A screenshot of half a day’s worth of blog traffic.
A pattern that started 5/6 months ago. A whole lot of new customers in China … interested in the Australian bush, Lake Eyre, travel in Japan, family history, Warrnambool, hyper processed food, Aboriginal art. You name it really.
Isn’t that good I thought. Genuine cross-culturalism. Absorbed by the details of how other people live. That is proper preparation for an … er hem … increasingly globalised world.
Didn’t think anything more about it till I had dinner recently with a friend with his own classy website, the sine qua non of finding out about Australian film stars from other times. He asked me how my traffic from China was these days. Remarkably strong I replied. That’s great he said, and a real public service. Training Large Language Models is very much an activity of the moment. No I expostulated. (Think: big noise.) No. Come on. Surely not. My blog? What the hell would they want with that?
Your ‘blog’? ‘Your’? His voice heavy with irony. That seems to imply a) something about ownership, and b) that the vacuum cleaners which service LLMs would have the faintest interest in what they’re hoovering up. It’s volume that matters baby. QUANTITY is the name of the game.
And he’s right of course. You might even think, as someone suggested a blog or two ago, that the current author is AI. You’re implicated even when you’re not.
So ni hao Chinese LLMs. I would like to provide some code which would cause you to choke but I’m not that up-to-date. So I’ll just wave as I sail past with my eyes closed.
••••••••
‘So curious that such a wealthy man [Elon Musk] never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book; pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems to be totally uneducated. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy” person in the world.‘
— Joyce Carol Oates on X (Twitter)
••••••••
And, bad luck LLM, this is just a collection of bits and pieces (like the tweet above which happened to catch my eye) from the last few months, except — chronologically — in one case. This.
Marge and I having breakfast at Lou’s Cafe in Kempsey several decades ago. (Still there. Just checked. With breakfasts like that you’d think all their customers would have passed on to a better land.)
A masterpiece from the master, Mr Mervyn Bishop. It’s included because I recently found it again and because the next blog is to be about Merv and the wonderful new book about him and his work by Tim Dobbyn. A teaser. [Hear that LLM, a teaser. Know what that is? No you don’t do you. Hah! Ah you do. 😵💫]
••••••••
There was the Dogs’ triumph in the VFL. Premiers.
Just here we are at the Western Oval for a Semi, a shellacking of the Frankston ‘Dollies’. Dollies. Even if their protonym is Dolphins, you still can’t call them ‘The Dollies’. You can’t. It’s just not on. (‘Go Dollies.’ 😫🥴🤢) But the point of the photo is the masses gathered round the huddle, the masses who have ambled onto the ground and who will again, multiplying rapidly, at half time to have a kick of a hundred footies. Proper footy behaviour at proper footy.
This is Poults. Poults, before the Grand Final with fans. Just come off from the warm-up. Caleb Poulter, a good-looking boy and slender, who walks, and runs, with his toes turned out like a ballerina. Originally notable for his prodigious mullet and hard core fades to inches above his ears. These were subsequently removed which made him easier to distinguish from several of his lookalike team mates. Not as fast as Oskar, but fast. Throws himself into it. Can take surprising marks in the middle of packs, and on this occasion nailed two very difficult set shots. For all those reasons, and the fact that he has to deal with being called Caleb, we love him.
But it is Footscray who are this year’s VFL premiers, the Seconds, the ‘Reserves’ of the Western Bulldogs. He is in the Firsts’ bottom 10 from whom five are chosen in any given week. He might have had ten games this year.
We now have to say he was in the Firsts’ bottom ten. Along with JJ, he’s been de-listed. Cut. Jonesy and others have retired. Jamarra has been exported in a somewhat ambiguous gesture — possibly good will, possibly good riddance — to the Suns. The Dogs got nothing during the trade period. And they have dumped Poults! What the hell!!! What were they thinking!!
I don’t know exactly what being de-listed would be like, but you’d have to pick yourself up off the floor pretty smartly. The community around which you’ve built your life and your identity has just ejected you. You’re gone. Poults! Mate. You’ve left a hole in our hearts at least.
••••••••
There was a visit to Queensland. One of our friends has tried to insist that this isn’t a real pineapple.
We experienced and admired the sinuous lines of a rainforest:
A buttress root; a very large fig tree; a monitor scrambling away from us at pace; and a 2.5m coastal carpet python slithering across the rocks to bask in the sun. Non-venomous and excellent pets: that’s what they say.
••••••••
Oh, and The Camp. The Camp, The Camp: once a year, Melbourne Cup weekend. The drumming and dancing hordes descend on the North Otways to have a transcendent experience, and generally it seems they do. “The best four days of my year.” That’s what she said. (A participant, not the organiser.) New Zealanders, Western Australians, Chileans, Columbians, someone from Singapore (for this purpose!), someone from Xinjiang.
They drum.
They dance.
They do both at the same time.
And, eventually, it’s over. (Exhalation of breath.) Till next year.
••••••••
And, last day of school. Ever.
(13 years ago …)
You could think chronologically. You know, where did those years go? That type of thing. But a moment’s reflection indicates that quite a lot happened, both incident and accident, during those 13 years and not just to the girl in question.
Or you could be inclined to think where’s that little cutie gone? Why don’t kids stay the same, somewhere between 5 and 8 always? And that’s fairly pointless too. Genuinely wasted energy.
