Wyatt Moss-Wellington: Blog

Last month, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reported the president and publisher of Variety group, Neil Stiles, as having said, "I'm not optimistic about this habit called journalism."

Coming from one of the globe's most widely circulated entertainment-trade publications, this is not a good sign.

Stiles' creed is that service and customer are the way of the future. This can be read as: we will tailor our reportage and content to what the public wants to hear. But even then, will the projected extra traffic bring back the ol’ rivers of gold? Likely not. Internet advertising revenue isn’t what it used to be either.

Meanwhile, “customers” are finding it hard to take issue with a domain selling them exactly what they want to hear, truth be damned.

Those with any interest in hard news will know that even the most major news reporters are caving in and calling populism the answer. Within Australia, the nation’s highest circulation broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, plasters inconsequential celeb stories across its homepage almost every day.

The difference between reliable journalism, marketing and opinion writing is increasingly spurious. Apparently when evaluating where to downsize, newspapers have turned straight to reporters, who have been identified as the most expendable staff members. The justification? No one is interested in reading hard news content anymore. We have always had to keep an eye on the media, but to this extent? Who, now, is going to fulfill the thankless task of attempting objective reporting?

Many of us have turned to bloggers in search of news content with integrity, upon recognising the mainstream media’s blundering amid economic plight. But is this an answer?

It seems that consumers online are still choosing fantasy over reality, celebrity gossip stories over hard news coverage. Unfortunately Waxman's Hollyblog is no match in net traffic for the likes of trash-gossip peddler Perez Hilton. Similarly, even within the Hollyblogosphere, many are choosing the unreliable flash journalism of Nikki Finke over more reliable sources.

Finke excels in the goodies-and-baddies model of journalism, where each story reads like a pantomime and the truth can be distorted at will, reported without cross-reference; even publication dates are edited without notice to the reader. The blog is attractive because its simplistic and adversarial reporting reminds us of Hollywood artifice. But unfortunately the truth is never as neat as a Pixar screenplay.

The biggest problem here is that bloggers - myself included - don't seem to be entirely liable for the misinformation they publish.

However, many have pointed to the fact that we have never been able to lay our complete faith in the mainstream media either.

I have devoted a gobsmacking amount of time since the publication of my last post on Australian asylum seekers to dismantling lies perpetuated by the Australian press. Here is one example: a ninemsn report (UPDATE Nov 19) on the cost of Australia's relatively meagre refugee intake. It has been slammed by both the national broadcaster's Media Watch and by its own statistical source, Centrelink, who have denied any truth in the figures the story is based on.

Yet those who follow the ninemsn link above will discover the story remains online! How is this possible?

People still read the story, and still quote it as fact. It seems like anyone interested in uncovering the truth has to do a lot more work to get to it.

Unfortunately work is a turn-off to a consumer repeatedly told that their entertainment is more important than locating the truth and the challenges it brings. Studies show that the internet fosters not only shorter attention spans but a "compassion fatigue". It is also within the interests of many high income earners to keep us engaged in fantasy, so that we are too distracted and befuddled to even consider holding them to their accounts.

Our fantasies exist because there is some inclination in us to desire them as reality. Sadly, they can be indulged by us, by market profiteers and by the media, so it is important to hold people up on charges of outrageous fantasy before they leak into real life. How else can we explain Arnold Swartzeneger's Californian election victory? How else do we explain the spike in army enrollments after the release of major war films? How else do we let Nic Cage get away with owning more than a dozen houses and two Bahamian islands, while half the world lives in poverty? When I tell my peers about Cage’s reported finance concerns, the irritated response is often: “don’t say that about Nic Cage, I like Nic Cage.”

If we are choosing these fantasies over reality, it’s a pretty sad indictment on the social pressures of our everyday lives. We must be getting something wrong if so many are so frightened of reality that they would choose to board it up with framed posters of wealth-hording cultural icons.

What do we do about this? It seems like the world relies on a minority of people who value truth enough to engage in the "habit" of real journalism. But when the rivers of gold dry up, and our traditional providers of hard news can't earn what they used to off internet advertising, and their front pages spill with celeb gossip stories, all competing for a few remaining dollars on the same dogged populist and fantasist grounds, what do we do?

Do the largely unregulated blogs hold an answer? Are they making any money, if newspapers aren't, or are they destined to be a community service too, just as the arts are increasingly being reassessed as (free music, free movies anyone)?

Waxman ends her article by saying, "we'll continue to do journalism, even if Variety chooses not to." Now consumers just have to choose journalism as well, even if that means locating its whereabouts.

I was writing a completely different blog entry about the future of journalism, when it dawned on me that I had a duty to be writing about something else. In Australia, the incrimination of asylum seekers has gone on for way too long.

The politicians who claim to represent us are talking big about the threat posed by a handful of asylum seekers, backed up by a hysterical media. We are debating whether or not to be kind to a few desperate humans on a couple of ships.

The sad thing is that we shouldn't even be having this debate. Consider this: the population of Australia is estimated to be 22 million at 2009. Last year, we took in 13, 500 asylum seekers (way behind global average according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR). Of those, 206 came by boat. Yet apparently these people coming by boat constitute a "national crisis"?

Moreover, asylum seekers arriving by boat are more likely to be deemed genuine refugees than those arriving by air. But we are still capable of looking at all of these individuals as "illegals", to borrow one of our prime minister's words, in turn borrowing a linguistic fear campaign from his predecessor.

Time and again I hear the one primary concern bandied about by the media and echoed by my peers: won't these potential immigrants place massive burden on our already limited infrastructure?

First of all, this argument is never leveled at the government when they encourage us to make more Australian babies. It is generally acknowledged that more people is a good thing. The economic growth which parallels population growth could entail resources to build roads and rail lines, improve healthcare and education, if our government has the will and the Australian people have the will to request it.

Wouldn't our intellectual resources be better suited toward chasing down high-income tax evaders, or those who are doing real damage to our infrastructure: greedy and inept politicians and developers? I don't how we can continue to blame immigrant population growth for problems it has nothing to do with.

Blaming asylum seekers is a welcome distraction for politicians and those with the wealth to create change, forever skirting their responsibility to help out. We've been duped. Look in their pockets for the answer to our infrastructure woes, not to a tiny fraction of the population of Australian immigrants.

If we are really that concerned about infrastructure, traveling the globe to just a few other countries will help us realise we don't have it so bad after all. Try traversing Mexico City in peek hour traffic. Congestion especially is a ubiquitous challenge of increased urbanisation - not ours alone.

Additionally, genuine refugees, as the majority of asylum seekers turn out to be, are revealed as good, hard workers; coveted assets in the communities they settle in.

The fact is we are not making many babies in Australia, and we need immigrants. So why not be kind to them? They are not a burden, they are entirely necessary to uphold the way of life we hold so dear.

The other big scare campaign runs like this: if we are soft on border protection, everyone will want to come here. The extension of this argument is implicit, but never vocalised: so we must be cruel to these people and put them through torturous circumstances to discourage others from coming here.

The potential for people to arrive on our shores is not limitless. The amount of asylum seekers processed annually depends on global circumstances - how much conflict, internationally, people are fleeing.

