Adventures in Oz, Report 6: post-trip wrap-up, part 2 Finally, almost the last installment, I promise. I've been busy, and lazy, for the last week, but now i'm finishing this up. I began writing this from the airport in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, waiting for my flight back home to San Francisco. I am now finishing it Sunday, October 21, after being home for a week. As I write this and also re-read my earlier reports I realize how non-linear the whole mess is. I apologize if I repeat myself or mention events that I already described earlier. Perhaps there's at least new insight on them with the added time that has passed.... Wednesday, September 26 I checked out of my hotel in Port Macquarie relatively early and headed south back toward Newcastle. For the first 60 kilometers or so I took a road that was closer to the coast than the Pacific Highway. It wound its way through some sleepy coast villages and across estuaries and past some fields. In one of these fields, as it began to rain lightly, I spotted some strange grey furry shapes. Kangaroos! I quickly pulled off onto a side-road, incurring the wrathful honk of a driver behind me, and drove around to the side of the field where I thought they were. I was right! About 50 feet off the road, fairly near a small rural residential subdivision, were about 5 adult grey kangaroos, a few of them with joeys (young). They acted sort of like cows - when i stopped the car they looked up at me for a while, then went back to munching grass. Then as I got out of the car and walked slowly out into the field toward them, some of the nearer ones stopped and looked at me again. But they didn't move beyond that. I got to within 20 feet or so, snapping pictures, but eventually the nearest one hopped off. That was the strangest sight, to see them hopping. A bizarre creature, for sure. I didn't want to bother them any further, and plus I had run out of film. So I bid them farewell and hit the road again. Most of the way back to Newcastle from there it rained, sort of a spring rain style of medium-strong shower, with really dark clouds that periodically broke up and showed the sun streaming down. It was beautiful, and I didn't mind the rain because now i would have an excuse to use my rainjacket. I stopped in Kew, a little hamlet where the smaller highway I was on met back up again with the Pacific Highway, and where there was a visitor's center. There were some kindly old ladies in there who were very talkative and very eager to help, showering me with information about tourist attractions and advice. I signed the guest book and noticed that I was one of very few Americans who had signed it in the last few weeks. Lots of Italians, Germans, Japanese, and many other nationalities, but very few Americans. I noted out loud that it must be fascinating to meet all the people from so many different places, and the cheerful old ladies agreed enthusiastically. Then they mentioned how people in England were buying up all the gas masks they could; but that sort of scare hadn't hit Australia yet, they offered. Perhaps, they theorized, the danger just hadn't been realized here. Back on the road, the kilometers passed uneventfully and in 2 hours I was in Newcastle. After not too much wandering around, I found Noah's on the Beach, the hotel where Electrofringe had reserved lodging for me. Just as I was signing in at the desk, Mark Gunderson of the Evolution Control Committee arrived, fresh off the train from Sydney and the plane from the States. It turned out that we were sharing a room. We brought our bags to our room and then I went to return my rental car. The rental place was quite a ways away but I managed to catch a bus back downtown and get back to the hotel still in time for lunch. Mark had just got off the phone with Vicki (of People Like Us) and Irene (of Scientifically Speaking with Irene Moon), who had arrived in Sydney at virtually the same time as Mark and taken the train up with him, but they were lodged at a different hotel. We went over there, finding Irene and Vicki just as they were kicking some other poor blokes, Dave and Dave from FatCat Records, out of their room. Apparently there was a little confusion over accomodation, and the girls, being the most jetlagged, won the dispute. Vicki knew the Fatcat guys from London so it wasn't as bad an altercation as it sounds. Anyway, we went downstairs and had a wonderful lunch, and then Vicki decided she was tired and went back to her room. Meanwhile Mark, Irene, and I headed for the Octapod. The Octapod is the organization which organizes the This if Not Art festival. They're a very cool group with a great space in downtown Newcastle, a big open room with computers and a zine library and a large meeting area. I strongly recommend checking out their website to find out more - octapod.org. Anyway, we found the place and got programs and maps and such. (one small annoyance - we had to pay for copies of the program, despite the fact that we were in the festival! I can understand, in a way, since there are hundreds of artists in the festival and the programs probably cost quite a bit to print up, so Octapod has to recoup their costs somehow. and it was only $2AUS; but still, it would have been nice for international guests, at least, to get a free program.) We talked to some volunteers there. It was busy, lots of freaky arty punky people milling around. More freaky punky types than I'd seen in one place anywhere else in Australia yet. It was a great "scene". The three of us went to the grocery store next - a Bi-Lo, which we have in parts of the States too. It seemed like we were being shorted on exoticism or something. The price of globalisation, I guess. Anyway, since Mark and Irene were going to be in town quite a bit longer then I they were very keen on cutting costs, which means eating cheaply. I bought a few things here and there too. It is good to save, though I had found that even eating out was pretty cheap, because of the exchange rate and also just compared to prices in San Francisco, almost anywhere is cheaper. I probably spent less on food during my travels than I do when I'm at home. Anyway, it was also fun to buy strange products like vegemite and "Cheezels" and weird Australian bulk bin candy - jelly grubs, "chocolate mates", "milk bottles", "super sour twists", and more. To skip ahead - Later that night Mark and I went to the festival's opening night party at the Mission Theatre. Basically just a party: DJs spinning and beer and food. It was a festive atmosphere but Mark and I felt pretty alone. No sign of Shannon, Joni, Isabel, not to mention Irene or Vicki. I ran into a couple people