On The Future of Popular Music

The Future Sound of Nothing-Nowhere

The future of popular music probably isn't too good. This isn't one of those music was better in my youth kind of rants because frankly even if that were true, it's not a point I exactly want to litigate here. While it might be seen as taking that same line, I would posit that there are far more technically accomplished musicians working in popular music than at any time in history. Even allowing for that, popular music's future is very bleak. 

The historical trend on artistic complexity seems to be that over time, complexity is reduced as the form of the music gets reified. In once sense, music is moving towards fewer players per ensemble - from orchestra to Big Band to quintets and quarts and then trios, and duos. The ultimate is the solo artist who accompanies themselves with a computer or karaoke device or looper pedal. As more contributing players are shed, the simpler the music becomes in structure. While there are plenty of jaw-dropping players working in this kind of format, it is still a lot simpler than music played in larger groups. 

Songwriters themselves have reduced the range of harmonic content in their songs. They are structured more simply than any time before. The proliferation of songs with just one chord progression with no variation has overtaken all the other kinds of songwriting. In that instance it is hard to tell if it is the retreat of complexity or the advance of simplicity. There is the information theory whereby if you want to reach more people, you have to reduce the complexity of your message, so it stands to reason songwriters have taken an axe to such concepts as a verse being different to a chorus, or that there might be a middle 8 in-between the verse and chorus. After all they are playing to a generation that fast-forwards through the guitar solo. 

And yes, there is the crux of the biscuit right there. What kind of hare-brained asshole fast forwards through the guitar solo? What kind of absence of mind does that? It is not a matter of taste - it's a matter of failing to understand what a guitar solo is. Yes, there are some terrible solos out there - some of them played by your truly right here - but you can't be fast forwarding through all guitar solos on principle without incurring the observation that it's not guitar solos that are the problem, but the people who can't appreciate them who are the problem. 

Contrary to all the amazing guitar players plying their trade on Youtube, guitar solos have been phased out of popular music. All these new songs without a change in chord progression from verse to chorus, also seem to come absent the guitar solo. 

Now don't get me wrong. It's not all about the guitar solo. It's that fact that there's a young audience out there that doesn't connect to guitar solos. Surprisingly there's a whole generation or two of kids who just don't view music the way the previous generations did, and this has turned into time bomb. As Rick Beato rightly points out, kids today have a whole eco-system of stuff to indulge themselves. Music simply sin't enough. So while there are some amazing players doing their thing on instagram and TikTok and Youtube, the general population is pulling away from music as fast as the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ran towards music. If music itself is losing value in the discourse as we go forwards, then you can't expect it to be in better shape in the future. 

This Does Need A Bit More Explaining For Future Generations

Skip this bit if you're an old fart like me - older readers know what the hell it used to be like before the internet. The people in the future will have no idea. Hence my need to write it down here.  

So this is a sketch of the old world before the internet: Before the internet, information used to be hard to come by and when we got it, it wasn't cheap or free. And we accepted this condition as capitalism. So we paid for newspapers and we paid for books and subscriptions to magazines. We paid to find stuff out in most part. You would be lucky to find stuff in libraries. If you were looking for granular information on something of a minor field, your school library or council library was not going to cut it.  

It so happens music was one of those information formats. It wasn't clear to us growing up, but music was in of itself a kind of information - we only found that out when things went digital with compact discs. In one sense, we had to put our money down to obtain the information that was music, just as we did with everything else. The record store then, was sort of an information exchange, and you can see that in the loving portrayal in the movie version of 'High Fidelity'. In turn, music, was the communal space that connected a global audience. World tours by big bands, whether that be The Police or Dire Straits  were culturally significant moments.

As the format of the information evolved the vendors of the information saw fit to raise the prices on the information. Thus, in Sydney in the mid 1980s, LPs and Cassette tapes were priced around $10 but Compact Discs were $30. As a student working late night shopping and weekend jobs, you were making $12-15 and hour at best. The calculations would then go, do you exchange roughly an hour of your worked time with 1 album on LP or do you instead swap three of those for something with higher fidelity. Kids who were in to music were exchanging their blood sweat and tears into their music collections. 

And there was a cohort who grumbled loudly about the prices of Compact Discs all the time. 

Then the internet came along together with compressed data. Suddenly people were 'ripping' CDs and file sharing them in .mp3 format. Naturally this got record companies very upset and the rest of it is history. The internet devalued the entire music industry and denuded it of profits. A lot has happened since that moment in history but essentially there is music everywhere for free, if you just choose to look. Kids today don't have to necessarily exchange their blood sweat and tears for mere music.  In turn the monetisation of music has changed radically in response to the internet. 

The point of all this is that the music listener of the Boomer and Gen-X vintage had skin in the game. This is why they have the wrong opinions they have, and in turn this is why there's a lot of judgemental put downs by these people towards Millennials and Gen-Z. Is this fair? No - but you should know why this happens. The judgement is coming from a place of heavy emotional investiture. This is not to say Millennials and Gen-Z don't have heavy investment in music themselves. It's just that in the scheme of things, it most likely won't be their main emotional investiture simply because of where they are in history (and to be totally frank I don't judge the younger generation harshly for that fact).

The bad news for music and those with heavy emotional investment in music, is that the Boomers are finally dying out in droves. Even Gen-Xers are starting to pop off, kick the bucket and fall off their perches. This means that in the future, there are fewer people invested in all of this than there are going to be more. As the demographic changes, it is evident that things that hold meaning are changing hands. With the dead, goes the past. As ever, the living inherit a world they cannot fathom. 

Just what can be done about this for music?

Meaning As Social Construct

Back in my own formative years, something that got pounded into me by a philosophy major (read, Mr. Pharmakeus) was that a great man called Ludwig Wittgenstein said that 'meaning' is 'socially determined'. There are a lot of ways to come at this statement but one of the ways is that the more people who engage with a subject matter provides more meaning to the subject. 

This is evidenced by say, Wikipedia, where ever more people have come to add ever more knowledge and opinions across so many topics. You can probably rely on an article that has passed through the oversight of thousands of people, more than something with a short entry that was agreed upon by 5 people, but in most part Wikipedia represents the sum total of volunteered knowledge and opinions of internet denizens. While Wikipedia probably won't match the kind of epistemological reliability of a peer-reviewed study, it can get close in some matters. In turn, it has raised the curtain on the process whereby we can ask whether peer-reviewed studies are exactly what they're cracked up to be, and whether Encyclopaedias like the Britannica and Americana ever could have matched the breadth and scope of of Wikipedia. 