Australian activist organisation GetUp put together this fact sheet, demonstrating that the amount of asylum seekers arriving in Australian territory is not driven by policy change or awareness of a "soft target", but the amount of people who actually need to seek asylum.

The "we don't want to look soft" argument has been used to justify much cruelty in past, including countless failed and useless wars - look no further back than the rhetoric used to justify the invasion of Iraq for examples.

Softness appears to mean treating all people as equal, undeserved of torture; it is entering a dialogue where no one has any more or less rights than anyone else; softness is actually caring about the human cost of our actions. Are these things we really want to avoid?

The bottom line is that kindness is a good thing - whether you choose to denigrate its human impact by calling it "softness" or not. Despite the fact that asylum seekers should be desired by Australia rather than attacked, the argument that kind behaviour leads to those in need taking advantage of our kindness misses the point. There is no "taking advantage". Kindness isn't conditional, we do it because we care about people other than ourselves.

If softness is another word for kindness or generosity, then I, for one, don't mind being soft.

The internet does its own PR these days. People have a strange ability to bestow the lion's share of responsibility and kudos upon the machines they work with rather than the people driving them. Look at TV, for example: we prefer to blame television for its myriad psychological crimes than to acknowledge our responsibility to choose what and how we consume the product it broadcasts.

So it is with the internet. Only it is happening the other way around: these days we uphold the internet as a great equaliser, via which the truth will be revealed on an egalitarian, democratised platform, and all we need to do is stand by and wait for the statistics to come in.

Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. A fine example of this fantasy in action can be found right now on the Sydney music scene. Venues are closing left, right and centre; we have recently seen the closure of the iconic Hopetoun Hotel.

Sydney-based music promoter Leyne Elbourne of Cadence Commotions has appealed to the many locals who joined a Facebook group intended to save local venue The Hopetoun. "The fact is," she writes, "if more of the thousands of members of the 'Save the Hopetoun' group went to the Hoey more often...it may not have had to close its doors." She points out the disparity between our romanticised endorsement and our actions: "People need to actively support their live music scene, not just 'love' it from afar," she told the group.

There may be many reasons the Sydney live music scene is faltering, and our resistance to attend live music could speak of the place we have chosen for music in our lives, or the relevance of the music being played, but the argument remains - if we really do care about it, what makes us think that we can support its survival so passively?

The internet seems to be selling the idea that support automatically becomes action. That simply by being one of the numbers, you can drive change. In actuality, all this kind of action does is to place power back in the hands of marketers who have access to the data, so their product can be better targeted. We still need to be active rather than passive consumers, or "support" is as valueless as the single muscle twitch it takes to click a mouse button.

Also look toward the recent Twitter phenomenon for an example of internet services talking themselves up beyond their powers of social persuasion. The Twitter team had the good sense to launch themselves with a powerful PR department, trumpeting celebrity endorsement such as Ashton Kutcher's, with his trademark interminable banality in 140 characters or less. They have managed to lie to the media about their box office influence, which falls a long way behind other online services. Their product is slowly being revealed as a self-serving marketing tool, as demonstrated by surveys on Twitter user retention. If I were Jack Dorsey, I'd sell it off for the ludicrous sums on offer, before the few techies still using the thing wake up to the hype.

Worse than our dwindling ability (and that of the worldwide media) to separate internet PR from the facts, the myth of meritocracy has been shifted to and dumped on the internet.

We all want to believe it; we want to believe that the system we work in rewards people proportionately to the societal usefulness of their output. But the internet doesn't appear to provide this either.

Music is an obvious example: if you are good, runs the conventional wisdom, the wonder of social marketing will work its wonders and you will become a myspace success story, such is the democratisation of taste on the internet. All that's required is some to-the-minute technical knowhow on the part of the artist. Unfortunately this is bullshit.

An interesting debate unfurled not long ago on the discussion board of whatsrattlin, a Canterbury music interest group. It was posited that the internet has taken the power from the hands of the big four record companies and empowered artists to get heard at a lower cost.

However the majority of people who are finding music online are listening to ten second grabs before moving on to the next freely available tune, such is the nature of market glut. There may be more independent music available, but it is not really getting any more attention. The effect on the consumer mind seems to be that the overload of information is scary - so they turn to the publicly endorsed, or what has worked in past. And amongst those, the select few with marketing and PR budgets behind them may get a fair listening, so the cost is not zero.

I know a lot of miserable musicians who expected that they were good enough, worked hard enough, and were digi-savvy enough to make it. They were willing to adapt. But it didn't happen. The idea of moving "up" in the world remains strong, but for most musicians class advancement is a dead expectation or a 99.9% improbable dream. As drummer Bill Bruford points out in his autobiography, the social standing of musicians hasn't really changed that much. They've always been on the lower end of the social strata/income bracket. The record industry only changed this for a very, very select few people - most musicians now as ever, good or bad, are plugging away at the bottom of the human food chain. But, some do move "up" and they are the most visible, fueling the rest to ask what was wrong with them. This is the myth of meritocracy in action.

Lest I sound gloomy about all this - and I'm not really - I'd like to point out that there are people interested in sharing diverse and ambitious music in the world, and using these digital developments to be part of a community that does so. Subsequently, there's a lot of GREAT cross-pollination of musical tradition that is very exciting and available to all of us right now. Making money is a different kettle of kelp entirely - it depends on our expectations of what music should do for us.

Also, there are online activist groups who use the internet to incite us to further action. Observe Australian activist organisation GetUp's recent coal ad success. The internet is not the problem, it can still be a useful tool to mobilise those who care about the world around them.

However, instead of believing all the hype, perhaps we would be better served by a little scepticism; perhaps we would be happier acknowledging the real circumstances we live in rather than the fantasy of global democracy the internet props up. It may be seductive, but the internet PR is rarely true.

I've figured it out. What the world needs right now is another TV series about serial killers.

Oktober love,

Wyatt xo

Numerous chums and acquaintances have attempted to push this book onto me over the past couple of years, but having attempted Coetzee's meandering split-page experiment "Diary of a Bad Year", I declined. Declined, that is, until someone bought "Disgrace" for my birthday, all shiny and new - is there any better way to make someone read a favourite novel?

Considering all the acclaim - it won the 1999 Booker and propelled the author toward claiming the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature - I'd like to point out that the book is much more thin on insight than suggested. (Coetzee is up for the Booker again this year, with "Summertime".)

Philandering South African lecturer David Lurie flees to his daughter's farm after an affair with a student has him sacked. While he is there, his daughter is raped in her home - apparently as post-apartheid "debt collection" - but she decides to stay, to Lurie's chagrin.

The story is, seductively, succinctly told; I'll grant Coetzee this. However, a cursory unraveling of his thematic devices reveals more heavy-handed audience manipulation than literary umph.

Too often I find that authors use the weight of sexual shame - and rape - to bolster the credibility of their subject matter. It has the appearance of making their text seem richer and more loaded with meaning. But it is also a cheap trick - what sort of revelation does it lead to in "Disgrace"? What exactly is the insight?