I'd met briefly at Frigid in Sydney, but that was about it. Mark and I discussed how when you go to parties you often instinctively look around for people you'll recognize, but at this party, over 7000 miles from home, we were less likely to meet someone we knew than at any other party we'd ever been to. After a while we got bored. It was good to see the space we were to play in, though nothing was happening other than dance music. And no one was dancing. I noticed that none of the events at the Mission had anyone dancing, even though lots of the music was pretty beat-oriented. No doubt this was because of the "art context" that those shows were in. I think this is a shame. I see this all the time in the States too. But I think, if your music is danceable, people should dance. Why should people feel shy about dancing just because they're there to supposedly consume "Art"? Thursday, September 27 The next day was the first real day of the festival. Mark and I went to a panel discussion about the power of the media. It was pretty interesting hearing a discussion like this, which is similiar to discussions I've read and seen before back home, but from an Australian point of view. Many of the same ideas, but all the details were different. Examples were concerning companies, scandals, and politicans that I'd never heard of, or only barely heard of. One speaker I found particularly interesting was Stephen Mayne of crikey.com.au. He was originally a business journalist, then went into doing public relations work for a Victorian politician named Jeff Kennett. While doing that he saw how corrupt Kennett was and how much power the big corporations have over politicians and the media. He tried to out Kennett but found that the best way to do that was to run against him in the Victorian elections, and make a site called "jeffed.com". Crikey is his newest project, aimed at being an alternative news source and revealing some of the behind-the-scenes activity. He also engages in what he calls "shareholder activism": buy shares in a company, and then go to their annual meetings. You have a right as a shareholder to stand up at their meetings and ask whatever questions you want, and they are legally required to answer you. I think this is a wonderful way to attack corporate power. The interesting thing is Mayne is not what you'd normally call "progressive". He's basically a conservative- pro-business, pro-capitalism, etc, but he wants to reform the way corporations do business. However I think his methods are sound for people coming from more liberal directions. One really amusing and, to me and Mark, strange commentary that Mayne made was a whole set of praises for American media. He went on and on about how much more accountable the American media is and how there's more opposition media and organizations that criticize the mainstream media, like Adbusters, etc. To me that seems quite absurd; perhaps he doesn't realize just how little attention these alternate outlets get in the States. Yet perhaps it's all relative - it's so much worse in Australia that the situation here seems, believe it or not, quite good. When another panelist mentioned that Rupert Murdoch owns 70% of the media in Australia I began to understand how bad it might be there. Later that day was the "Humor and Sampling" session, with Douglas Kahn and Antediluvian Rocking Horse. .... Now it's Oct 29, and I don't know why it's taking me so long to write this. It's now been exactly one month since these events happened, and I'm still not done writing about them... it's been like pulling teeth. I just don't feel like it, and I don't know why. In every other way I have been obsessively documenting everything about my trip. Why do I find it so difficult to write about the last 2 days? I am going to skim. I don't care if it seems incomplete, If you wanted more details. To hell with details. ....... Susan and Paul of ARH are very cool. They showed up late to their talk, so Douglas Kahn had to talk a lot more than he was expecting. But he did a great job, telling the story of his Ronald Reagan piece... Susan and Paul eventually showed up, late in driving up from Sydney, having flown in from Melbourne. ARH goes to every Electrofringe every year, Susan later explained to me, and they were just bored with always giving basically the same talk about copyright and music every single year, and just preaching to the converted. So they ripped up their paper and laminated the little business-card sized pieces, and handed them out. It was great. Though I still want to read the paper. Susan and Paul were great to hang out with, and over the next 2 days they helped Mark and I quite a bit giving us rides back and forth to the hotel, which is where they were staying too, and advice and whatnot. They're quite smart, and I had several great conversations with Susan about intellectual property, and the differences between Australia and the US, and australian Consitution, and more. She had actually spent several years as a child in the States, so she had a rare perspective, able to comment intelligently on the States versus Oz. That night was "experimental electronica" night at the Mission Theatre. There were quite a few great artists playing, and it was frustrating having to slip back and forth between upstairs and downstairs, where music was happening simultaneously. The extreme of this was at the end when Pimmon was playing downstairs exactly when Tom Ellard of Severed Heads was playing upstairs. Both were excellent, though completely different moods. I would have gladly sat and zoned out to the quiet clicks and glitches of Pimmon if it wasn't for the fact that Ellard was providing a total sensory onslaught, both audio and video, that just couldn't be passed up. However, to offer a quick bit of criticism of Ellard's set, I have to say that while it was technically impressive, once I realized what he was doing it grew old pretty quick. Basically he was using some software running on two different windoze laptops to control video clips. the software allowed him to skip instantly around the clips and playback tight little video loops. Of course this is a powerful, though not new, visual effect; in fact i even use it in my video. The strength of Ellard's software was that it allowed this to be done in a live improvisational manner. However, that's all he was doing. A one-trick pony. Other than the selection of source material, there was really nothing very creative going on. It could have been a software demo at SIGGRAPH conference. The music for thursday ended there. There were some videos shown too after that, but i forget most of them as I was falling asleep. End of Thursday.