The point of the above paragraph is that the more people you have participating in a field, you have a way of achieving more and deeper meaning. The more people working a field and contributing to it, the more likely you are to achieve a higher granularity of knowledge as well as a greater pile of it. This in turn means the more people there are playing rock guitar, then, the better the chances are of rock guitar continuing into the future in a meaningful manner. Ultimately, an artist is not some point that exists in a sea of meaninglessness but a representative of a demographic of people working in an area. This is how you get not just The Beatles, but also The Rolling Stones and the entire British Invasion in the 1960s; and a generation later, not just Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the entire Grunge movement. 

In once sense, if there isn't a critical mass of a critical, mass listenership, popular music is not going to gain the kind of meaning it once possessed. With the advent of the internet, it may never again reach the height of importance it once held. 

So What Happens Now?

Without the critical mass of the critical masses, popular music will fail to form the kind of meaningfulness it once possessed. In a sense, it is going to be more meaningless than meaningful - and there's going to be a lot of the meaningless stuff over the meaningful stuff. It's not exactly a joyous future, but there is an upside. Thanks to the same technology that destroyed social meaning, it is also now dead easy to make your own music. In as much as there will be people making their own music for their own meaningful experience, music will not die out. There will be meaningful music in a sea of meaningless music. People are just going to work very hard to find it and get to it. 

If you want meaningful music to exist in the future, then you'd better start participating in it.   

 

They Should Change Their Name To Unfairfax

Content Is Not King With Fairfax

It's been pissing me off for a few days so I'm going to have to jus get it out there.
A band - Black Bird Hum - were asked play at the Sydney Night Noodle Markets. They were told that they wouldn't get paid to play, but they should because of the exposure they would get. As any right thinking professional would, the band declined and put it out to the world that Fairfax (who own and run the Nigh Noodle Markets) would do such a thing as to ask a band to play for free.

Black Bird Hum declined the offer, which they received via an agent representing Fairfax. “We’re flattered to be on the radar of a company with an annual ‘Total Group Revenue of $1,867.2 million‘ (FY2016),” the band wrote on Facebook. 

“We have, however, decided to decline the invitation to perform at the event on account of you deciding not to pay us.” The band noted how they have been paid for all of their upcoming tour dates, much like those who would’ve worked on Fairfax’s event. 

“We’re guessing that the sound tech who ran the PA on the night was paid; as were the graphic designers and marketing companies that did the event website, promo and marketing material; and the companies that supplied the lighting, tables, chairs and umbrellas; and the cleaners,” they wrote. 

But despite a Fairfax representative insisting to Crikey that they will “look at how we are engaging with everyone to ensure we are showing RESPECT”, they apparently still haven’t quite grasped the message. 

In an article published earlier this week in The Advocate, a Tasmanian paper printed by Fairfax Regional Media, musicians are taken to task for their ungrateful entitlement, i.e. expecting to be paid for performing live.

And so things just got a bit more nasty. If you go to the Advocate, you will find one Elanor Watt writing:

The real question is, how strong is your passion and what are you willing to do to achieve your goals.

I assume most musicians love making and performing music, it is not one of those jobs that you simply decide to do as you don’t have any other choice, it is considerably passion related much like writing or sports.

If someone was really passionate about getting their music out there, and enjoyed performing then they would take up any opportunity given to them, especially if it means expanding their audiences, drawing in a larger fan base, because we have all seen the movies, anything can happen.

The next issue is worth. Some bands have explicitly implied taking the previous approach insists that artists, well some, do not need to be paid. Are they not worth payment, are the countless hours put into practicing not worth payment.


I consider this issue similar to one that many other people face.

The trade industry for example. My grandmother told me she worked for several years training to be a hairdresser, she was the one who paid for cutting people’s hair, cleaning up, like any employee, but she was paying to do this, to further her skills.

The same goes for university students, yes we pay to learn but we are churning out word after word, some people go on to write thesis’ and contribute to academic literature which is all unpaid.
These people all share the same desire to pursue their goals. They all do this to get ahead, musicians should be no different.In response to these comments, the argument they make completely rules out many other people who are in a similar situation as mentioned previously.

The band seems ungrateful to a potentially amazing opportunity that has been given to them. Dismissing events like this makes me wonder where this band will be in several years time, if they consistently have in their heads they are too good to be even approached for an unpaid gig, what has made them so entitled.

Hundreds of people would be honoured to play at such an event that draws in thousands of people, but hey. obviously royalties are more important to some people.

And so she goes. Where do you start? If a band played a live set at the Night Noodle Markets, clearly it's situation where the corporation is hiring a band to play. If they don't want to pay for it, they should say it's open mic and invite people who want to play for "exposure". Watch all the crazies come out of the woodwork with their banjos and ukuleles and glockenspiels. Of course, they won't do that because they want to ensure a certain standard of entertainment - which is kind of why they would have to pay for the band. It's just a standard business transaction. 

If you have a stage with lights and a PA, and you have crew running around already, it's understandable that it's no big leap to think you can make it better by having a band. Except as the band point out, the lights and the stage and the audio techs are paid. Why on earth wouldn't Fairfax pay for the band? What possible reason could there be but outright disrespect for band musicians? Well, let's look at it in some more detail. 

Fairfax are doing all these Night Noodle Market numbers in order to transition out of just being a print media company. I also know for a fact that they keep their budgets tight and hardly raise them year after year but expect more from their suppliers every year; I know that they charge a shit ton of money for these stall holders to participate; I know this results in stupendous prices when you go to the Night Noodle Markets. In that context, it surprises me none whatsoever that they don't want to pay musicians.  They don't want to pay because it comes out of their margin - that's it. It's not profound; it's not some kind misunderstanding; it's not really difficult to understand.

Fairfax have conjured up an event where they charge stall holders money in exchange for providing an event space. They spend a portion of that money and squeeze out as much as possible from the production company so that they provide infrastructure such as power, lighting, staging, audio and assorted decorations. And the rest of it is their margin. It's a business, so you wouldn't do it if you didn't have a margin. The question then follows, if you're willing to have the infrastructure of a band performance and pay for it, why the hell wouldn't you want to pay for the band? 

It really goes to the core of what Fairfax thinks is its content. Presumably they think it's the food and therefore not the band playing music. What really is staggering is that the people who produce this event think the band should come free in exchange for 'exposure', because that would suit Fairfax just fine. All this says is that Fairfax doesn't want to spend the money because it's greedy. There's nothing excusable about it or anything that can be misconstrued as a misunderstanding. 