This simple metaphorical device is just as tasteless when used to demonstrate a political dilemma. It surges our understanding of the presented dilemma past reason and into a space dominated by our sense of sexual gravitas, and we end up assuming that, because of the awfulness of sexual crime, the author must have something worthwhile to say; at worst, they must be right. Although often, the author has nothing more to say.

The story's sexual crime is even more tasteless when juxtaposed with the protagonist's philandering. Did anyone who read "Disgrace" ask how this - the book's most basic thematic thread - was a useful parallel?

Add to this Coetzee's academically irrelevant, tangential passages about Byron, and you have more hypocrisy than great art, if you ask me. And what was he suggesting was the way forward for South Africa? Did anyone catch it?

For those who haven’t been following, this year’s international film festival circuit has been subject to the ire of a brave few filmmakers concerned that festivals including Toronto and Melbourne have accepted funding and programming influence from the Israeli government in the guise of a cultural campaign to “rebrand Israel.” A number of filmmakers and entertainment industry practitioners – among them John Greyson, David Byrne, Julie Christie, Ken Loach, Wallace Shawn and Jane Fonda – have removed their films from the festivals or urged festival boycotts.

Greyson also named the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv as “the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” (quoting Naomi Klein).

The more influential (i.e. cashed up) of those opposing the festivals’ critics have expressed themselves by taking out an ad in Variety. They have accused the boycotters of demanding unnecessary censorship and admonished them for unjustly attacking Israeli filmmakers. By heading their open letter with “We Don’t Need Another Blacklist”, they have also drawn an outrageously histrionic parallel with the Holocaust.

The problem with this argument is that it conflates the product with the means. It is not Israeli films or filmmakers that the festivals’ critics are opposing, but the means for showing the films. This is not a call to discredit filmmakers from Israel, but an appeal to festivals and their directors who are profiteering from a government entrenched in upholding unnecessary war.

Ken Loach couldn’t have been clearer when he said the boycott was aimed "not at independent Israeli films or filmmakers", but at "the Israeli state."

But unfortunately festival organizers such as Melbourne’s exec director Richard Moore use easily virtuous censorship battles, such as he had with China, to bolster their humanitarian public profile, accept bloodstained money with their other hand, and still come off like heroes. He managed this by again conflating the boycotters’ motives with an attack on Israeli filmmakers, which is deliberate misinterpretation.

I do not turn a blind eye to reactionary atrocities performed in the name of Palestine, the consequences of which can be equally egregious, but the impact is nowhere near as crippling as the throttle placed on Palestinians by Israeli force. In the last year alone, as Greyson points out, Israel’s list of human damage includes, “The Gaza massacre that occurred last December, which resulted in 1,000 civilian deaths; the election of a Prime Minister earlier this year that has been accused of war crimes; the extension of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; the destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards; and the growth of a totalitarian security wall, and the further enshrining of the check-point system.” So when Greyson says this is “not the right year to celebrate Brand Israel”, his position is understandable.

Additionally, TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey attempted to justify their spotlight on Tel Aviv, “because it is one of those cities where there is an incredibly diverse mix of cultures”, yet their program is devoid of Palestinian filmmakers. All countries may have some form of humanitarian maltreatment in their past, and all may attempt to exert some form of cultural influence through film, but when a country exploits cultural or financial clout so obviously to distract from humanitarian abuse, it is time for festival panels to be critical and separate the product from the propaganda.

Any message we can send to Israel that their current behaviour is mortifyingly inhumane is the right message to send. Cultural imperialism has long been the method to distract from more real and violent imperialism, and instill warm and convivial feelings toward an ill-willed state; this is the underlying purpose in the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Director General for Cultural Affairs’ attempt to, “show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” And if buying influence over film festivals’ such as MIFF’s programming – what could be more obviously culturally imperialist? – is the chosen method, then the funding must be declined.

It is war money.

Those who oppose the filmmakers’ decision to boycott are attempting to separate art from life. I suppose they would prefer film to remain diverting and ephemeral entertainment, and not engage us to any sort of response with the real world. But you can’t have it both ways – if you want your films to talk about life, you must acknowledge that they are part of an interaction with the people who make and consume them, and are therefore capable of adverse effects as well as momentary indulgence of fantasy or relief. These people are, ultimately, asking films NOT to be instruments of change.

But in a world where Western-backed governments still incite vast and indiscriminate massacres of civilians and get away with it, how can we ask for anything but change?

"Throw Down You Heart" is the soundtrack to a documentary made by flash banjo player and transcultural jazz/funk bandleader Bela Fleck. I haven't seen the film, but apparently it sees Fleck roaming Africa in search of the origins of the banjo. Sounds to me like as good an excuse as any to travel the continent. Power to Fleck.

The music made in the process, however, is a revelation in its diversity. In an age when a few assembled beats on a brightly coloured mix CD is marketed as a true cultural experience, Fleck reminds us that there is a lot more happening in Africa than is represented in the dollar bin at your local gas station.

I admit that the Sounds of Africa tripe, marketed to a consumer base hungry for some easily-digested reduction to imagined primality, has also infected my idea of what African music is. In my uneducated mind it had become synonomous with endless cheerful beats plastered, banal and lazy, on a repeated melodic line. It strikes me while listening to this collection that I've done it too - reduced my concept of African music to a few signifiers of bogus African-ness...

But there is such a variety of sounds, instrumental timbres and approaches to music-making contained herein; consider especially the myriad vocal tones of Fleck's collaborators, from Oumou Sangare to Anania Ngoliga. What's more, we find ourselves hearing genuine musicianship, adventurousness and compositional integrity.

I can often be found down the pub decrying the dwindling acknowledgment of complexity in the musical arts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in current expressions of African identity through music, especially the output of the progeny of African diaspora in wealthier countries - those with the money to create cultural influence. It's called hip hop these days.

But the incredulity amongst my peers begins here - arguing that embracing complexity is the ideal, isn't that just a Western notion trying to squash culture imported from developing nations? Saying that we're just better again?

No. The idea that complexity is the cultural realm of the imperialist West persists even in academic circles (probably who should know better). It's demeaning to say that complexity does not exist in developing cultures. Because let's admit it: life is complex no matter where it's taking place. It's just that we've been sold the more easily digestible - and orientalist - product.

That's right, hip hop is orientalist and ultimately racist. It features the aggression, the tribal mentality, the genetically essentialist idea of violence - and more importantly the image of an entire culture hinging on a few token cultural characteristics to sum up the totality. The sad thing is that it's been marketed back to those it claims to speak for, and it's been mistaken for empowerment and identity affirmation. It's not, it's a limited view of a complex culture. Now we have to wriggle out of it.

The idea that rap or hip hop are more egalitarian musical expressions because "anyone can do it" is a mere comfort to a generation afraid of the motivation to mastery and learned effort; an effort it feels guilty for shunning. We are afraid of skill and the hard work that creates something wonderful, because it would reflect poorly on us while we are being so idle. So we are comforted by peer-generated content which dismisses ambition or any reach for greatness. Developing cultures continue to generate fine musicians we will probably never hear, and we continue choosing to consume the watered-down, usually Western-produced versions of the same thing.

