Post-trip wrap-up, part 3
Friday, September 28

My last full day in Australia, and it was a busy one, for
sure. I had a talk, a panel, and a performance to do all
on that day.  

At 2:00 I had to give my talk, entitled "The Intellectual
Property Wars: Cultural Recycling as Cultural Activism". 
I showed up at about 11:00 to set up, since another
session was happening at noon.  I made sure the data
projector and sound would work and then went to brunch
with Mark, Susan, and Paul.  After returning to the
theater I ran into Douglas Kahn. He hadn't had lunch yet
and I was interested in chatting, so I went along with
him and had coffee while he ate.  We had a great
conversation.  He had lived in San Francisco for a long
time before moving to Australia, so we had a lot of
common ground and knew a lot of the same people in the
music scene.  He is now a professor at 
University of Technology, Sydney.

Eventually it was time for my talk, and I rushed back to
the venue, though hardly anyone was there.  At first I
was a little depressed about the fact that it looked like
I would be speaking to only 4 or 5 people. But, once I
got started, folks started coming in, and by the midway
point there were probably about 200 or so.  

Though I have yet to listen to the recording of the whole
thing,  I think the talk went really well.  I balanced
between telling the background and history of Detritus
and giving my more political views on the future of
recycled culture. Everyone looked pretty interested and
engaged, and for the question and answer at the end I got
lots of really intelligent, mostly non-naive questions,
though mostly, admittedly, quite "on my side".  I kept
things moderate, but afterwards some people came up and
complimented me and one guy said he could tell I wanted
to say more extreme things but I was holding back.   He
was right.  But in a large and varied crowd you can't
start shouting about abolishing private property, now can
you? heh.  

At any rate, for the people who come to the festival
every year and talk about copyright, who already know
these issues, I think I may have still kept it
interesting with my Yank accent and specific stories of
legal threats and whatnot.  But yet for the people more
new to the IP controversy it was probably a good primer
as well,I hope.

a few hours later was the "Copyright Showdown", a panel
discussion with myself, Douglas Kahn, Gordon Finlayson,
from Sydney, a lawyer and manager for a small electronic
music label, and Greg Peterkin,  a traditional composer
from Adelaide (by "traditional" I mean not involved with
sampling).  At Douglas' suggestion, we set up our chairs
on the floor rather than on the stage, to better include
the audience in the discussion. I don't remember much
about the details of the  session... Gordon and Greg were
on one side, Douglas and I on the other, though Douglas
was also the moderator so he was trying to keep a
balanced front. I remember making some pretty good
points, but everyone else made pretty good points too,
and were careful to be mostly pretty polite.  I wish I
had a recording of it. Someone was taping it, and said it
would show up "probably on Indymedia", but I don't know
exactly where.  Write me if you know....

Shortly after the panel was the big sample-heavy
performance night, called "CRTM"  - copyright, registered
trademark...

1. Spanky went first. I really liked his set. Very
beat-oriented, but incredibly entertaining, especially
with the visuals, which were animations of mostly comic,
cute images like cows and rabbits, bouncing around the
screen in sync with the music.  (He later gave me a CD-R
that has versions of the software he uses - Director
programs that map images and sounds to keys on the
keyboard. wonderful.)   But I couldn't help noticing that
again, no one danced.  I was bouncing around in my seat
though.

2. Irene was excellent, and even more surreal than in her
lecture the previous day, with an even more crazy costume. 
Mark ran the slides again - at one point Irene went out
into the audience with her microphone, and Mark used the
slide projector like a spotlight, following her around.
It was a beautiful effect.

3. My set went fine.  It was hard work.  I was busy up
there.  This performance, and the next 3 I did back in
the States, made me really think about reconsidering the
practical and aesthetic decisions which went into
creating my live software, The Syntagm Engine.  Briefly,
the built-in uncertainties which are purposely included
in order to add excitement and risk to my performances
may be adding a little too much risk and excitement.  But
anyway, it went well, and afterward several people
complimented me, especially on the last 20 minutes (which
was when I was playing along with my pre-prepared video).