You know what's really crazy about all this? They've always been happy to pay some DJ in the past. Yes, a fucking DJ. Don't let anybody fool you that the Fairfax corporation has any "RESPECT" for musicians, or content. 

Listening To...

Old School Habits

Here are some CDs I scored. Yes, that's right CDs. Not stuff I stream, or got as mp3s or whatever people do these days to procure music. I'm a creature of habit and lately I've been back in shops buying discs. There's a lot I can say about this regression to old habits but it comes down to wanting-that-disc-god-damn-it, and that part of me isn't quite dead by the looks of things.

Sonik Kicks - Paul Weller.
This one is actually really upbeat and punchy. It was also only $4.99 at JB Hi-Fi, which is a steal. I mean really, 14 tracks of really well crafted songs by the Mod Father himself. What's the world come to?

10cc. The Greatest Hits ...And More - 10cc
I was after the more obscure cuts on the second disc. They really were the master of studio work so it bears listening to over and over again. They're so smooth in delivery and deft in execution, it's always worth going back for a quick revision. Plus the sheer sonic majesty of 'I'm not In Love' is still astounding to this day.

This Is Not The End - Baby Animals
The apotheosis to the apotheosis of Aussie rock. Truly, once upon a long ago they were pure-and-athentic Gen-X rockers but they got short shrift in a marketplace more interested in pushing Nirvana and grunge. I could write a whole lot more about them, but it's basically Suze DeMarchi and Dave Leslie with a new rhythm section here. 3 albums in total is not enough, when I cast mind to it. On the bright side, Suze DeMarchi hasn't shredded out her vocal cords so she sounds as good as she did on the first 2 albums way back when. And David Leslie is a guitar god.

A Box Set of Thelonious Monk
For $29.99 you get 'In Italy','At the Blackhawk', 'Brilliant Corners', 'The Unique Thelonious Monk', 'Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington'. I already owned the Ellington one and the Italy one so I got the set for the middle 3 discs. It's a lot of great stuff for not much money. Once again, what's the world come to?
Look, Monk clearly isn't to everybody's taste. But if you like your music interesting and not bland, you can't go past him.

View From The Couch - 20/Feb/2016

The End Of CDs

I ordered 'Dark Star' from JB Hi-Fi. Something went wrong with the order - which seems to be the waylay luck goes these days, - and the PayPal transaction never went through.I didn't realise this until month went by and my order didn't arrive. I only found out after I queried the order, and so I trekked in to a JB HiFi store to buy my copy. On the way to the counter I picked up the last Frank Zappa album on the shelf, which just so happened to be 'Guitar', an album Walk-Off HBP was hoping to encode lossless into his iTunes.

It turns out that CDs don't last forever after all. Somehow some rogue bit of moisture gets in and compromises the data storage. Walk-Off HBP had been moving his vast CD collection on to a hard disk only to find some of his older CDs had died on the shelf. I don't think any of my CDs have died just yet, but the indication is, it's very possible; I'd have to go through them all one by one to find out It's quite the drag. I don't think I could face such a task.

The oldest CDs I own are 'Aliens Ate My Buick' by Thomas Dolby and '90125' by Yes. I remember buying those thinking, this is the first day of my CD collection. They both still function so clearly it's not just age which affects these things. You can't get too wedded to formats. Videotapes were great when there was nothing else around;  DVDs were an excellent improvement until the Blu-Ray came along in HD 1080p; LPs were great when that was all there is; cassettes were fine until a better alternative came along. And while the future of CDs looks greatly diminished, the format of 16bit 44.12KHz will live on a bit longer.

Each time any technology gets updated, you have to bite the bullet and move on to the next thing. The funny thing is even if you know this to be abundantly true, it's hard to let go of the old tech. It's not as if the practical advantages of the CD has disappeared. The future is likely digital files streamed from some place and we pay subscriptions for this pleasure, and ownership of blocks of units goes into the past, proper listening will demand you control aspects the physical medium itself. It's a strange world in any case because Led Zeppelin have a LP box set out with CDs included for each of their albums. I wondered just what kind of person dropped $199.99 for that package of 'In Through The Out Door'. A lot of this tech has a long tail.

Walk Off HBO said that once he is done transferring all his discs on to a hard drive, he'll be able to pack up all his CDs into boxes. It would be the end of the CD era for him. It's such a weird thought. Yet I can recall way back in the mid-80s, Walk-Off HBP had crystallised that idea. He had created a fictional character who lives in the future who carried around a huge library of 20th century recorded music on a tiny data storage unit. Little did he know he was really talking about himself.

Living The Future Shock

Techno-Junk 

I have a lot of techno-junk. A lot of times, it starts out being the cool thing, but as I keep using it, it just ends up being kipple. I've been using my second 160GB iPod Classic for like 6years. Now I have the choice of moving to an iPod Touch with 128GB or shelling out big and using my phone as the music player. Given that I simply have the iPod Classic as my car audio thing, it's not likely I'm going to shell out for the biggest-capacity iPhone 6S as a music player. I'm going to move to another dedicated audio player and be done with it.

The iPhone has made the point and shoot camera redundant. I have an old Canon G9. In the olden days of 2009, it was a pretty cool compact camera. Of course the camera on the iPhone ate its job, so now it sits on the shelf un-used, and worse still it's far too obsolete in spec to be waved around in public lest people think I am a retro-fetishist. Which goes to show tech isn't worth spending money on until it becomes necessary to have that tech. I've given the Go-Pro cameras a wide berth as a result. They look like a lot of fun if you like strapping the camera on to moving things, but it's hard to argue a need for one on a day to day basis. It's usually easier just to grab the iPhone and shoot video.

Still, I have weird techno-junk which are noise-making devices of various types. These don't go obsolete; they merely extend the sonic palette for recordings so they don't tend to be as bad an investment as a camera. As good as iRig is on the iPhone, it is simply no match for the Catalinbread WIIO pedal for its ability to make my guitar sound like Pete Townshend's tone on 'Live at Leeds'. It never really goes old as a piece of technology; although the desire to want to sound like Pete Townshend on 'Live at Leeds' sort of dates a lot faster than any bit of techno-junk.

It's not all bad news. I have an app on the iPad that can fire samples of an old Mellotron with great accuracy. I have a whole array of synths on the iPad, I could do anything from Kraftwerk style blips to fairly modern trance music sweeps. The option anxiety that arises from my iPad alone is substantial, so it is doing a great job as this sort of noise-making machine. And of course one day it will become this obsolete little tablet that I can't wave around public, but while it can make all these noises, it's going to remain one of my important noise-source units.