ALL - really ALL of the political hip hop I have heard has been equally simplistic and lame, usually a general cry that everything is wrong and we need to fix it, or love will lead the way, without too much insight beyond these proclamations. We listen to rambling political diatribes reaching no conclusion - that sound good because they, so cleverly, rhyme - and think we are witnessing greatness because when they are over we don't have to think or act, although they have stimulated inarguable truths that comfort us. In addition, the statement is often overshadowed by personal ego.

Obviously this is an inflammatory thing to say. I know that I'm onto something when most people are pissed off when I mention it, as with this (increasingly frequent) dialogue. How could I dismiss an entire genre like this? After all, from a utilitarian perspective, seeing as it gives so many people so much joy it can't be that bad.

True, but I think more joy is to be found in the complex and the new, if we give it the time. So right now I bemoan that the avant-garde has been hijacked by punk, and that progressive music has been hijacked by metal. Instead of opening up new possibilities for music, these movements have restricted music to ploddingly mindless genre conventions, mostly to do with rhythm and noise dismissing other musical possibilities. Once the avant-garde and prog weren't genres, but ideas related to looking for new ways of thinking through music.

Even jazz has accepted a limited vision of its capabilities in the "theme-everyone takes a solo-return to theme" structure. Fleck's album suggests that the most experimental music at the moment is - get this - folk music. Even in my hometown, Sydney, the most adventurous musician I can think of is using a folk medium to communicate - Brian Campeau.

Are we really that saturated with musical product that we've given up, for now, on something new? We create our own cultural identity via the artistic produce we choose to consume, so let's create an identity more honest and more adequate for coping with the mess we know of as life, and choose complexity.

*NB: Yes, I am still calling them CD reviews as I am still purchasing CDs rather than downloads.

Despite the fact that journalism as we know it appears to be a sinking ship, fashion journalism has become the latest home of the chic flick. However, where "Prada" director David Frankel uses the genre as mere condescending fluff (he is capable of more), “Shopaholic” director PJ Hogan has, with impeccable timing, crafted a well-aimed reconsideration of what is valuable in our lives.

Consider this: what does Andy Sachs, protagonist of "Prada", believe in? We are advised throughout that she possesses some lofty integrity which goes AWOL under the employ of the villainous Miranda Priestly, but what exactly is the source of this integrity? What does Andy actually believe in beyond her career? Moreover, what do the filmmakers want to tell us is a good alternative to the alleged inanity and malice of the high fashion world? The film wants it both ways and lands in the hypocritical middle ground. It presents a fabulous, alluring world of glitzy fashion, but scolds its participants as vacuous. It ends standing for nothing.

"Shopaholic" actually propels its protagonist, Rebecca Bloomwood, through a fair interrogation of values, at the other side of which is a real and well articulated enlightenment. Through her boss she learns to stand up against executive pay rises. Through her family she learns that our possessions don't define us. And the whole film points toward the self-destructive nature of consumerism without blaming anyone for getting involved with it. Could there be anything more worthwhile to say to a chic flick audience (such as myself) right now?

I wish the critics would stop referring to "Prada" as a classic, and I hope we remember "Shopaholic" instead when we look back on the filmic representations of a world before the $ crisis.

In keeping with the title of this blog – gen y irony stole my heart – a few words on what that phrase actually means.

Humour obviously has great subconscious power over our interpretation of the world, though it can be difficult to ascertain exactly what that power is. Many have pointed out that our concept of what is funny is closely tied to our fear of death. (Some of my favourite cinema deals with the relationship between death and stand-up comedy; Lenny, Man on the Moon – I await the Australian release of Funny People.)

Gen y, with its unprecedented information overload (iOverload, MyOverload?) and its resulting Shutdown Complex, is always looking for techniques to sift through the roar of marketing, opinion and other more parochially-intentioned loud voices; they’re longing for an escape from the pressure to decide what is important and what is not. Enter: humour.

The easy answer is to say that nothing is important, and as I blabbed about on my last blog entry, this strikes a particular chord with an idle generation with more time to contemplate death than probably any other generation before it.

But we need to choose some things to flag as less worthy of serious consideration, and here is where humour is an indispensable tool. Consider sibling rivalry for example - the easiest way to repair a tetchy relationship with siblings is to acknowledge the rivalry as a joke, a game. It's also important for dismantling political fear campaigns: making light of that which we are supposed to fear can clear our heads.

In observing the trajectory of popular humour, especially the evolution of the cartoon sitcom, I’ve found myself asking why much of today’s humour – typified by the shooting star of TV comedy, Family Guy – makes me so uncomfortable. Humour can be uncomfortable because we want to, or we’ve been told we must, take certain aspects of life seriously, and if this is challenged, the very foundations of our existence can be at stake. Family Guy gives us permission to dismiss pretty much everything we may consider to be serious. But is this an answer?

We grew up with The Simpsons. The formula was inherited from the Roseanne model of family dramedy: everyone is deeply flawed and pretty much nasty to each other most of the time, but in the end we are endeared to the characters because they reveal that they actually care for each other beneath their sarcasm and self-absorption. The Simpsons added to the mix a surrealism that was once the exclusive realm of cartoons, but the show kept basically the same formula: borderline cynical satire and pop psychology.

What happened when you removed the pop psychology, and the “borderline”? South Park happened. Then when you remove the satire and replace it with dismissal in favour of pop culture referencing? And then make the whole thing move so fast that there is no time to reflect on the gravity of the subject matter? Family Guy. That’s gen y’s version of irony, admittedly at its lamest. It dismisses everything and tells us to take nothing seriously because it is easier. This is the directive power of humour. The image of the two stoners on the living room couch watching back-to-back Family Guy to escape their lives will turn up in future depictions of this generation, if there is any honesty in the world.

This is, once again, shrinking from the complexities which make us human. Giving up on taking anything seriously is a time bomb, and generation y is already dealing with the fallout by way of anxiety disorder.

Gen y’s particular irony lacks a heart because it is easier to lack a heart. Hearts are complex and hot damn they can hurt like hell. But there come landmark moments in anyone’s life when we are forced to give up on what we’ve taken for granted, or futile solutions we’ve relied on in past, and find a new path. Are we there yet?

So it turns out that - fancy this - more comfortable and prosperous generations are not necessarily any more content with their lives. Case in point: gen y. Most have been, not without reason, pointing to the unrealistic expectations set up in our youth.

There are a lot of blogs out there written by my peers asking: why, when I have so little to worry about, do I worry so much? On paper my life looks dandy, why do I feel dreadful all the time?

It is within the nature of parenting to want the best for one's children, and the baby boomers, with their unparalleled wealth and influence as a collective, were in the position to be able to provide. They systematically removed the need for their children - the bulk being generation y - to struggle for themselves, their food, their shelter, their essentials.

Nor did gen y feel the threat of conscription blowing past their mailbox. Nor did they feel any real threat from political power in general. In short, we didn't have to fight for our lives.

But, on the other hand, humans just as any living thing are programmed to fight for their lives - the only point in living is to keep living, and to make sure the species keeps living. When we don't have to do that, what is there left to do?

Ponder the meaningless of existence and our inevitable demise, that's what. And that's a lot harder to deal with than reacting to more immediate threats to our being.

