Coasting-it...

Hello dear readers,

I've just returned from a week's respite up on the Central Coast of NSW. This former haven of relaxed beachside living has seen some dramatic changes over the many years my family has holidayed in the area...and most of them aren't that great but here's a collection of thoughts, random of course, but they seemed important at the time, so indulge me...

I miss being 16 but there is no way I would go back

On my numerous beach days I was subjected to the inner most thoughts of the 16-18 year old psyche as numerous groups landed on the beaches around me...ahhh to have a life once more where the controversy of the day was what happened at the formal after party and where one would go for schoolies. As I watch their awkward interactions I realised how most of us deep down are still 16 at heart but also feeling a world away from their cares and worries.

They paved paradise and put up parking lot OR my version of the multinational that swallowed the little guy

This is the story of a local shopping strip, an IGA and the car park that now sits on its site. I won't go into a chorus of 'paving paradise to put up a parking lot' and I will admit, I did enjoy being able to buy my usual yoghurt brand...but surely when Coles moves into your holiday area...it's no longer a small out of the way destination. It's serious urban (coastal?) sprawl. And I'm not sure I like it. I mean, for the people who live there it's probably most convenient to have a Coles open to midnight where you can pick up your Jalna...but will the awful Coles bakery kill the local bakehouse where if you get there after 11am all the sticky buns have been sold but pies are only $2 after 2pm?

What is it with the smiling at people?

Everybody smiles and says hello as you pass them...I'm not complaining, only I think I spoke to more people in the past week than I have in the previous 3 weeks in Sydney. And actually wished them well. Good morning to the man whose campervan blocked the access to my accommodation. Hello pregnant lady with toddler at the ocean pool...hello man fishing on bridge as I ran past you...(you probably thought I was crazy running the lake circuit)...

The smell

And I don't mean a bad one...rather there is something so quintessentially holiday- smelling for me when you get paper-bark mingled with a soft breeze coming over the lake front mixed with the slightly dense humidity when you are just over a row of bushland to the ocean...

Miles of beachfront...no one there...bliss.

On being 'done'

My mother has an oft-repeated statement that annoys me more than anything. It surrounds her notion of being 'done'...for her this is usually surrounded by a pleading stream of things that have to be 'done' household chores, ironing at 6am on Sunday mornings, cooking tea early on a Sunday evening...(I'm sure the last two are somehow related). I have often joked that on her eventual demise I will make some salacious speech about her finally 'being done'...(I am a nice daughter, I promise)...but today I can finally declare that 'I'm done'. Five years ago I decided I needed to do a Masters, five years before that I had this silly notion of going off to get myself a university education. Ten years later and the tax department should list me as a Gold Sponsor with the amount of HECs I will be paying back over the rest of my life. But you know what? I'm done.

I am done feeling guilty when I know I should be studying/reading/writting instead of well, having a life

I am done trying to do ridiculous all-nighters or the trick (that never works and I have Lisa to back me up on this) of the little nap...20 minutes at 3am does not make you a better proof reader...and I have proof

I am done with MLA, APA, Harvard in-text and the acronym Ibid.

I am done with economic multipliers, frescoes, oils, works on paper and movable cultural heritage, the 4 P's, the 7P's, narratology, semiology, communication theory and models, proposals, plans, reports, essays, critiques and the worse of all, the dreaded multiple choice!

I am done with using phrases such 'as Lord argues' and 'as Falk and Dierking outline'

I am done with reading others thoughts, summarising them, comparing, contrasting, arguing against them, reapplying their thinking to other disciplines and trying to make something original out of what is, lets face it, a crap essay question to begin with

I am done trying to out do everybody else to see if I can squeeze in another reference

I am done with the anti-climatic moment of handing things in

I am done trying to work out why although I get good marks no one has ever really offered any constructive criticism...yes I agree with you, that was a well written essay...but what happened to those other 5 marks? (oh, you lost them on your bell curve?)

I am done listing things I am done with.

Ahhhhhhh....now that's out of the way and the list of things I can now catch up on is in front of me...let's see, watching soap opera, sleeping in, gardening, sailing...well really leisure time in general, a social life, ironing at 6am on Sunday mornings, cleaning the oven...partying like it's 1999 (ahhh those ten years!)

...and now I'm done with this post.

On ruralising 'River Cottage' style

I've got it bad. All this work at home by myself has me dipping into other obsessions, namely kitchen gardens. I'm currently planning away when I can next attack the very small yard out the back of the terrace and put in my summer/autumn plantings, a task spurred on by too much watching of River Cottage and The Wild Gourmets, both on the ABC and then streaming some episodes online as er, a reward and much needed study breaks.

I do have a history of kitchen gardens in the family, my mother's father was a keen gardener with a small plot in their inner city backyard as she grew up. His father and mother up near Mudgee in the northern part of the Central West (makes sense oui?) also had kitchen gardens, with orchards on neighbour's property over the hill. What I long for is one of those glorious French or English kitchen gardens, with rolling hills and pastures in the background...(kind of Central West but more green, less bush!). Lush woodlands, forest foraging, otters (yes I'll stop now!)...ahhh yes too much River Cottage for me.