The speed at which things become obsolete has me in a bit of a headspin when I survey the things that are going out of date in my lifetime. The LP record lasted about 35years; CD Players lasted about 25; The Walkman went 15years somewhere in there, 20 if you count the portable CD iteration; the iPod era went for about 10years. I feel immense pressure to move on to streamed music but it just runs hard against my instincts. Film cameras of still and moving variety went for decades before digital knocked them off, but the reign of the stand alone domestic digital camera lasted all of 12 years by the time the camera in the phone ate up most of that market. Somewhere in there there was the U-matic video tape which seemed to be around since the 60s for about 25years, and VHS tape which lasted as a popular format for about 20years. DVDs as a media format really only lasted 12 years before HD video and Blu Ray supplanted it; and Blu Ray has really only gone 5 years as a mass consumer format before Netflix and streaming services have killed that market.

You can chalk all of that up to Future Shock. Computers too are accelerating in a disconcerting way. I went 5years with with the G5 PowerMac, 4years with the Tower Mac, and now 2 years with the Mac Mini, and I'm already thinking maybe I should be upgrading the computer soon if I want to be able to edit 4K Video.

As you can see, not only are the product cycles getting shorter, the actual lifespan of any given tech is getting so short. My first iPhone was the 3GS because I was a late adopter. I went three and a half years until it was so obsolete I couldn't show people I was still using it; so that put me onto the iPhone 5S which I've had for 22months - and well, it too is feeling slow, old and obsolete next to the iPhone 6S. I couldn't have imagined that, back 22months ago when I got my 5S. I fear for the lifespan of iPhones and smartphones as a technology, in general. With the pace things are going, there might not be much left in the future of smart phones. I might buy an iPhone 6S the day it goes on sale, but it is in danger of becoming super obsolete, well within the lifespan of its 24month contract.

That's all on the one hand. Contrasting against all that is my pair of Optonica Speakers from the 70s which still sound great. They sound full, broad, punchy and rich. The Arcam Amp powering it is from the mid-2000s, while the CD player is a 5 plate Sony from the late 1990s and it still works great. I have guitars and basses that date to the 1960s and 1970s that work perfectly well, pedals that date to  the early 1980s that still work perfectly well, a 1985 Roland synth that still works fine, and other bits and pieces from somewhere in the last half century that still do what they're designed to do. Somewhere in storage is a top of the range VHS player, and a turntable. All of this stuff still works.

And so gradually you end up being a weird mosaic of tech ownership. I feel like I live in the Bradbury building of 'Blade Runner' ("Good evening JF!") of my own devising and I didn't necessarily plan things that way. I am, to confess, a little more than simply shocked about all this. I never imagined what it would feel like to end up so layered up with the experience of technology. It's even true of this very blog too. When I start blogging over a decade ago, I was the only person in my circle doing it and everybody else was incredulous or disinterested. Now that decade has passed, blogging went from being a fad to a phenomenon to then being reduced to microblogging, and now this kind of blogging -writing out full sentences with the pretence of ecriture - has become somewhat quaint in its archaic-ness.

I write all of this down because I think there is great scepticism about the rate at which things change. The delusion we've been given in our childhoods was that it would be gradual, and mostly linear. The lived experiences inform us that it is rapid and ever accelerating. People think Ray Kurzweil's description of an ever-accelerating technological progress as being fanciful, but I have to tell you the subjective experience of this notion is far more true than the persistent critique that somehow technological development is going to plateau and level off. I won't vouch for the technological Singularity, but I will say that the future change is going to speed up even more.

Bread & Circuses Part 2

So There Was A Protest Yesterday...

Make of this what you will.

Dancers were out in force in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday as part of Australia-wide protests against more than $100m in cuts to the country's top arts funding body, the Australia Council. Around 100 artists and members of the arts industry turned up to perform the so-called 'dance action'. Arts minister George Brandis attracted criticism for his decision to cut funding in the May budget.

I learnt of this protest action late last night at a dinner, marking the launch of Vivid Sydney 2015, which is ironic because Vivid Sydney - as far as anybody can tell - is a kind of state-sponsored arts festival and if people got money from the Australia Council to do artistic things, that too is a State-spomsored art, as much as any arts body person who receives the money from George Brandis' office directly. It's all a kind of propaganda more than proper art, and by proper, I mean art that finds both creation and audience from the artist's own practice and application. Without a doubt it goes to what I wrote about in my recent entry, about bread and circuses.

As somebody whose arts repertoire is rock music and film and writing, it's really quite hard to relate to the artists who need government monies to continue their craft. If you are a ballet dancer or a fine Shakespearean actor, chances are you need to work with some kind of body that gets this state-sponsorship. Those people are working in an area of the arts where the market is no guarantee to sustain you, and in turn, there are heavy cultural reasons to sustain these arts. This is why we have the  theatre companies and dance companies we have - good or not-so-good as they may be. I myself am not a great fan of these big old arts companies but it is clear that we need an active pool of practitioners to sustain the entire arts in general.

That being said, if you play rock music like I do, you fund yourself, and your entire adventures are risks you bear by yourself. Nobody I know ever got an arts grant from the Australia Council to record their rock album; and that's probably the way it should be. As a film maker in Australia, the majority of my production experience has been outside the funding structure. Any time I have approached bodies it has been painful, humiliating, insulting and irrelevant so I can't say I'm a big fan of the government sponsorship model of cinema any more. As for writing, well, here you are reading what I do in my spare hours and there's no government money involved here. I was working on a novel for a while but it's not like I was getting government sponsorship money at any time while I did so. I know writers who do, but it's just different when you take the government's money.

You get the picture. I'm a pretty committed arts practitioner but I have the strong (but odd) 'luxury' of not having to answer to a government body. The exchange for this luxury is that my life is nothing like my friends who are not in the arts. My friends who are in the arts are similarly afflicted with very non-standard living arrangements and family arrangements. It's not a light exchange - it's heavy, man. You do arts in Australia and you can count out the normal arrangements for family unless you're born rich.

Here's an article in the SMH that describes things bit better.

Arts leaders have stepped up their campaign against the federal government's cuts to the Australia Council in a national day of protest that included a "mass dance action" to demonstrate their displeasure. 

About 300 people turned out in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday despite wet conditions and performed the "hoofer dance" from a clip by Melbourne band Fondue Set. 

Speakers echoed Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's comments that the transfer of $105 million from the Australia Council to the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts, controlled by the arts ministry, was a politicised power grab by Arts Minister George Brandis.