Perhaps this is why existential humour and postmodern expositions on meaninglessness have resonated so well with my generation. A brief wander through the Adult Swim oeuvre demonstrates the y-ist psyche in ample measures. As art, it cuts through the constant roaring confusion of selecting what to worry about and says, "if only we didn't have to worry about this: death."

Death is apparently more readily digestible when it has proximity, when we don't have time to ponder it, only avoid its immediacy. I guess pondering only leads to one conclusion.

Having absorbed an ungodly dose of the 80's-born variety of neoconservative self interest, now heavily drummed into us (gen y is all about the individual and individual gain), a good remedy might be to revert to the other reason for being here: helping others in the species who do experience more immediate threats to their mortality. Perhaps turning our sense of purpose to others in dire circumstances would grant us focus and direction, and help clear up some of our pointlessness and confusion.

Once again, thanks for nothing neoconservatism, even your plans for utopian selfishness backfired.

True experiments in aural possibilities often start with an exploration of fears and threats of annihilation at the hands of current worldly changes. Charting the nightmarescapes composed or performed by previous artists takes us through the truly frightening sounds of machines taking over in the post-industrial era (from Edgar Varèse to Henry Cow and Zappa), the short-lived space age shortly thereafter (say, the difference between what Zappa and Gong were exploring), through to techno fears, morphing into the ever more digital. Listening to a universe blank but for the unsettlingly inhuman sounds of digital manipulation can be a heady experience.

The magic happens when the experiment moves past merely seeing what we can do with the noises and into revelatory composition. This is exactly what we're hearing at the moment from Scandinavia, where bands such as the popular múm have welded trendy tech noises with human and acoustically-devised sounds, which I believe the ear has been craving as relief; the results are uplifting. Tortoise's musical acumen, likewise, is now more than ever conquering their younger tendency to section off genres in their music. They are finding their own space by fusing their myriad references into more satisfyingly unique compositions.

Beacons of Ancestorship retains experimental edge: each track provides an idea of a combination of uncovered and recovered sounds. And so - I think this can be a mark of greatness - the album moves in the blink of an eardrum between being exceptionally new and exciting (the bulk of the album, from "Gigantes" on) to just plain annoying (as per the near unlistenable "Northern Something"). Perhaps you're not really experimenting if you don't occasionally make mistakes.

But of course, as I am obliged to point out in this age of postmodern minefields of opinion, mistakes don't exist except as the individual listener's projection.

Despite the very fine drumming of Tortoise's John McEntire, my final hope is that we will move past this era of obsession with beat, as if it were the sole contributing factor to enjoyment of music, and make progressive musics with drum sounds mixed a little further back.

*NB: Yes, I am still calling them CD reviews as I am still purchasing CDs rather than downloads.

As with virtually all global print media, the Hollywood trade publications are wondering if they'll be extinct in a few years. The Hollywood Reporter is not fairing as well as Variety, and there is speculation that THR may be bought out by its long-time competitor.

So, today's Big Q: if I were appointed the colossal responsibility of saving the drowning publication, what would I do? In three simple steps:

1. Gather all THR's opinion writers and get them blogging. Readers are demanding even their hard news delivered with opinion - we don't believe in unbiased reporting anymore.

Let's face it, THR is dying because it offers nothing that isn't available elsewhere - it falls in the middle of the road, uncomfortably between wishy-washy edited opinion and lame 2nd-day reporting of celeb trash. To survive, THR needs to stand for something.

So call a spade a spade, an opinion an opinion, and a journalist a blogger. Don't edit opinion.

2. Cast aside the inner miser, exhume the dwindling coffers' leftover riches, slap pay cuts on all executive staff, and invest in just a few good reporters who are actually following the trail of Hollywood's dirty money. This means investing in just those one or two good leads for scoops that no one else wants to put up the cash for. Bloggers can't afford it. There's the difference between what they provide and what you can provide. Without taking any risks, THR ain't going to stop nosediving.

3. Acknowledge the future of newspapers and put it all online. The rivers of gold have dried up here as with every rag. The studios aren't advertising like they used to. Dinosaurs wanting to live in their publication's Golden Era, expecting that circumstances don't change and what worked in past will always work, should be bumped. Variety did it, you can do it too.

Final secret step: don't expect riches. Even those who are navigating the digital media storm the best (such as the LA Times) aren't locating the revenue they have been used to... maybe it won't exist again. Maybe entertainment journalism, like the arts they cover, will have to acknowledge a public service role in lieu of the moola - which means now more than ever we rely on people being good because they believe in something other than their own advancement.

That's right, I'm reviewing Roseanne.

I've been working in LA for the past couple of weeks, and increasingly aghast at the TV culture here: they're all gratuitous serial killer programs, advertisements for easy-anorexia-inducing pills, advertisements for erectile dysfunction remedies that begin, "No one likes an impotent man." I don't have a TV at home, but I suppose this is the real American experience.

While the shame quota runs high, and you can almost gauge the preoccupations of an entire country by their allocation of guilt in chosen media, I have found some respite on one of 1000 channels of junk. In the small hours when my Australian biorhythms hammer me blearily awake and my fuzzed out brain needs company, Roseanne Barr is there. She is there to remind me that the TV format can offer worthwhile entertainment.

What is so wonderful about the sitcom? It is capable of living more realistically on our level, not massaging our aspirations to financially elevated, apartment-bound, navel obsessed versions of how we should be. It makes me wonder where the economically struggling characters are in sitcoms now? Do we not believe they exist? Where does this leave the less privileged majority of audiences?

The realism of Roseanne's family's situation also grants the show scope to deal with dilemmas not approached so often in today's sitcoms. It doesn't talk down. By the end of each episode, the characters are inevitably forced to face their denial of one of life's gray areas. Yet they still laugh. Thence, the humour is not dismissive, but healing and inclusive. The background rumble in the laughter comes as "it's okay - we all deal with this."

Plus, Roseanne as a character is a portly, opinionated, not glisteningly-picture-perfect woman who has authority in her environment but does not get punished for being who she is.

This review is a simple lament. What happened to the honest sitcom featuring characters living the way the majority of us live: struggling.

I'm finding myself wondering why we seem to be accepting more brash cruelty and unfair stereotyping as stand-ins for genuine humour these days.

The Hangover delivers exactly this variety of ugliness with shattering remorselessness. The apparently market research-devised, soulless comedy takes a dog-eared concept - four guys have hell-raising bucks weekend in Vegas, have to pick up the pieces and find their lost buddy - and attempts nothing new with it, except to see how much more abhorrent it can be than its predecessors.

During one unoriginally slapstick scene, the pic's token obese sidekick is hit in such a way that would send anyone outside of a Hollywood farce directly to hospital. Cue laughs. The attacker points at the just-for-laffs and so-dumb-its-funny non-character and exclaims, "it's funny because you're fat."

Cue guffaws. But is anyone insulted? Is this accepting the lowest of the low?

Here's the nub: our portly anti-hero says nothing back, looks at him dumbly, and the movie congratulates our and his complicity by lumbering hatefully onward. Systematically, the film catalogues stereotypes of those who least need stereotyping - Asian people, obese people, women - and robs them of any right to talk back or explain themselves. We are even asked to laugh at the heroes being callously degrading to a number of animals. And every time, the victim will sit there and take it.