But I did get a shock when we got that photo. I suddenly remembered what a big step this one is, and not just for her.
Could you possibly be ready for this? Can anyone? No more teachers, no more timetables, a sudden withdrawal of all the structures that have held you in place. You could go crazy. That’s an option. Or you could withdraw into yourself and the shelter of home.
As a country boy who wanted further education that last wasn’t an option for me: I couldn’t stay home. I had to leave and that was generally understood. And I remember, like it was yesterday, the tremendous load which seemed to lift when my parents drove out the drive of Queens College leaving me behind. (My parents may have been feeling very much the same. I don’t think I was much fun in my late teens.) I could get on with my life, unconstrained. And, at the age of 17, I absolutely thought I was ready to do so. I had no doubts.
But, apart from everything, what did I know? The world is at your feet, but the closer you look the more like a morass it can seem. There are so many bits and pieces. So much detail. Do you know not to put a woollen jumper in a hot dryer? Do you know how often to change your sheets and for that matter, your underwear? Do you know not to vacuum wet material that will clog up the machine? So you want a car, do you know how to look after it? What type of petrol does it use? Do you even know how to open the petrol cap? Can you do your tax?
That’s the trivia, but the critical trivia, sometimes called life skills (and they should be in CAPITAL LETTERS).
My father wrote me a letter, quite a long letter, which he gave me just before they drove off. At the time I took it as an artefact of the things I wanted to leave behind. Not necessarily its contents, although at the time if I’d been as smart as I thought I was I would have understood it as advice to himself, if 50 years too late. It was good advice, solid advice, even if the style was oddly distant … as though he’d never met me.
“How would you like it yourself? is no bad rule. The positive side is even more important — noting and encouraging the shy person, bringing the whole circle into conversation … Ask questions, don’t make assertions. Be constructive rather than critical. Especially never tease children nor make fun of them. … Truth is many-sided, and therefore there is always a great need for tolerance and to attempt to appreciate other points of view of others. Don’t be afraid to differ, but let your differing be a matter of principled non-conformity and not just wilful eccentricity.
‘Women will intrigue you and often puzzle you. Interest in sex is natural, normal and right. …
REDACTED
… Courtesy everywhere is most important — in prompt answers to correspondence, keeping faith in little things, acknowledging all the services given to one, the returning of books and so on. Don’t be a gossip.’
And so on indeed. Perhaps 1500 words. Very Dad, and I understood it as such and was appreciative of the gesture. But it was 1967, and I was 17 with the whole world in front of me.
None of this advice was about life skills, unless you count ‘Make light of injuries sustained’. It was all about relationships and human interactions. And you hope quite a bit has been learnt about those ever fluid mysteries by 17. But who’s ever got a fix on them, even after 70 years of practice?
By 17 you might have had your heart broken. I’m pretty sure that should be seen as a useful enrichment of your emotional education, widening your landscape and signalling business you might have to learn to manage, toughening you up in useful ways. But it is hardly something to encourage.
In another blog I have written: “Perhaps everyone has stories to tell of their 20s: the dangerous years, the careless years, when you knew everything, alert to neither Scylla nor Charybdis, scarcely aware of their existence so immersed are you in your own immediate framework of concerns — relationships, friends, trying to find a job, brooding about who you are and what you should be doing.” None of this takes 10 minutes. It might be 10 or 15 years before things shake down into some sort of stable shape.
Looking outwards from the Late Teen Ledge, a relationship is just one of the big three along with a job and somewhere to live. (The need for friends I have taken for granted.) But is a spouse and house still a benchmark?
When one of my sisters was about this age (a long time ago now) it was fashionably correct for a young woman to be engaged at 19, married at 20 and a mother at 21. She hit the trifecta of what might be seen as a protective social ritual, but frankly how spooky. We should be glad that at least some expectations change and quite dramatically. That’s one.
The blog I referred to was part of a series about our choice to build a house. By ourselves that is. We did, and with our 58 acres of land it cost $11,752-ish, equivalent today to $102,124. We built it for complex reasons only one of which was cost. We started with just $1000 (prize money for a film) and were able to pay the rest off as we went. This is an unsuitable comparison for many reasons, but at the end of September this year the median house price in Australia was approximately $929,495, with capital cities having a median of about $1,068,696 and regional areas around $715,916. Might you have to be a millionaire to own a house now? Well … maybe. In the US the median age of first-time homebuyers in 1990 was 28. It is now 40.
And you can only assume job churn, and that where your thinking starts at 17 or 18 will probably be nowhere near some of the places you end up. You are likely to have had 8 or 9 jobs by the time you’re 35, some of which you probably had never even heard of when you were a late teenager.
And then, perhaps speaking as an older person, you lift your eyes a bit higher and see the monsters on the horizon, the Creatures of the News: the predations of climate change, AI, social media, the wars, regional espionage, appalling politicians.