Hmmm. 300 people. Like Spartans of Art at the Thermopylae for government funding, dancing in protest.

I was lambasted at the dinner table for not being there at the protest, by an artist who did go to the protest. I told him, for a start I didn't even know it was happening, and secondly I was at work at that time. I got further lambasted for my self-interest but really, who is an artist angry about how government funds the arts to judge somebody who actually has to work for a living in the arts industry, and doesn't have the liberty to go protesting at the drop of a hat?

As I wrote a few days ago, it's not like I'm not sympathetic, but we're talking about entire programs of funding the arts from the government. Colour me somewhat unimpressed. I do understand the problem for people who do rely on the government and may be somewhat institutionalised in their need for the government to dispense its funding in the way it has established for over 45years. George Brandis is cutting off the teat from which they suckle. That would be rough.

The complaint is that George Brandis has taken 104 million dollars out of Australia Council and is going to give it to his favourite artists directly on the basis of ideological alignment. Yes, it totally sucks and is perfectly in line with what the Nazi government did in the 1930s and I say that without any equivocation or exaggeration. It is highly suspect, if not downright rotten. With that part of it, I certainly agree. George Brandis is essentially behaving like Dr. Goebbels but without the Jew-Killing program. I get it.

"So why weren't you there at the protest?" I was asked. "Self-interest kept you away!" the artist thundered.

Partly because that $104 million will still go to some person(s) in the arts. Just not the regular Australia Council roster recipients. It's not like it got completely taken away from the arts and given to constructing a football stadium or something of the ilk. It's still, presumably going to some other parts of the arts industry who are presumably not so stridently pro-ALP and anti-Coalition. It sucks that it's going to some reactionary, but it's still going to the arts - just not to the classic trendy Left crowd. Is this really as big a protest-worthy-thing as say, asylum seekers on boats being sent to Manus Island?

I still had to explain my Jean-Paul Sartre reasoning from 'Age of Reason' as to why the main character Mathieu does not go fight in Spain during the Spanish civil war. That he would only fight if the war was at his doorstep. Which earned me the charge of "a kind of xenophobia for other forms of arts". But it's unfortunately true. If you're me, it's really hard to sit there and try to relate to the plight of, oh I don't know, something like the Bangarra Dance company when I work for an arts company that worked its way up from the ground up without any direct or indirect government fund injection; or the plight of an artist who needs government funding to pay for materials when I've bought all my gear to do my recordings; or to some writer who needs funding to go buy time to write stuff when all you really need is pen, paper and the commitment to write.

These 300 artists protesting, as self-important as they may be, are so distant to my own experience of being an arts practitioner that they may as well be from ancient Greece. In the broadest strokes, if you were getting money for your work before from the state, and now you are not, the general term for that condition is, you got fired. The reason you get fired at most workplaces is if your work is not good enough. You can protest your layoff all you like and you do get my sympathy as a fellow practitioner, but it does make me wonder if your work is any good at all.

As you can imagine that conversation didn't go down well with the artist at all.

Mötley Crüe (& Alice Cooper) - Sydney 16/May/2015

The Times They Are A Ending

Mötley Crüe are on their farewell tour around the globe.The calculus is that they'll never play together again, and beyond that, they'll ride off into the sunset with one last cash grab. They're hoping never to go to this well again, and are trying to drink it all dry before they go out. to paraphrase TS Eliot, we don't go out with a bang, we go out with a 24month global farewell tour screaming "I'm really going to miss you guys!" in the microphone in-between playing your greatest hits.

I was lucky enough to get an invite to the corporate box so not only did I not pay, I got fed very well. I'm not entirely sure if this is meant to be the way Rock music goes - it was almost an un-Rock sort of experience having canapés before Alice Cooper came on. 

What's Good About It

The amazing light show and pyrotechnics that accompany the band on stage, are amazing. The staging is extraordinary. It's somewhat like a circus - and you got Alice Cooper as the support act to boot. It's one big phantasmagorical hair metal festival that takes you back to the bits of the 1980s you didn't really enjoy the first time. (It helps to have the distance of time and the protection of the above-mentioned corporate box.)

The lighting is amazing. It has 50 moving lights, a massive structure with LED fittings, there are 10 flame-throwing things as well as umpteen pyrotechnical devices. The design of the lighting array is breathtaking and always in sync with the music. It looks the way MTV made you believe all concerts looked, back in the 80s. 

The band is tight; very well rehearsed and don't miss their cues at all. The whole enterprise has a very mechanically correct feel, even to the point of making Alice Cooper's act look a little quaint. There's a high energy level that never really lets up and goes right to the end with it. It's a really good show. 

What's Bad About It

They put across what they have very well, but what they actually have is 80's hair metal. It's been a long time since I was living the musical universe where this stuff was the backbone the music industry, but basically their material is as simple as any old dumb rock band of that era. There's a lot of sound and fury but there's very little actual musical content to hang your hat upon. It's sort of amazing that music this simple in conception could have rung up so much sales. 

Never has so little been stretched out to such magnificent folly-like dimension. But then again this was unabashedly showbiz and hardly an attempt at art. If you' looking for artistic merit, you'd be very wrong to look for it at a Mötley Crüe concert. So, back to what's good about it - it was actually a good show. 

What's Interesting About It

Oh the irony of it all, really. 

There I am sitting in a corporate box watching this corporate entertainment. It was entirely the opposite experience to seeing the Crimson ProjeKCt last year. With that one, I was up front by the stage listening to musicians craft the most adventurous music in the total dark of the Hi-Fi Bar. This was me sitting up on the third deck looking down at the throbbing throng crowding the stage to hear this unadventurous music packaged with the most amazing light and fireworks show. 

To add ironic insult to injury, they covered 'Anarchy in the UK' by the Sex Pistols, which was most likely the worst act of appropriation I've ever seen. Not only were they phoneys, they made us the audience equally phoney and even complicit in this orgy of phoniness. It was like a semiotic train wreck; a cum-shot of phoniness splattering across our faces. Yes, horrible metaphor, but it's still accurate.

I mean, really, what would Johnny Rotten of '77 make of something so cynical, exploitative, and unedifying as Mötley Crüe? 'Anarchy in the UK' sung by LA native corporate rockers in 2015? It's banality stands as the mirror image of Sid Vicious covering 'My Way'. Oddly enough the band walks off to Frank Sinatra's rendition of 'My Way' at the end of the night. 