The most sinister stamp of hollow scripting and timelessly shallow Hollywood pretense is revealed in presentation of its alternative to subservience to the white, self-serving, male pack: its treatment of women characters sees a dichotomy set up where only two possibilities are available: the nagging, "evil to her core" (this is an actual quote) wife, or the submissive, dumb, unquestioning and unopinionated happy whore. A diverse and forgiving spectrum of female identity.

Pretending to deal with stereotypes head-on, it slips a more insidious attack on each target minority under the radar. And yet we, and they, remain silenced.

To top a list of not even epic failures, The Hangover lacks an original plot, original characters, twists on character types, or any exploration of any possible new ground not explored extensively in every other movie you have ever seen.

The Hangover mistakes human meanness for comedy, and we seem to have gone along with it. Perhaps because it lets us off the hook: if they are that bad, can we absolve ourselves of similar sins by not being as bad as them?

...

Instead of rampaging against the film (is it too late to say that?), I guess I should find questions to ask myself. This was not difficult as almost everyone I spoke to about the film has been more offended by my offense threshold than I was offended by the film. A number of questions I may dance with at the next disco:

Don't portrayals of stereotypes help us relax into a position where we can laugh at their non-relation to real life?

Why is it sacrilegious to be upset by a film this cruel?

What is it about this time that sees a film like The Hangover so expansively lauded, such a money-earner, and being talked about in the same breath as the untouchably pretentious Academy Awards?

Welcome to Wyatt Moss-Wellington's review blog. So far it reviews film, music, life, social media, blackened bubblegum and economic crises.

In light of increasingly ubiquitous, hyped-up reports of economic doom and gloom, I have noticed a few enlightened souls are now pointing out an error in our use of language – that is, the tenuous link between clinical depression and economic depression.

The unquestioned coalescence of the two is, in fact, a furphy – people as a whole have not reported themselves as any less happy during harsher economic times. In his book "The Myth of the Great Depression", historian David Potts even suggests that we may have been happier in our lowest economic ebb of the last century, for the sense of purpose and community brought about by common struggle. (Courtesy Tony Wellington's "Happy?: exposing the cultural myths about happiness" for conducting my attention to Potts' work.)

However the term “depression” has been adopted because something rings true, and some comparisons are worth making.

The clinical variety of depression doesn’t exist without reason – it is all too easy to ignore its important psychological function. Depression lets us know when there is something wrong within our personal lives, when something needs changing.

Economic depression is the same. It tells us there is something wrong with the way we are organising the fiscal world. This should be fine; this means we have an opportunity to put some hard analytical work into our global financial arrangements.

The only reason the current economic crisis could be a problem is if we believe we should not have to go through such hard times.

This is exactly the sort of incredulity I am hearing from all sides now: how could something so terrible befall us? Isn’t it unfair?

Since when did we enshrine the idea that it is somehow unfair for us to have to occasionally stumble and fall? That we should remain forever comfortable, forsaking the necessary collective questioning that brings us together and makes us stronger? It is as ludicrous as the concept of limitless market advancement.

Of course, the media, entertainment industry and our religious leaders have a lot to answer for in perpetuating the myth that we can be happy – and prosperous – absolutely constantly. Perhaps now is the time to hurl these reductionist notions out the window. Toss the Dalai Lama fridge magnet (“why is the Dalai Lama always smiling?”); respond with critical jottings to sensationalist doomsdayism in your rag or mag of choice; reject reality TV’s ruthless ideal of reaching the perfect self in the short-term spotlight of forgettable stardom.

Unemployment, of course, is the word thrown back in defence of currently ordained misery. What worse a blow to one’s sense of purpose could there be?

I can relate to this. One of the most miserable and hardest times of my life was spent unemployed in London, for four months over one of the UK’s sopping, bitter winters. During this time I had to open my meagre address book and go through the names of all the people I’d met since arrival, then ask them for couch space for a week.

But by doing this, I got to know and bond with so many gorgeously warm and loving former acquaintances I would never otherwise have explored a deeper friendship with. Within four months I found myself relating to new communities of people – communities I didn’t know existed – who also provided an emotional support network.

Even unemployment can be beneficial, if we are brave enough to look long-term. This is no “harden-up” speech – things can get tough. It can last a long time. But we can feel it, share it, and together build something stronger and wiser.

Happy community building everyone – I’m excited.

In an era when demeaning schlock like "Slumdog Millionaire" can beguile millions into spending millions, massaging contemptuous fetishism of poverty-induced violence masquerading for genuine concern, India is crying out for more generous cultural exchange between the US and itself.

By far the best idea I’ve had while combing the aisles of my local Blockbuster this year was to hire "Outsourced". On some occasions, the American tradition of dramedy rises above its inherent predisposition to paternalist judgment and is capable of approaching sensitive subject matter with uncharacteristic subtlety. If you’ve forgotten how joyously astute American rom coms can be (the political variety are a dying breed in Hollywood; we rely on the occasional gem like "Two Weeks Notice"), check it:

Comfortably employed Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton) is selling Americana kitsch knick knackery from a call centre in the States. Wasting no time, screenwriter George Wing outsources his company to India in the first scene. Todd is sent to train his replacements, one of whom is the immensely likeable actress (and female lead) Ayesha Dharker.

The ensuing comedy of cultural exchange is, surprisingly, almost as unobtrusively analytical as the 2005 Swiss drama "The White Massai" (is this film a classic yet?) At every moment the viewer expects the familiar cultural condescension to come crashing down hard (for example, in a memorably pragmatic dialogue on arranged marriage), but it never does, and the conclusion is about as enlightened given the circumstance as one could hope.

Outsourced retains some forgivable reliance on American plot contrivance, employed with enough knowing mirth and joy in narrative form to get away with it. None of this spoils the joy I feel seeing Indians and Americans being realistically kind to one another onscreen.

It's directed by John Jeffcoat.

In 1990 progressive rock pioneer Frank Zappa was considering moving his business, his family and his life to Australia. He paid a visit to the Australian consulate in Los Angeles to discuss his options. In an interview for Society Pages he later said, “Nothing that I ever wanted to do in life could be done in Australia because of [the] union situation.”

So Zappa did the next best thing – he surrounded himself with Australian assistants, one of whom was Meredith Emmanuel, then an emerging PR consultant in Hollywood and recent divorcee of guitarist Tommy Emmanuel.

“The Zappa family has always had a strong connection to Australia,” says Meredith. “They love Australians and New Zealanders. That’s why I got the job, partially because I was Australian. Mark [Holdom], who got me in, is a New Zealander.”

Together, Mark and Meredith were running Zappa’s eleven businesses, including a publishing company, licensing company, recording studios and a school. They were negotiating contracts and booking orchestras. They were also running his family. This involved school runs and childminding, mostly for Gail and Frank’s youngest, Diva. Meredith worked for Frank Zappa at a tumultuous time in his life, between 1990 and 1992, leaving to have a child just a year before he died of prostate cancer.