Let’s lower them again. Quickly. A clinical psychologist who spends most of her time with 20 somethings suggests: “Young adults may no longer have work and love sorted out in their 20s, but they can use their early adult years to build the kinds of skills and relationships they will still feel good about as they age. This is what we ought to be telling them. They’re not delayed or damaged or doomed. They’re digging in. I don’t expect my 20-something clients to have it all. I do expect them, and 20-somethings everywhere, to become happier and healthier over time, as they become more likely to have—and do—what makes people happier and healthier.” (Meg Jay ‘We’re Thinking About Young Adulthood All Wrong’ The Atlantic 15/11/25) After digging through the hot air and the failure to confront the facts of biology and reproduction, that all seems like a very good idea. Let’s say the arc of life is long but — generally, more often than not — it bends towards stability and improvement. We have to believe that.
Finally, it is important for me at least to note that something reciprocal is going on. That might have been what gave me the biggest shock. The girl in the pic is a kid. And isn’t. And that ‘isn’t’ requires a recalibration of our relationship, a different sort of equilibrium, increasingly and over time, as two adults. Over time. But, yes, that is what’s required. Lord almighty.
§§§§§§
Advice is a tricky and troubled genre, often being simply a waste of time (not that that in any way limits the immense volume of advisory endeavours). So what would I say to Rom? Be courageous. Give things a go. Be adventurous in thought, word and deed. Work hard. Exercise. I could say all that and I’d be right.
I could also say, stay friends with your grandparents. Be nice to them. They won’t be round for that much longer. But that’s special pleading rather than advice.
Maybe best — if you want some advice we’re always willing to try to help. Yeah that would probably be it. That, and the assurance that whatever happens we at the very least will still love you.
••••••••
In a lane near the market. And they think they’re going to keep kids off social media …
Try to look at this blog on a desk top if you can. Phone screens simply will not do the pics justice. The introductory material is here.
‘The bush holds much more than the eyes can see. Photographers seek to capture it, filmmakers record it, but what they bring back is mere imagery. Beyond the image, another world lies.‘ (Nicholas Rothwell, Ilkara)
But the image still has power: to startle and surprise, to intrigue and expand your perspective and sense of wonderment.
I wondered if we were going to see something like this. (Click here and watch it move.)
Wouldn’t that have been out of the box! But we didn’t. We got this close to Kati Thanda South. It is salt, not water, that we’re looking at.
From the air like this …
While we were there, water which would possibly fill the southern lake from the floods north of Innamincka was on its way down the Cooper. This stolen photo provides a rather thrilling update. That’s it. The real thing. The Cooper entering Kati Thanda South — a most unusual event.
Our views were mostly from the air.
We flew from William Creek to Birdsville in the late afternoon, at about 800-1000m, and were able to see how the water was creeping in. We flew back early the next morning, and very low, 150-200m, following the Diamantina and Warburton through Goyder Lagoon to one of the northern entry points to the lake.
And this is what it looked like initially. (You can click on any of the photos in the galleries of three or two to enlarge them individually.)
And then …
Some of this may have been cloud reflections. We don’t know and neither did anyone else. But that’s what we saw, us and the camera.
And below is a gibber desert (the stony edge of the Simpson) … with channels which have recently run through it!
And Birdsville. Population 110. For the annual races 8-9,000. Red dirt country: but on this day in such vivid green. It is the Diamantina at right. The plume of steam from the town’s artesian bore is in the top left hand corner. The water comes out of the ground at a constant 98C.
The next morning we went back the other way, lower and following various water courses.
At right above, meeting the Diamantina are the famous longitudinal sand dunes of the Simpson desert, usually a vast sea of orange and magenta.
There were these big intermittent bodies of water with their extraordinary shapes and colours.
The Goyder Lagoon.
And the Diamantina which crossing state boundaries has become Warburton Creek splitting into myriad channels and then re-forming.
We went looking for birds and did find some. At left is a collection of pelicans not so far from the shores of the lake (at right).
But the remarkable scale and geography of the whole — from our vantage point — didn’t lend itself to a focus on wild life. It was there absolutely no doubt, but this was a different sort of life.
We arrived on Monday. Tuesday was one of the wettest and coldest days ever recorded in Adelaide: a top of 8C with 85mm of rain not to mention wind gusts of over 100kmh. We sheltered in the gallery finding, as anticipated, ‘Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940’. Fifty of them. A movement. Ma préférée:
Hilda Rix Nicholas, born Ballarat Victoria, L’Australienne (1926), probably painted while she was in Brittany. She went to school at Merton Hall and earned money from time to time by providing illustrations for that seminal periodical TheSchool Paper. George Nicholas, an Australian soldier, saw other work which she had had to leave behind in Étaples at the outbreak of the First World War. He decided he wanted to get in touch and found her in London in September 1916. They married on the 7th October and had a honeymoon lasting three days before he returned to the Western Front. He died there on the 15th November. Her father played football for Carlton.
However fascinating, a digression. We are on weather, its confounding variety and its consequences.
We had left a state without an autumn break for the third dry year, desert-like conditions in some of its regions and just the thinnest of grass elsewhere. We were going to look at floodwaters, so immense that they could travel up to 2,000 kms without being absorbed in their path by endless deep cracks and waterholes, salt pans, flat plains and relentless evaporation. How fast? Depending on the terrain somewhere between one and ten kilometres an hour. A flow? More of a slow ooze.