4. Mark's set was entertaining but unfortunately he was
dealing with severe technical difficulties.  Something
was very wrong with his instrument, the Thimbletron,
which he  uses to control his samples playing back on his
laptop.  Things would stop and start and skip and
stutter, obviously very frustrating to him... During one
song he just could not get one of the main samples to
play, so he SANG the words instead. It was a great case
of making-do, and it made for a pretty entertaining
version of the song, especially for those, like me, who
had heard it before several times.  (I have a microphone
recording of it which I'll soon be putting online here.) 
Anyway, Mark told me that he later found that there was a
short-circuit in the Thimbletron, which he fixed easily
before any of his other gigs in Australia.

5. The schedule-overload bit me again, as I unfortunately
missed both Susan and Paul's set and Shannon and Adrian's
set, since they overlapped with mine. I was quite
disappointed at this.  When will I ever get a chance to
see them perform again?  

6. Vicki was still pretty weak from being sick, and
looked a little pale to me, that night. Her set was still
excellent though, as usual, though I thought it was a bit
less, well, dense, than usual, which is understandable. 
The video she showed was new stuff she had just finished,
quite entertaining, full of beautiful composited
juxtapositions of footage from the Prelinger Archives
(50s and 60s found educational and propaganda footage),
among other sources. I wish I could see it again, it's
very subtle, I think, the kind of stuff you need to view
again and again.

7. Downstairs simultaneous with Vicki's set was the most
outrageous performance i saw of the whole festival - a
group from Sydney called "Sweden" that consisted of 2
guys - one making the music with various synths and
samplers, and a singer, who was dressed up in a giant
translucent plastic octopus outfit, gyrating around with
a microphone, doing sort of a punk, Johnny Rotten sort of
thing.  Projected on a wall to the side of him was a loop
of footage of the World Trade Center attack, over and
over and over.  I talked with locals afterward who said
that only Sweden would have the audacity to use that
footage. Apparently they have quite a reputation as the
bad boys of the electronic scene, or something. Look for
some snippets of my field recordings of that soon also.

8. Skipping ahead, the show was over, it was late at
night, and my time in Australia could be measured in
single digits of hours.  We (meaning Mark, Irene, Vicki,
myself, Paul and Susan) went looking for a quiet place to
have a drink. However, there was quite simply no quiet
place to drink in all of Newcastle, thanx to the huge
rugby game happening that weekend.  The single moment,
out of all my time in Australia, of negativity directed
at me as an American, happened during this search.  At
one point we went into a pub, but soon realized it would
be much too loud for conversation, which is all most of
us wanted, really.  So we left, not 60 seconds after we
entered.  One of the blokes at the door yelled to me as
we walked out "see ya later, yankee doodle."  Of course I
don't mean to make a big deal out of this. It was said in
a pretty good-humored tone and I actually was pretty
amused. But it was interesting.

9.  We eventually went to the Hunter on Hunter, a pub
that was another venue of the festival.  There was a
series of heavy industrial dance groups playing. I guess
you could call it "digital hardcore".  It was pretty cool
in an intense, aggro sort of way, and people were
actually dancing, really really hard. Apparently the
Newcastle label that organized the evening, called Bloody
Fist, are pretty legendary.  Joni, one of the festival
organizers who is originally from Newcastle, ran into me
and told me the story of how she'd been in Germany once
and some German industrial fans found out she was from
Newcastle, and they started chanting "Nasenbluten!
Nasenbluten!".   She thought they were sneezing or
something, till she remembered that one of the Bloody
Fist bands was called Nasenbluten. amazing.  I was
particularly  interested to see a DJ scratching during
one set, which you don't normally see in industrial
music. It was cool.

10. Returned to the hotel at about 2:30 am.  Packed till
3:30, long after Mark had gone to bed.  Called the desk
for a 5:30 wake-up call.  Got 2 hours of sleep.  Taxi to
train station. Caught the 6:30 train to Sydney. 
Transferred at Sydney Central Station to the airport
train.  Got to the airport at 10:00 or so, caught my 11am
flight. Sydney airport security was pretty damn tight, 
hand-checking every single carry-on bag.  Anyway, soon
the coast of New South Wales was receding into the
distance...

About 19 hours later I was in Minneapolis.  crazy, eh?

*******

Finally, we come to the end of this epic narrative. hah.
I think I said this before but I will say again, I enjoyed 
my time in Australia a lot, and the only thing I didn't like was
the brevity of my stay. Hopefully I'll get over there again sooner 
than later.

If you have questions, comments or corrections 
about any of this, let me
know.  (go back to the index page and click on the
contact link)  Thanx for flying Hise wordways....