Alice Cooper

In some ways the highlight of the night was the demented gothic vaudeville of Alice Cooper and his band. being the support act, the sound had the clarity of a sewage outlet in Shengzeng industrial sector in China. Yet the playing was spirited and the stage show a pleasant pantomime of gothic horror archetypes. He even did 'Welcome to my Nightmare' which is the title track of my fave Alice Cooper album. Steve Deacon wasn't there, but he had 3 shredding guitarists playing their hearts out. 

The show sort of underlined the possibility that if Rock isn't dead, it surely is in its undead zombie phase. The problem I've always felt with Alice Cooper's material is that these play-acting mini-stories he tells in song and on stage don't point to any kind of authenticity. Instead it underscores the entire edifice of show biz that plays musicians like puppets. That underneath all the makeup and pretend gothic-gore, there's a guy playing his audience for suckers. After all, he's now a keen golfer and votes Republican.

He's a fricken' class enemy for the values of Rock. 

Mick Mars

Mick Mars looked sickly. At 64, he's a full 10years older than Vince and Tommy and Nicky. He looks like a vampire. Alice Cooper's ghoulish makeup's got nothing on Mick Mars. But he sure can play. He gets beautiful singing tones out of his battered white Strat and the overtones are to die for. 

Mars is the saving grace of Mötley Crüe. He is controlled, studied and succinct. While all the silly bombast comes from Tommy Lee's drumming and the pedestrian bass playing of Nicky Sixx, Mars' is the contribution that gives the rather skeletal music some actual flesh. As shredders go, he's not as impressive as a Van Halen or a Steve Vai. He's very good, but not enough to be a generation-defining player.  His solo spot is pretty ordinary and reveals a rather quirky player with some fine touch, but it has nothing on the likes of his leading Heavy Metal contemporaries when it comes to gusto or emotive power. 

It's a weird band to look at these days. Vince looks like a gerbil, Mick looks like a vampire, Nicky looks like he's wearing underpants on his head and Tommy Lee looks like he's getting fashion cues from Henry Rollins. 

Goodbye Rock

Rock music used to mean something - I should know, I meant it when I played. Then it sort of slowly drifted up its own fundament to the point where it's now mostly just corporate entertainment. The counterculture of the 60s and 70s gave way to the Reaganomic, Thatcherite 1980s and rock music got sucked into the vortex of commerce. It became this thing where pop music could be packaged up and sold like commodities, it didn't even need to be good or meaningful. And that's how we got Mötley Crüe in the first place - a vapid mirror for a vapid age. 

The fact that today, they're old and shrivelled and too misshapen to fit into their spandex trousers any more, is almost irrelevant because there is no legitimate nostalgia. It's all manufactured and marketed from the monolithic industry in LA. There was nothing ever real or authentic about this band to begin with, so complaining about the un-reality of their career oeuvre is like complaining about McDonalds as a form of cuisine. Frank Zappa used to say that anybody who thinks rock video clips (like you see on MTV) are a new form of art probably thinks Cabbage Patch Dolls (remember those?) are a new form of soft sculpture. Mötley Crüe is exactly what Frank Zappa was talking about; the disdain from Frank is fully well-earned. 

But it's easy for me to diss their music. It stand for all the wrong things in rock.
My better half thought they were gas in their heyday, what with their hair and clothes and makeup and outlandish behaviour. She thought that, was rock. Needless to say, she had a good time. I did too, but it had nothing to do with the actual music. 

'Whiplash'

Movies About Music Are Hard

...Especially when it's about drummers. The fine technicality of drumming is visually dramatic but it's the subtle things that make a drummer's performance stand out or fail or be whatever it is. Whether it's Buddy Rich or Art Blakey, or Omar Hakim or (or for that matter Keith Moon or John Bonham or Stewart Copeland), it's actually the little things they do that make all the difference - how they lean into the beat or pull the beat, how they accent the counter, how they bring contrast to the dynamic and underline the melody. So it is with great trepidation one watches a film like 'Whiplash' as it tries to encapsulate jazz drumming.

Drumming is hard. Just ask Terry Bozzio who makes it look easy but works like hell to get his sound. It goes without saying that you wonder if a film is up to capturing the intricacies of the difficulties themselves. This film comes awfully close.

What's Good About It

The songs 'Whiplash' and 'Caravan' get a working out, but otherwise the film mercifully goes through tiny fragments of music, almost vivisecting the elements of playing these songs. J.K Simmons plays a formidable scary instructor/conductor and the moments when the music flows is great. But more interestingly the director restrains from letting the music flow, and this creates amazing tension because watching and hearing the snippets makes you want to hear the whole damn thing played out - something that gets served up in the last section.

The world contained in the movie is surprisingly small. There's a conservatory of music, there's a band, there's a hall of faceless people, there's a cinema with one employee, a girl who is a brief love interest. And this creates an interesting effect where loneliness is played out as something claustrophobic.

What's Bad About It

As tough as J.K. Sommons' character Fletcher might be, there's something unrealistic about his vision of music having great value. The point of course is that his band is expertly attuned in such a way s to win competitions and sustain his reputation, but it becomes rather unbelievable that such a joyless bunch of musicians can be so good as to win so many competitions. The more bullying he becomes, and ratchets up the drama, the more bizarre the vision of his music seems to the audience. There's a certain limit to the kind perfection and precision he is conveying, especially in the context of jazz music.

If he wants machine-like precision, he can programme a drum track on cubase or Garageband and be done with it. It would never make a mistake, it would always play on tempo, and never complain or wilt or tire. But would that be jazz? If a human being couldn't do it, is that still jazz? I tend to think the answer is in the negative so this Fletcher character seems like a tremendous phoney and not sufficiently authoritative at all.

What's Interesting About It

It's interesting that it got made. And I don't mean that with my usual sarcasm-fuelled insult for something like a movie directed by Dolph Lundgren; rather, that it is interesting that a film that is so much about the musical experience could have been conveyed so well on paper that it got investment. The world of cinema is a lot more interesting than I gave it credit. You could have fooled me with the rush of comic book superhero movies being churned out, but no, something like this can still get up.

If You Can't Get Your Technique Down...

At one point there is a headline on an article cut out, stuck up on the wall that reads "If you can't get your technique down, you wind up playing in a rock band". It might even be true. But it's nothing to be ashamed of if you do.

Drumming And Human Consciousness

Just coincidentally, I stumbled upon this page after watching the film. Here's a lengthy excerpt which is of great interest:

But even though a steady drummer may be more intelligent than his or her bandmates, the drummer's gifts can be shared: a tight beat can actually transfer that natural intelligence to others. In studies on the effects of rhythm on brains, researchers showed that experiencing a steady rhythm actually improves cognitive function. One psychology professor at the University of Washington used rhythmic light and sound therapy on his students and discovered that their grades improved. Similarly, one researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch used that method on a group of elementary and middle school boys with ADD. The therapies had a similar effect to Ritalin, eventually making lasting increases to the boys' IQ scores. 