On meetings...

I miss meetings. But maybe as Alain de Botton (oh how I love to roll that name over my tongue!) reveals...it's the biscuits and the blather I miss most. Alain de Botton, another hero!

On Meetings: A Note On Dreaded Corporate Etiquette

When we look back on our working lives and wonder where the time has gone, the answer is, of course, meetings. The meeting is to modern office work what the hunt was to our primeval ancestors. Beneath the surface, civility is where money is made and survival is ensured — while an intriguing variety of biscuits sits untouched and brightly lit in the center of the wood-effect table.

Though there is always much to talk about and an agenda to get through, the protocol of meetings dictates that they cannot begin too abruptly. There must be at least seven (but never more) minutes of chat, a piece of dialogue entirely unrelated to the real reason why one has left one's desk — and which meanders painfully around insincere considerations of the weather, the children and a recent sporting event. It is embarrassment that causes the chat.

In a democratic egalitarian society, the person who has called the meeting hesitates before too clearly revealing its purpose to the subordinate or supplicant party seated across the biscuits. Just as manners were invented to disguise the brutishness of our appetites, so, too, the chat conceals the shame at the ruthless drives that pulsate beneath the politeness of office civilization. We may be itching to scold, order, bark, hire or fire, but, as if we essentially had nothing on our minds, we remark on the unusual chilliness of the season.

Yet it is a recklessly naive employee who inadvertently continues the chat for even a fraction of a minute longer than the time subtly allotted to it by the most powerful person in the room. We all know the naive, touching Don Quixotes who sally forth on an over-long anecdote just after the chairperson has mumbled the customary "Right, then."

What blatherers we humans are. If only we could communicate with the abbreviated accuracy of algebraic equations, and yet it is cheering that big decisions about the future of pipelines and data storage centers can be reached within a slurry of "To be honests" and "It could be argued thats".

There is often a moment in the meeting when something external happens which brings an element of self-consciousness to proceedings: an ambulance, hammering from upstairs, a fat fly obsessively buzzing around one participant. One can't ignore the issue — though one has to be relatively senior or cocky to draw attention to it: "This fly is clearly interested in tax deferment ..."

What immediate comedy and horror would result if a machine were plugged into our brains, beaming up on a PowerPoint screen all the thoughts we were having as we navigated the agenda; it would show our sexual fantasies, longings and despair while a little more sand trickled from the upper chamber of life's hourglass until we finally reached point 9.8 on the agenda.

Alain de Botton is the author of the book How Proust Can Change Your Life. He lives in London.

'City' ideas versus 'Natural' ideas

Found via the blog Something Changed

"Millions of dollars are spent each year at conferences that people attend to be inspired, to learn the latest memes and speak the latest jargon. They stand around in hotel lobbies, drinking bottled water and swapping business cards. They look at what everyone else is doing, and try to figure out how to apply what they see to their own particular endeavor. These conferences lead to what I call “city ideas”. City ideas have to do with a particular moment in time, a scene, a movement, other people’s work, what critics say, or what’s happening in the zeitgeist. City ideas tend to be slick, sexy, smart, and savvy, like the people who live in cities. City ideas are often incremental improvements—small steps forward, usually in response to what your neighbor is doing or what you just read in the paper. City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles. The opposite of city ideas are “natural ideas”, which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere. These ideas come from nature, solitude, and meditation. They’re less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be."

— Jonathan Harris, “Ideas,” World Building in a Crazy World

Why the Australia Council doesn’t get digital culture...

Just had to share...following on from Marcus Westbury's article in The Age...here's an even better one Marcus pointed the way to. Ben Eltham...you are my new hero.

Was the Australia Concil’s abolition of the New Media Arts Board the single worst decision by an Australian cultural agency of the last decade? It’s certainly beginning to look that way.

Re-rite or how to make the most of your orchestra...

I haven't had a chance to really have a look at the 'Re-rite' program, but it had me at the clever pun, and a post by Stephen Smoliar

re-rite is a new experiment by the British Philharmonia Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. It tries to confront the problem that most concert-goers not only are passive but also lack any sense of how they can actively engage through listening. re-rite tries to solve this problem by turning a recorded performance into an activity space.

Here's a bit more...

re-rite, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Digital Residency, will allow members of the public to conduct, play and step inside the Philharmonia Orchestra with Esa-Pekka Salonen through audio and video projections of musicians performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Opening to the public at the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank on Tuesday 3 November, the project will show every section of the Orchestra performing The Rite of Spring simultaneously ‘as live’ throughout a four-storey warehouse building. The public will able to sit amongst the horn players, perform in the percussion section and take up the baton and control sections of the Orchestra as they play.

Stephen does a great job of summarising it and linking through to other articles...all I'm going to add is when can we do this with the AOBO?

Image source: http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/re-rite/