Just 80 million years too late, we were going to look at the remnants of an inland sea. Kati Thanda or Lake Eyre provides the lowest point on the continent at 15.5m below sea level, and among the flattest. Its high point, well over 100kms from the low point, is 15m below sea level, a height gain of 50 cms. And this is where the water from a catchment area considerably bigger than Germany, the Low Countries, France and Spain combined, one-fifth of Australia, flows. Except that it doesn’t. Most of the time. The Macumba, the Warburton, the Georgina, the Diamantina, Cooper Creek, the great waterways of the area, are most frequently dry or reduced to intermittent waterholes.
Every three years or so water reaches the lake, which is actually two lakes — South (the enormous one) and North (the far bigger one). That water rarely lasts beyond a month or two. This is desert country, the most arid part of Australia with each year at least six months of searing evaporative heat. The lake has filled three times in 175 years. The last was in 1974 … before I was 30.
There are lots of reasons why this is unsurprising. One is its dimensions: around 180 kms north-south and about 80 kms east-west, 9,700 square kilometres, the second largest salt lake in the world. In parts it can be 6m deep when full but the average depth is more usually 3-4m.
Flows restore what has been called an ‘invertebrate swamp’ to life. The water resurrects frogs, fish, prawn-like creatures, crabs and other amphibious species. These in turn provide feeding grounds for a wide variety of bird life: pelicans, gulls, stilts and stints, sandpipers, terns, even black swans. How do they know!! Just how do they know? And for that matter how do these these things stay alive in any form during the decades when the lake is dry, or for that matter when it becomes hypersaline during the process of evaporation. I am interested to discover that the pink bands visible in the shallows of the lake are the consequences of a particular salt-friendly algae. This can have dramatic results. (Not my photo, but you can see the bands in my photos which appear in the next blog.)
I knew that there had been massive floods in northern and western Queensland round Christmas time, and that it had hardly stopped raining since. That water had to go somewhere.
We heard a super-excited scientist talking about what was happening to the lake on ‘Late Night Live’. The next day an ad for an APT tour of Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre landed in my Spam. It was a sign. We needed to go.
But first we had to get there.
• • • • • • •
The orange arrows on the map at left refer to places mentioned in the blog. This is Kym our guide and driver who did everything and extra well.
We’re on a 4WD bus/ truck, comfortable and warm, good on bitumen if a bit rocky on the dirt and corrugations. ‘We’, 19 members of a very defined demographic in terms of age, class and ethnicity, the heart and soul not to mention the cash registers of the travel industry. It was easy and well designed with plenty of comfort stops. Excellent guide. Etc.
• • • • • • •
The country immediately north of Adelaide is devoted to feeding its citizens. Fertile plains full of vegetables, fruit comes from elsewhere but eggs, chicken and pork are all produced here. It’s already flatland and under some pressure from the city’s northern stretch, Two Wells already almost a suburb.
But dry.
After passing the top of St Vincent Gulf one of the first towns you come to is Snowtown which has a Big Blade for you to look at, but which will be known forever as the town with the bodies (11, such a lot) in the barrels in the bank vault. If you must, you can be reminded about the story and its horrific intimations here. The town discussed changing its name (to ‘Rosetown’) but didn’t.
Wind turbines at work, big blades spinning hard, began appearing. These are six of the 1300 near Port Augusta which also has two of the largest solar farms in Australia and the first of South Australia’s seven Big Batteries (‘opened’ in the presence of Elon Musk).
Port Augusta is home to the now de-commissioned coal-fired power station which for decades provided almost all of South Australia’s electricity.
At present 77% of all SA’s power is generated renewably. It is intended that this be 100% by 2027. It can be done.
By Port Augusta we’re in the arid lands, just here in fact we’re in the town’s Arid Lands Botanic Gardens. And we’re at the end of the Spencer Gulf after which the water courses become so nondescript they don’t have a name until, after several hundred kilometres, you get to Lake Torrens, customarily a salt pan.
But this point has other significance. For millennia Barngala and Nukunu people would have stood here looking north-east at what the perambulations of two giant rainbow serpents had left behind. In 1802 it was Matthew Flinders. This blog is very much in favour of Matthew Flinders for reasons some of which are explained here. But one is that he didn’t consider naming those ranges after himself.
We left early next morning as we did every morning. It was a lovely morning.
Almost immediately saltbush and bluebush country.
Through the Pichi Richi Gap, and then there’s Quorn.
Once a railway hub that required spending a night in order to transfer from one train gauge to another — train transport has been so profoundly important to the white version of this area — Quorn has four hotels like this one and not much else. It makes its money from a steam train ride up and back through the Gap, entirely scenic. It also has a popular cafe devoted to dishes made from quandong, native peach, and just a little surprising. But it also has a collection of built memorabilia decked out in South Australia’s sandstone ochre and brick maroon. This is the Town Hall.
And then Kanyaka. (These blue skies are deceptive. It was at least three layers cold.)
Kanyaka Station was selected in 1852. Two years after, Hugh Proby the English aristocrat responsible, died aged 24 trying to cross the Willochra Creek in a flash flood. It’s a story I’ve expanded here, a story most emphatically about weather and its exigencies — an early ‘rain will follow the plough‘ story. That very creek, or its bed at least, is below right.
But it was good to see those muscular remnants again.
And then Parachilna, tethered population somewhere between 2 and 16. Activity: the Prairie Hotel, owned by the local cattle station owner, ‘understated iconic landmark and legendary destination’.