Granted, these studies focused more on the effects of rhythm on the mind rather than on the mind behind the rhythm. Still, drummers' consistent rhythmic focus has positive effects on them and those around them. When drummers bring a steady rhythm (and their corresponding problem-solving abilities) to a group setting, they actually create a "drummer's high" for everyone around them. University of Oxford researchers discovered that when drummers play together, both their happiness levels and pain tolerance increase, similar to Olympic runners. Observing that high led researchers to hypothesize that drumming was integral to community-building and that sharing rhythms could be the sort of behavior necessary for the evolution of human society. 

Drumming is a fundamentally human thing. A lot of modern music has shifted towards drum machines over humans to create ultra-precise electronic rhythms. But it turns out that what we typically perceive as error is really just a uniquely human sense of time: Researchers at Harvard found that drummers harness a different sort of internal clock that moves in waves, rather than linearly as a real clock does. They match an innate rhythm that has been found in human brainwaves, heart rates during sleep and even the auditory nerve firings in cats. When a human drummer plays, he or she finds a human rhythm.

So on some fundamental level drumming is a window into our own brains concerning time. Even the precision demanded by Fletcher is in some ways entirely bogus given the way we are wired to sense rhythm as well as participate in rhythm.

The machine beat problem goes back further in rock and pop because they (we) have aggressively adopted machine beats to eliminate the messy problem of recording drumming, drummers and the sheer emotional commitment to go with hanging out with drummers. But a machine beat is always known to be a machine beat by its precision. A genuine, well-played groove becomes elusive with the machine beat. Thomas Dolby's solution was to throw a good bass player against the machine beat to let the bass player generate the groove against the machine beat, but even then it's not the same thing as playing with a real, live drummer. What a human drummer provides is human-ness itself.

News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Sep/2014

It's Not The Burqa, Stupid

There are people making statements about the burqa and hijab, starting with Jacqui Lambie.  It's a funny thing - now the National Party is complaining that their anti-burqa message is being garbled by Senator Lambie's efforts. There's now an Islamophobia hotline to boot because anti-muslim sentiment has gone up in the wake of the arrests of the ISIL//ISOR-sympathisers and their random-beheading plot.

It needs to be said, hounding women with these head dresses is hardly going to achieve anything towards achieving the defeat of ISIL//ISOR or towards World Peace. If we're going on about Sharia Law and who intolerant Islamist muslims are, then it's probably worth talking about other religions that have a highly intolerant branch. Judging muslims by the behaviour of ISIL//ISOR is  like judging western society by the behaviour of Westboro Baptist Church. Complaining about the burqa is equally irrelevant as people who complained about bikinis. We've learned to live with bikinis, we'll learn to live with burqas.

Classical Music As Prestige Hobby

Pleiades sent in this story which deserves a bit of kicking around. It turns out that it wasn't just the ballerinas that got a reprieve from the Budget slashing knife wielded by Worst-Treasurer-Ever Joe Hockey; Melba Recordings which specialises in classical music recordings goat direct injection of $275,000 from the Federal Government, directly bypassing the Arts Council.

The story then tells us that Melba Recordings has been receiving Federal grant monies for a long time, and each and every time has been bypassing the Arts Council. This fact alone fills one with great mixed feeling - but I'll get on to that in a moment.

ArtsHub reports that: “Melba’s last published financial statements appear to be from 2011-12. They paint a dismal picture. The foundation recorded a $566,704 loss on revenue of only $630,848, of which the Federal Government grant was $500,000 – an extraordinary subsidy ratio of approximately 79 per cent.” 

“Melba’s sales record is equally glum. The 2012 annual report shows an “other” income, which appears to include CD sales, of only $39,225. Sales from earlier years were equally disappointing. In 2011 the foundation made only $18,000 and in 2010 as little as $3,500, according to a 2012 analysis by Samantha Randell, a researcher at the Association of Independent Records,” the website reported.

The amazing thing about classical music is not the years of devotion and training it takes to master the technique, only to end up teaching the stuff or working in some cruddy orchestra as fifth violinist down the back or something; it's that it keeps finding patronage in the most extraordinary places.

Like, the Attorney General's Office.

Jokes aside, you do wonder how valid it is to be spending money on a label of classical music, recorded in Australia by Australian musicians and artistes. On the one hand, it's good that there is a forum for classical musicians to get a go, recording stuff. Otherwise, it's forever going to be the cultural cringe of worshipping at the altar of 'Deutsche Grammophon' and 'ARKIV Produktion' and 'Decca Records' and all those wonderful, established recording houses in Europe. On the other hand you would think, if there's no market purchase whatsoever, it's in the same basket-case basket as Australian Film & Cinema. Why are we spending good money after bad to indifferent effect, pissing it into the wind when the very same government is screaming about cuts to everything worthwhile?
The mind boggles.

Equally, one understands what the funding selection criteria process would be like for a classical music label to undergo at the Arts Council. It would be a hard sell, and some weird-as left wing ideologue is bound to scuttle sending money to something so conservative and backward looking as a classical music label. They would have no shot - and as progressive and trendy-lefty as I am, the musician side of me wonders if the Arts Council should be the kind of arbiter body for something like this?
It would be really - make that tremendously - hard to make a case that an Australian playing 'The Goldberg Variations' on a harpsichord made in Australia was still culturally Australian in the way funding bodies like it. But is this a fair ruler with which to measure this kind of venture? Is this venture that lacking in national interest?

All the same, when you look at just how much money has been spent and how little money that's been made selling classical music from this label, one would have to conclude this is just this conservative Coalition wanking on spending public monies on something that belongs with private philanthropic enterprises. It says a lot about Australia that this sort of thing happens at all. Bottom line is this: why aren't Jamie Packer and/or Lachlan Murdoch forking out money for this instead of the government? What's wrong with these billionaires? Acute Philistinism perhaps?

'Garni du Jour' Again

That Ain't The Music, They're Just The Lyrics

Here's good ole David Dale, frustrated by contemporary pop music's total inability to come up with a sophisticated lyric that tickles David Dale's fancy. The headline says 'the day the music died' but really, his complaint is about the poor abstraction and bad taste in the lyrics; and really can one blame him?