Meredith has a wealth of fond memories regarding Zappa’s eccentric lifestyle and the warmth of his personality. She recalls working in the house with Frank:

“I was in a converted garage with masses of filing cabinets and desks. Above me was Frank in the studio, next to him was a garden, and then above the recording studio and around the gardens there was this massive house. All the rooms were combined by tunnels and gangways and bridges that went through the air. It was like being on the inside of a ship … there’d even be portholes in the walls where you could look through to the garden or to another room.

“In the time that I was with him he spent every waking moment where he was feeling well enough to be there, in the studio. That was where he was most comfortable. Anyone could come into the studio – I would go in and sit with him for hours. We’d talk about literacy. We would read body-piercing magazines and roll around on the floor laughing together. The studio became his home and anybody in the close circle could come and access him there.”

She describes him as a man with a brain the size of a planet. “He had such a creative mind, his brain just didn’t stop. He was married to his work. That was his lifeblood in many ways.” Meredith clearly describes the frustration he felt toward the end of his life, when his health began to prevent him from realising so many grand ambitions. Zappa was a well known workaholic, evident in his astoundingly prolific output. There’s still plenty of unreleased material, unfinished projects and unperformed scores in the Zappa vault.

With more tribute bands than you can poke a poodle at, statues erected in his memory and collectors incessantly demanding more to collect, the hole Zappa left in the popular music industry is increasingly apparent. But there has been no figure quite like him to take up the challenge.

It is possible that in our insatiable nostalgia for rock history we have stifled the possibility of locating new progressive music innovators. Maybe all the would-be Frank Zappas, instead of revolutionising the global music scene, are forced to join these multitudinous Zappa tribute bands. Maybe we’re just too afraid of anything new?

Where have all the Zappas gone?

***

Frank Zappa spent a great deal of his adult working life wooing young audiences. He harnessed the one fundamental of rock music – it must seduce its target through the appearance of rebellion – for something infinitely more fascinating than egotism or profit. He was an early black rights bastion, spoke out against political and corporate corruption and was one of very few rock musicians with a clear anti-drugs position – that is, for the effect drug abuse has on others rather than the dangers for the consumer. Zappa fought long and hard to get young people registered to vote and interested in their own political lives, and above all he was a champion of the individual who dared rise above pack mentality. He was a champion of eccentricity. His hugely influential music remains a pinnacle of artistic idiosyncrasy. Frank Zappa was a genre unto himself.

He was also an anti-censorship pin-up. His censorship battle came to define him for a large part of his career, almost eclipsing his musical innovations. He accepted this limiting iconoclasm for a bafflingly long time – why he dug his heels in the safe realm of angry, bawdy, relatively simplistic rock song for so long remains a mystery.

Nick Kent described the better part of 1979’s "Sheik Yerbouti" as, “gross-out whacko ‘yuck for the bucks’ flimflam,” (NME, 1979) and George Duke reflected, “The latter part of the time I was in the band, his sense of humour became kind of vindictive” (Keyboard, 1994).

In a way, though, his fight against censorship was merely the means to win young minds to more ambitious ends. Watching filmed concerts of him in this era gives an idea of how openly he was feeding ideologies to throngs of adoring young fans. He conducts their collective energy into political outrage, cajoles them into damning record label greed and attempts to chide them when he spies drugs in the audience.

I asked Meredith how she felt about this significant aspect of his career.

“He tired of pop music long before that … the interest in politics started to build as the interest in pop music faded out. For many years he had got his messages out and his voice was heard via pop music. But I think there are habits formed – particularly with successful musicians.

“I think after he went before congress and realised that the whole political world is actually a group of human beings that he could approach and that it wasn’t this sort of overarching, untouchable government entity, he did become very politicised and felt that he could engage.”

He did begin to build a strong network of political affiliations in the States, but nowhere was Zappa’s presence felt more than in Eastern Europe, where he was not only a cultural warrior, but also a strong political figure. Meredith remembers a particularly remarkable visit to the Zappa abode:

“The Mayor of Warsaw came with a whole contingent of delegates while I was there, who came into the house and they were just gobsmacked. All these big tall people walking through these little corridors and they’ve all got medals and formal robes on, and they came in for an official ceremony where he was given the keys to the city and made an ambassador of Warsaw … By noon the mayor had kicked all the dignitaries off and he and Frank are sitting down in one of the comfy lounges listening to music and chatting. He was still there when I left at about seven that night.”

Zappa had been outspoken against America’s position in the Middle East, particularly during the first Gulf War. Now he was spending increasingly long periods of time glued to the television, hooked on the news.

“When he wasn’t in the studio, he was watching CNN, or C-SPAN,” says Meredith. “He would sit and watch debates in congress, twenty-four/seven sometimes, for several days … He would be just yelling at the screen and having conversations. And then he would get on talkback radio and debate it.”

In April 1991, on Dutch radio, Zappa made mention of his intent to enter the American presidential elections of the following year. Over ensuing months he announced that he was performing a “feasibility study”. But his health was not getting any better and all of his projects were suffering. Zappa wanted to be able to ignore his condition and get on with working, but the cancer was increasingly impinging on his ability to live out the innumerable eccentric schemes constantly hatching in his mind. The massive Frankfurt "Yellow Shark" concert in 1992 was one of the last major shows mounted in Zappa’s lifetime (posthumous Zappa extravaganzas show no sings of ceasing). Due to his health, a lot of the organisational responsibility fell on Meredith’s shoulders.

“It’s one thing to put a tour together and take a band out – that’s the easy part of it – but because he was writing symphonic pieces, he would do two or three years work prior, and then he would have to go and rehearse with the orchestra for weeks, or months. Then the band would come. There’d be band and orchestra rehearsals. Then three or four performances. So it was really hard on him. He did those ones then his cancer was just… there was no energy left to do it.”

***

Where are the daring rock icons with a political agenda now? Certainly, there have been musicians with politics on their sleeves. There have been Geldofs, Garretts and Bonos – but they aren’t the ones pushing boundaries or taking risks. I’m uneasy with this separation between the political and the confrontational, the explorative. I think we stand to learn a lot more from the articulate and provocative adventurousness that Zappa was good at. Pop icons like Madonna seemed to run out of risk-taking momentum by the early nineties. When I think of the figures fulfilling a similar role today, my mind spills with Eminems: angry white-boy rappers with their visceral altar to domestic abuse. It seems we’re seeing a generation now that has its testing of offence thresholds mixed up in its flirtation with cynical inertia.

But when will we be bored with this puerile ambition to annoy old people? When will we stop taking it so seriously? I want something that makes me hopeful. The rock arena is missing a Zappa for this age. None of these new stars even seem to pay a price: none of them appear in court or do time for their boundary pushing like Zappa did.

The longer we settle for less, perhaps, the longer the music industry executives and creative producers will assume our compliance. Those who do want more can only hope that their hopefulness is catalytic, and eventually grand expectations will again yield grand artistic statements.

***

Zappa had a hard time letting go of a life he very much wanted to remain a part of. Meredith remembers the last time she saw him: “When my daughter was eight months old I went back to visit. It was only a matter of weeks before he died, and he was in the studio. She was just learning to stand up, and he was obsessed with her. I probably stayed with him for about two or three hours in the studio and he wouldn’t give her back to me. He’s playing games with her and giving her new names and stuff. And then she’d be standing and she’d be holding onto his nose to balance, cause she couldn’t really stand. And he had such a big nose. I’ll never forget that. We laughed a lot about that.