Most of us ate a delicious meal of home-made damper, smoked butter, emu pate, camel sausage, sliced kangaroo fillet, locally-cured ham and salad washed down with beer made in the hotel’s brewery. A completely unexpected touch of gourmet provender.
Now, more than 600 kms north of Adelaide, Farina, another of the several dozen towns on our route representative of so much ambition but dilapidated by the reciprocal impact of drought and the closure of a train line.
Farina is being restored at a gentle pace by voluntary labour.
Grey Nomads are apparently among those who choose to spend a fortnight here rebuilding the stone walls or manning the classy store or helping bake the bread and other goods which come out of the wood-fired underground bakery.
The plans on display provided for a town of 2-3,000. That never happened.
This general goods store was operating in 1987, the end of its 70-year history. Now 40 years later its site is scarcely discernible. Two or three piles of rubble mark its rough dimensions. It’s startling how decisive this process is.
Marree Station … and its line. That line extends past the platform but not very far. The last train to Marree was in 1987. There were issues about varieties of gauge — the distance between the lines, a moment’s thought will clarify what such differences might mean. Problems. And there were questions about the best route north. Marree lost. Then there was the weather: long droughts. Isolation. Marree, 46 metres above sea level, the beginning of both the Birdsville and Oodnadatta Tracks, an important Outback destination. A sort of whitefellas dreamtime.
The pub. There might have been 200 people enjoying it the night we were there. Perfectly acceptable food and a comfortable cabin. Backpackers provide the staff for these enterprises. Last Christmas this hotel employed 45 of them.
Marree is also home to the Lake Eyre Yacht Club, a real thing, with strong and lively views about who can use the lake and how. With the filling of the lake, these will no doubt surface again soon and vigorously.
Over the road are remnants (a wooden frame and thatched roof) of the first mosque built in Australia, a reminder of the place of Afghani cameleers in this cultural landscape.
The pic below is here just because I like it. Marree’s main street at night with two people meeting under the light.
On to the dirt of the Oodnadatta Track, 200 kilometres of corrugations to William Creek.
And this chap, a doctor being ‘[Where’s] Wally’, who was riding a postie’s bike some vast distance soliciting financial support for traumatised soldiers of whom his brother was one.
Also on the way was one of Australia’s 5000 mound springs naturally venting the water of the Great Artesian Basin.
Mineralised water was oozing out of the side of this mound at various points and pooled at the top where the native grass is growing, a reminder that water flows underground as well as above ground, and that this too is affected by the weather.
One-fifth of Australia is also the catchment area for the Great Artesian Basin, the natural phenomenon which provides the lifeline for the living creatures, human and otherwise, who have made and now make their home here. Even underground its water tends to flow towards the lake area. Science suggests that some of the water coming out of the bores and springs in its southern regions might be two million years old. I have mentioned in the other blog how it comes out of the ground at Birdsville at 98C.
To go on the tour you had to wear a uniform.
Coward Springs, another oddity in the middle of absolutely nowhere, also survives on its spring. A modest date farm and tourist stop selling date ice cream and date milkshakes as well as dates. Why Coward Springs? Well, it was named after Thomas Coward who was a member of Warburton’s expedition north searching for the inland sea. How tedious! You could hope for something a bit zippier.
Our destination, William Creek, consists of not much more than a pub and a very busy airstrip. Trevor Wright has spent 30 years building a flourishing aviation business here — 29 planes I think I remember Kym saying — and we were to use his company’s services.
If you look closely at this pic you can see a black dot in the middle which is the plane carrying the other half of our group. Everyone had a window seat. You’d want that really wouldn’t you?
The accompanying blog illustrates what we saw on the flight but we got to Birdsville where David Littleproud had come to see us. He nodded warmly in my general direction. (Adam Bandt picked us up in the Flinders Ranges.)
And this is the excellent Birdsville pub actually very early in the morning as we were leaving. It sold 74,000 cans of beer at the last races, a matter of some concern as there were only 75,000 on hand. (What are you thinking? How did they get that many cans of beer there? And perhaps more particularly, what did they do with the empties? Yeah me too. I have lots of questions like that.) The person who told us that was a teacher from Mansefield in Victoria who decided that he and his ‘beautiful wife’ would live in widely varying parts of Australia as they got older. He’d been at Birdsville for 16 months including through the summer. Hmmm … so. He’d be valuable. And he was. Great. He took us to see Big Red.
‘Big Red’, at 50 metres the highest sand dune in Australia, and made so that you can drive your 4WD all over it.
True dinks. That’s Big Red from our plane two days after 79 year-old John Williamson kicked off his farewell tour here. (His CD The Big Red released in 2012 includes the songs ‘Marree Girl’ and ‘Prairie Hotel Parachilna‘.) You can see the squares organising the audience at the top of the pic. John and his band were up on the dune on a ‘platform’ carved into its northern side. Apparently there were several instances of John offering a different song to that of his band. 79, that could happen, is almost likely to happen in fact. 1200 people there. Where do they come from!? And go to? The bottom (wet) tracks in the picture above are the entry from/ departure to the Simpson Desert but that’s not where they came from, not en masse anyway. It usually looks a bit more like this.
But on the night we were there to drink a little wine and have some nibbles watching the sun go down (Correct Official Grey Nomad Behaviour) it looked very good in parts.