Australia's top-selling singles of the past 10 years (and typical lyrics)
❏ Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO (sold more than 800,000 copies): ''I'm runnin' through these hos like Drano, I got that devilish flow, no halo.''
❏ Somebody That I Used To Know, Gotye (700,000+): ''No, you didn't have to stoop so low, have your friends collect your records and then change your number.''
❏ Sexy and I Know It, LMFAO (600,000+): ''We headed to the bar, baby don't be nervous; no shoes, no shirt and I still get serviced.''
❏ Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen (550,000+): ''You took your time with the call, I took no time with the fall; you gave me nothin' at all, but still you're in my way.''
❏ Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5 (550,000+): ''You say I'm a kid, my ego is big; I don't give a shit and it goes like this.''

Admittedly, those lyrics look pretty bad. But if the group is called 'LFMAO' then maybe it's not quite right to be expecting lyrics of any depth or meaning. Or maybe the apparent banality is implicit to the times in which we find ourselves living? In which case, should we be surprised?

Still, the whole article brought me to think about the real death of music, and I have to say it is these reality TV singing contest shows like X Factor' and 'The Voice'. For the love of god, if there is one place music is being killed, it's on these TV shows where people who have no insight into the songs they're singing are judged on rather subjective, obscure, arcane performance points while session musicians pump out 2minute abridged versions of classic songs.

No, really, they're terrible, and they have nothing to do with the qualia that makes music good. It's freaking glorified Karaoke put to the service of TV stations and advertisers, dressed up as music, with semi-pro singers fronting for the execrable business. So if David Dale really wants to take a hatchet to the death of music that he liked, well, he can have a go at these awful shows, one of which produced Adele (to whom he gives a free pass). No, Mr. Dale, it's worse than that.

Once upon a time, there was rock music, and it had a shot at being something tat could really communicate something important. Then, the cultural mainstream bought into it and the record labels sold the artists down the river, ever in the search of wider profits. And to this end it was all about packaging and looks and style; not writing and performing - As Frank Zappa called it, the 'Garni de Jour' phenomenon. You slap a piece of burnt meat between two bits of bread, and it's a burger. You add a tired piece of parsley next to it, and that's 'Garni du Jour' - and somehow this dried bit of parsley is meant to make the whole dining experience better.

Frank Zappa also made the observation that people also hate music, but love the packaging. People say they like music, but what they really like is the 'Garni du Jour'; and if the mass market is saying that the music business is crazy to focus on the segment of the market that -*gasp*- is actually interested in music being music for the sake of music.

That's how music died - when the music business decided the 'Garni du Jour' was much more important than the quality of the meat in between the bread making up the burgers they were peddling. Similarly, all these reality TV singing contest shows are all judging on the 'Garni du Jour' elements of each of these singer's 'marketability'. If they win, they can go on to sing the incredibly insightful lyrics David Dale so detests. It's not about the music, it's not even about the lyrics. Truth be told, it's all about all those *stupid* performance notes handed out by the likes of Simon Cowell and the rest of those 'judges'.

Doing The Numbers

How Many More Times (...Will You Treat Me The Way You Always Do)?

I started posting songs on iCompositions about 4 years ago. It was Australia Day weekend and I was bored and I thought "why not?". There was a bit more to it, but I'll talk about it some other day.  I've since posted 200 songs and pulled down 100 of those for review and remixes.

The thing about music recording is that I spent a good deal of my adult life wanting to do it without having the means. Now that I have just about all the equipment I need to record rock music in my bedroom and lounge, I've been able to produce all the stuff I wanted to. It's all stuff that has been clogging my mind for years. It's really hard to get creative about things when you have so many unfulfilled ideas, because you start to think, "what's the point of adding another song/script/idea to the pile of unfinished song/script/ideas?" It's just rough.

Having the means of production is no small thing. It makes all the difference for the artist. A painter needs his paints and canvas and easel. It's all they need, but the difference between having and not having is a colossal one. Similarly with music, having the ability to make your own recordings is a great step forwards for the aspiring recording artist. As a result of having the means of production, I've been able to exorcise the huge frustration that used to block my thoughts.

In the process, I've learnt a few things that are probably worth relating to people. No. 1 on my list of lessons is that quantity matters. When I started uploading, I thought I had my own style and execution totally sussed, because I had thought about it for so many years. All I had to do was execute. What I've learned from having recorded the 200+ pieces of bits of music is that I couldn't have been further from the truth. The recording artist and musician that I am today is actually a very different artist and musician to the one I thought I was when I walked into this process.

What's different now? I actually have a different sense for how I ant to engineer and mix my material. I also have a different feel for how I arrange my material, and this leads to a greater sense of freedom to go forwards and do different things. There are more experiments I want to undertake, but I have a better guess as to which ones are likely to yield interesting results while others would be boring.

I've only been able to come to see all this because I have done so many recordings and lived through so many different musical moments of my own devising that it has transformed me.Having done so much, I have a much better understanding of my own music. The delusions are gone, replaced by a sanguine perspective on just how good/not-so-good I actually am. Your own work does not lie. It is pretty descriptive of the limits of your own talent. Nonetheless when you get there, the limits don't bother you so much because the self-knowledge is very empowering and enriches one's artistic life.

The reason I am relating this is not to beat my chest, but because it also relates to how I feel about things I have directed. I've listed the most important things I've directed in my 'Art Neurography' section, but I've also done a lot more. The thing about experience is that it all amounts to something inside your brain. I no longer have crazy impulses to do whacky stuff, I'm actually more interested in coherent ideas and concepts in films, mostly as a result of having worked through enough ideas, whims, fancies and problems.

The lesson to be drawn from this is that the only way a group of works can really be understood as a oeuvre is if there is a mass or volume of work from which salient features emerge - something we can call 'perspective'. And it's a rule of thumb that can be applied to so many creative areas. It doesn't matter how talented an artist is, until they've painted 100, 300, 500, they actually won't have a grip on who they are as an artist and where they are going with their craft and talent. Quantity, and the generation of quantity is vital.

Truth be known, this is actually what is making Australian Film worse. With only 10-20 films being produced a year, there's no way known that Australian Cinema can actually develop a kind of perspective on itself, as a creative endeavor. There just isn't the volume of work from which we can actually draw conclusions or understanding of the salient features of Australian Cinema, let alone getting any much-needed perspective.

And while there is hardly any quantity on the table to survey, we'll never really know or understand what exactly it is that Australian cinema is saying to the world, but all the while those film bureacrats are trying to assess if your script and mine are sufficiently 'Australian'.

It's worrisome, isn't it?