“There was a genuine, human warmth with Frank. A curiosity about who you were. Then this quirky, cheeky side to him. You could tell Frank anything. It wouldn’t matter how outrageous it was, it wouldn’t faze him. He’d actually think about it. He would analyse things with an enormous amount of warmth and humanity, and often come up with a very alternative perspective.”

Meredith agreed: the world sure could do with more Frank Zappas.

The writer at the 2009 Sydney Writers Festival was being interminably boring, discussing his inability to discuss his writing, and I was wondering why all of the women in the audience were swooning over him. Even the interviewer stumbled haplessly through the interview; words clipped with shameful thinking, she was all but gagged by desire. He’d come out of rehab, that was what his book was about, so I guess his irresistibility had something to do with that whole taming the bad boy shtick I never understood.

My attention began to drift. I looked to the floor. There was a piece of blackened gum glowing quietly in a ray of morning sun a couple of metres to my right.

The first thing one notices when glancing at the gum is the sheer beauty of its positioning, both on the floor and in the culture surrounding it. But its bold and stern majesty will soon catch the viewer off guard, and the gum is revealed as a heavyweight in its genre, not shying from its duty to provoke and deal with darker themes.

This gum has the power to catch a viewer right in the gut, access all of our deeper emotional places; press buttons we didn’t know we even had. Unlike other gums, this is a complex piece. Small rifts at the edges of an otherwise plain exterior make for a challenging experience. Compared with other pieces of blackened gum in its community of gums, this gum certainly stands out. The integrity and strength of characterization can be read all over its aged lines and wise, knowing stillness.

It may offend some who do not understand gum’s depth, but it is they who miss out.

No doubt about it, this is a gripping work. A must-have for all gum lovers. A tour-de-force in blackened gum. A work of pure genius and a savoury marvel to relish forever, it will stick in your mind long after you have chewed over its contents and extracted its myriad flavours. Gum is hard to look away from and even harder to forget.

There can no longer be any debate – this gum is undoubtedly a national treasure. I am once more struck by its newness while writing this piece. We could learn from this gum for years to come.

By the time I looked up the author had finished talking. Some of the women threw their underwear. I left convinced that my experience had been far more enriching.

There is a ferociously worded article currently doing the rounds across the inboxes and walls of leftwing Facebook users, written by journalist Tom Hodgkinson for the Guardian newspaper, regarding the objectionable politics of personal involvement with the boom site.

Hodgkinson unflinchingly critiques the neoconservative interests and alarming exponential paper wealth of Facebook power trio Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer, providing an important and timely reminder of what exactly fifty-nine million Facebookers are buying into. His presentation of online social pratfalls and his nostalgia for superior, pre-e communication is another thing entirely.

It strikes me as a similar argument to the one levelled against email and mobile phones not so long ago. Armchair luddites and informed sociologists alike heralded the end of “real” social interaction among the plebs, in favour of an isolating and ultimately inhuman machine-mediated information exchange. A lot of these paranoias seem naïve now. Email and mobile phones, much like letters and landlines before them, have been used predominantly to organise our social lives. The social being still comes first.

A similar argument is still applied to the internet’s primary entertainment competitor: the TV.

I have witnessed television used as both a barrier to healthy communication and a social lubricant. TV programs can offer a commonality amongst acquaintances and strangers, just like celebrity culture or politics or any level of public gossip: they provide a ready-made community we can use as a springboard to explore other conversational options.

The same applies to the internet and Facebook. The problem only arises when we start to see these devices as having control over us. Shifting responsibility from ourselves to a machine is a tempting and dangerous trap. Online social networking naysayers could be missing the point: it’s our obligation to shape these tools into what we want.

There has to be a better way to fight those neocon bigwigs than opting out or boycotting. I have noted others using Facebook to promote and organise progressive causes, for example; to alert friends to the merits of stimulatingly socialistic writing, to blast invitations for subversively political singer-songwriters’ performances… the list goes on.

There are more pertinent concerns, however, about targeted advertising, data mining, surveillance and the sale of mass statistical information to marketers, multinationals and U.S. government agencies. Facebook continues to push the boundaries of acceptable privacy and users continue striving to protect their own interests, forcing Facebook to keep up with user demand.

A recent triumph can be seen in the petition to prevent Facebook’s Beacon advertising scheme, which would track online purchases from other sites and use the information to advertise not only to you, but also your friends. 46 000 signed the “Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!” petition, and Zuckerberg et al were forced to back down.

Facebook also amended its policy of deleting deceased member profiles after users demanded their right to use the profiles for online mourning and remembrance.

There are still multitudes of abhorrent elements to the system. For example, Facebook owns every photo you upload onto their site. The answer to this one is simple: don’t upload any of your own photography and they can’t own it. Badger them to rewrite their ludicrous policies regarding photo ownership. Use one of the myriad other photo sharing sites.

The matter of surveillance is tricky, but I suspect the answer is: don’t upload any information about yourself that you don’t want public. You’d have to be quite foolish to upload personal information you don’t want known onto a site used by fifty-nine million people.

If the CIA is paying any attention to my public persona, the joke’s on them. I’m surely not that interesting to the CIA or to a billionaire IT magnate, aside from my potential to be advertised at. And as much as they may want to advertise Coca-Cola at me, I still won’t drink the stuff.

As much as they will advertise bestselling arts and culture at me, I will continue to put my own effort into locating entertainment I am personally interested in.

Besides which, Facebook is riddled with misinformation. I didn’t meet my friend Melissa at a seminar on the anatomy and spirituality of the common door mouse, and my hometown certainly isn’t Trouble, but my Facebook account says it is.

So far, the level of invasive advertising I’ve experienced on Facebook has been minimal. I’m more annoyed about the unprompted editing of all my emails to be bookended by advertisements unendorsed by me.

A third person effect appears to be taking place. Somehow most of us believe we are able to evade the inexorable pull of mismanaged internet use and online advertising, where others are not. If this really is the case, we should be teaching informed and discerning use of technology rather than preaching the evils of a social tool unlikely to be abandoned until a considerable alternative arrises.

Let’s face it: in the increasingly urbanised and crowded world, we need to adapt our traditionally locale-based community developing skills to recreate a new and less boundary-defined sense of social involvement. Telecommunications necessarily adapt to aid us in abating our unquenchable thirst for congregating in groups and sharing our existence here on Earth. Facebook is part of this process and will be used as such.

No doubt Facebook will be ousted for other community-creating options within the next year or two, such is the lightning pace of internet trends. And the same venture capitalists will have the capital to buy its usurper, too. This is nothing new.

The biggest problem I can see is that merely owning a Facebook account contributes to the gobsmacking affluence of those wretched Facebook owners. We all have to ask ourselves, does this participation outweigh the potential for positive change (and self-gratification of course) we can affect through our use of the system?

In the meantime, let’s not succumb to the myth of disempowerment – let’s use our wits to get what we want out of this juggernaut, and if need be throw it back in their Face.