You can have a look at some of the highlights of the flight back here, but one deviation stood out — a visit to the Marree Man carved by earth-moving equipment into the top of an isolated plateau south of Kati Thanda South some time between 27 May and 12 June 1998 (provably by photos from NASA’s Landsat-5 satellite).
It is an Aboriginal man with a woomera, a throwing stick, in close to perfect dimensions just under three kilometres from head to toe. And no one knows who did it, except the person/s who did it — and they may have died. Ideas have circulated round bored locals, seemingly unlikely given the effort, equipment — and skills — required to create it. It sits near the edge of the Woomera Protected Area which has been home to American servicemen who would at the time have been experimenting with GPS technology, quite probably required to construct it. And then there was an Alice Springs-based artist, Bardius Goldberg, who has since died, who had told his friends he wanted to create a work that would be visible from space. He had the skills and access to the technology and received a mysterious sum of $10,000 around this time. Coulda been … dunno. But there it is. No one knows. Dick Smith spent $5,000 trying to find out and is none the wiser.
It is not without controversy. The local native owners believe its construction damaged an important cultural site. If you double click on either the left or right hand pic you can see some of the extraordinary features that might render it special. Politicians have called it environmental vandalism and graffiti. The area is currently closed to the public and, over time, probably quite considerable time in this environment and climate, it will be resumed into the landscape.
Okay we’ve been, and now we’re coming back. A quick visit to the Flinders Ranges (named by Governor George Gawler in answer to your question from some time ago) and we’re on our way home. Sorry to have detained you this long.
You’ll have forgotten by now, but when this blog began we were in Adelaide and it was pouring down.
I like to maintain a narrative curve in my work so here is Myrna outside our cabin at Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges preparing for our walk round the St Mary Peak circuit and while it wasn’t raining at that minute, it did rain for the next three and half hours. But as I said to Kym, there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad preparation. (I know, ridiculous, but you’ve got to say something.)
This is a walk we have done before. Not an easy one: 20 kms with a big climb, and 4 or 5 kms to be spent stumbling over cricket ball-sized rocks. But it’s a good walk and we were looking forward to a day spent out of mechanical transport. The last time was seven years ago and in different conditions. Could old people still do this walk? Not altogether definitely.
I took a number of pics in the same place. This was one.
As can often be the case, things take on their own patina and sheen, their own mysterious beauty in the wet. In enlarged versions of the first one you can see droplets of water hanging off the foliage and branches.
There was quite a bit of this …
before the final step.
I think ‘suitably impressive’ is the term you’re looking for.
From Tanderra Saddle there can be a wonderful view. Pretty good in either sort of weather really.
After we got down into the Pound the rain stopped and the cloud lifted to some degree. But this is the rocky road I was referring to. Hard work! And not much used.
Same callitris. Same red gums. Same rocky field. Seven years later.
The walk finishes near a pool in the Wilpena Creek of almost impenetrable stillness. Weather again.
‘We desire to have a city that will be the Gotham of Australia … [and] in a few years will rival London in size, Athens in art and Paris in beauty.’ King O’Malley in 1904, an American masquerading as Canadian so he could be a member of the Australian parliament, taking on the job, as Minister for Home Affairs, of designing and developing a capital for Australia.
1907: The minute containing Sir John Forrest’s report to parliament on a site for the national capital.
Dalgety, about 150km south of the ACT, got the initial nod for the site of the new capital but the NSW government wouldn’t cede the land. Too hard and expensive to build a rail connection certainly, but also too far from Sydney. Canberra was second choice from eight options.
The word ‘Canberra’ may be a corruption of Ngambri, the name of one of the four Indigenous tribal groups living there prior to the disruption and assumption of their lands. Or it may mean (in Ngambri) ‘space between a woman’s breasts’, the breasts in this instance now called Mt Ainslie and Black Mountain.
Alternative names proposed at the time included: Austral, Aurora, Captain Cook, Caucus City, Cookaburra (😬), Dampier, Eden, Eucalypta, Flinders, Home, Hopetoun, Kangaremu, Myola, Meladneyperbane, New Era, Olympus, Paradise, Shakespeare (🤔), Sydmelperadbrisho, The National City, Union City, Unison, Wattleton and Wheatwoolgold. Probably lucky some of those didn’t get up.
1927, the opening of Parliament House by the Duke of York.
Not the Duke of York, but almost certainly with more claim to the land.
Imagine. It would have been a very strange life. Government from a paddock. Note the comparative absence of trees.
Building of the new ‘old’ parliament house commenced in August 1923 and was completed, after what must have been a constant series of construction and other challenges, early in 1927. It was not designed by the Griffins, Walter Burley and Marion Mahony, but it could have been. Very Chicago School: clerestories, very strong horizontals, interesting sight lines, furniture matching walls matching floors matching fixtures matching ceilings. Passionately symmetrical, built round the two houses — Reps and Senate. Snug, I thought. A building very easy to warm to if not to heat.
The old King’s Hall with King George V standing guard.
The view via this transect through the House of Reps frames the War Memorial (invisible here) perfectly.
John Smith Murdoch, Australia’s first Commonwealth Government architect, did design it in what was called the ‘stripped classical’ style. Good job, but it was only ever intended to be temporary. It does seems like a lot of work and effort for a temporary building.
The Prime Minister’s Office, to my eye perfectly fit for purpose. Bob Hawke’s voice is heard.
The Prime Minister may have had ample space but a run-of-the-mill MP and three aides would work in an office smaller than this, about 4m x 2.5m. Shall we say limited confidentiality which, who knows, may have been a good idea. New Parliament House where more than 5000 people work on sitting days has nearly eight times the floor space of the old one.
Labor gets a surprisingly good go in the displays, away, that is, from the John Howard Library. And, yes, that is The Australian Constitution being kicked downstairs.
Always was …
• • • • • • • •
‘You won’t find a whole settled essentially stable community that is so smug, so bourgeois, so comfortable, so well-educated. I mean this may be fucking paradise. I’m not saying it is. But it’s as good as it gets.’ (Jack Waterford, staple of the Canberra Times, legend. And I know just what he means. It has occurred to me every time we go there. All those facilities. All that cycling and jogging.)
It can be quiet downtown.
Although there will usually be a jogger to add to the vibe.
It will also be socially aware, generously so.
With plenty of thoughtful instruction.
• • • • • • • •
In his very good book about Canberra, Paul Daley suggests ‘the role of a [national] capital is to host its legislature and judiciary, its memory (the National Library of Australia; the national archives, the galleries), its conscience (the Aboriginal Embassy and the National Museum of Australia with its vast collection of Indigenous remains and relics) and tell the story of disastrous events that almost derailed a fledgling federation (the Australian War Memorial).’
In a recent visit we made the most of these, especially its memory.
One of the reasons for our visit was to have a look at ‘Fit to Print’, the exhibition in the National Library curated by Mike Bowers of press photos printed from glass-plate negatives (one chance only). A very generous selection and display from the 18,000 or so held by the Library in its Fairfax Collection. All round 1930: another time, another life.
Moments caught at a performance by Inge Stange’s dance gymnastics students, Sydney 1933. ‘This type of physical education is better adapted than almost any other for inspiring inner cheerfulness and new courage to face life in these uncertain times.’
William Lygon, 7th Earl of Beauchamp and, for a time, Governor-General of NSW, with some chaps at Bondi. ‘I doubt’, he observed, ‘whether anywhere in the world are finer specimens of manhood than in Sydney. The life-savers at the bathing beaches are wonderful.’ Using certain information about his activities which could only be described as salacious, his enemies were able to move him on. Smith’s Weekly noted that when his wife divorced him at the time ‘it came as little surprise’. But, bless him really. He’s having such a good time.
The National Library also had its customary display of ‘treasures’. I liked these two among others:
At left, Major Mitchell’s sextant; and above, Banjo Paterson’s ‘Diary used as a notebook’ open at a draft of ‘The Wind’s Message’. Not his finest work, but ‘The Man from Snowy River’ is just over the page.
And … you can look at Leonard French’s glorious windows while you’re having your coffee.
National Library: 9.7/10. At least.
And then there was the Gallery. You must go to the Gallery, but it was looking and feeling a bit Brutalist, just a tiny bit stuck around 1980, those enormous rooms bullying their contents which examined closely seemed like they might be second choice. The new Gaugin, the new Monet, the new Munch: not my favourites anyway, but the sort of thing you might mention when you are talking about examples of the absolute range of an artist’s work including when they had a go at something that didn’t quite work.
Best thing downstairs by a mile —
What a very great painting that is. And what a cultural landmark. It was time.
Upstairs was ‘Golden Summer, Eaglemont’ in its very fancy frame. A Mention Honorable at the Paris Salon of 1892 is noted. I’m confirming golden and not just because it’s the Dandenongs in the background. This was the title piece (called ‘Golden Summers’ at the time for some reason) for the best exhibition of Australian Impressionists ever mounted, NGV 1985. I remember it indelibly.
Also upstairs was this, ‘Bush walkers’ by Freda Robertshaw painted in 1944.
Intriguing. So carefully painted, and so formidably un-bushwalkerly. The figures, frozen from inception to completion, would not have been capable of walking anywhere let alone in the bush. Could they be aliens perhaps? Which is not to deny the considerable interest of the painting. I’d be happy to look at it carefully …hmmm, four times a week. Evidently the same genre as Charles Meere’s iconic ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ (which can be found in the Gallery of NSW) from just a bit earlier. Similarly carefully painted. Statuary, with a sea made of actual glass. That ball, suspended forever. (You might note the hint of domestic violence in the deep background. Us Aussies! Always up for a laugh.)
Just incidentally it is on record that Englishman Meere really didn’t like the beach, and he may have painted himself into the picture as the chap at left looking at least thoughtful (perplexed?) if not entirely discomfited.
Also on display was an exhibition of contemporary ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, the best known example of which is Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa‘. In his Hawaii Snorkel Series Japanese-American Masami Teraoka offers his own take on the slightly libidinous shunga tradition. His ‘View from Here to Eternity’ is below. The placement of the woman’s head provides a challenge.
There was also this glorious ‘Lotus Table’ by A&A Design, 1200mm in diameter and made out of ‘custom-dyed rye straw’.
The Drill Hall gallery had a very large exhibition of conceptual art which we think we are unable to explain except that some conventional thinking is involved as well as aesthetic appreciation. I liked it but not as much as a series in the same place by Simon Gende, an artist from PNG. (When did you last see paintings exhibited by an artist from PNG?) Even more exotic was that the theme of the series was the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent events stalking, capturing, killing and burying Osama Bin Laden.
This is ‘Twin Towers’. The legend in always so attractive Pidgin at the bottom says ‘Tupela balusbumpin Twin Tower long America USA‘. ‘(‘Two planes [balloons/ birds/fellas] crashing into the Twin Towers which belong to/in America USA.’)
In the museum, one-third closed for a new exhibition when we were there, we found the last day of Pompeii, so to speak, a good deal made out of not very much but with its moments …
and a pink van plus Holden. Good. And someone taking a somewhat decontextualised selfie.
It is a city — now, so very much not in 1927, and not really till the 1970s — of public art … (You can tap on these pics to see them better.)
and edifice. Hard to move without bumping into, or at least experiencing, an edifice.
The Gallery (bottom left), the High Court building (‘Gar’s Mahal’) overwhelming two galahs as it does its users, the massively over-engineered Bowen Place pedestrian underpass, and the mysterious ‘Commonwealth Place’, the outcome of a competition, from front and back, itself just in front of John Dunmore Lang Place. John Dunmore Lang, a Scotsman, a Republican and an Australian patriot who didn’t live to see Federation. I don’t know what he’d make of Canberra today. His Place is largely a blank of struggling lawn.
But just along from here is Reconciliation Place which does have a range of features including these standing stones each of which incorporates some First Nations art.
As appropriate the art is representative of different traditions and cultures, quite easily recognisable like the one on the left. But I have never seenGwion Gwion (at right) with all their complexities anywhere other than the Kimberley. Perhaps a courageous decision.
And trees. Trees trees trees. Hundreds of thousands of them. One of the great arboreal projects of Australia. What a wonderful thing. Especially thinking back to the bare paddocks of 100 years ago. It was autumn of course and there was ample evidence of the extent of alien deciduous planting …
and the absorption with monocultures, a version of town planning aesthetic concerns dominating the truths of ecology, but at least they’re trees.
A bit of the National Arboretum from its main pavilion.
Perhaps the most signal image from our trip was this: round 9pm, Lonsdale St as downtown as you get, temperature minus 4, queuing up at the Messina gelato bar for ice cream. You might imagine otherwise, but you don’t miss out on a thing in Canberra.
Hmm well I seem to have a different sort of audience. Mature perhaps? Out of the TikTok Zone? Or just prepared to put in the hard yards after a big preseason? 386 people had pressed the button to view (or more correctly the button to view had been pressed that many times, but also by a lot of different people) 16 hours after I posted ‘Flooding the Zone’. For me, that’s viral. 42 of them were in America where I can confidently guess at only two of their names. So, good I guess.
Hmm I wrote that yesterday. Today something more dramatic has happened. Another 494 people have opened the blog with very large representations from Germany and the US. I am surprised about that. Oh well, good. I suppose. [There were two more days like that and then a taper.]
Just before we get too much further I want to make an important correction.
The blog initially asserted that this video at left has been viewed 3 million times. The eagle-eyed Mr Findlay spotted that it had actually been viewed 40 million times. He claims that only half of them were him. (A claim that might be disputed by John Cook, or perhaps he’s happy to acknowledge just the other half were him!)
• • • • • • • •
I have said before that very few people leave comments. But they do send me emails which I very much appreciate. It’s keeping in touch. And they also say a lot of interesting things.
I would like to refine a couple of things before turning to a larger question.
• I want to dispense with the idea that I’m an old fart banging on about my distress concerning what the kids are up to these days. Do I really need to? Maybe not. However … I’m happy to be an old fart, but what I am writing about is a subject in which I am an active and very willing participant. It is a subject with a fat discourse which grows by the day, and of sufficient moment for social media manipulation and regulation to be under consideration right now by governments in many countries including this one. (See below.) Even if it only deeply affects, as I suggest and acknowledge, only a minority of the population, it’s a matter of concern for everyone.
• And for my own satisfaction, of course not all manufactured food is bad for you. Pasteurising milk, for example, meant one of the great leaps forward in public health. Cooking could be considered a process of manufacture. Then there’s milk chocolate bullets … great. However, hyper processing is different and some processes in particular are difficult to justify.
If you want to chase up more about hyper processed food you could read this excellent article. If you do you will find out that:
in the UK 61 percent of 2 to 5 year-olds energy intake comes from hyper processed foods, even more than in the US;
these kids are increasingly rejecting any food with texture that differs from puree. One result of which is a higher level of tooth decay, another is speech delay because the muscles required for chewing are the same as those required for forming sounds;
one baby food pouch can contain four teaspoons of sugar
parents commonly believe that these hyper processed foods are ‘healthier’ than alternatives.
• For the Netflix fans: On Netflix you can find some excellent and challenging entertainment produced by smart young things, children of the millennium. Stranger Things was not to my taste but it was to a lot of other people’s. Squid Game had to watched with sub titles and thus was not conducive to random auditing. Severance, another hit, demands committed attention. Succession, Slow Horses and the first two series of White Lotus are among the finest television fiction ever made and were made available via streaming services HBO, Apple+TV and Binge respectively. Maybe the best and most taxing of the lot, Adolescence, was produced by and made available via Netflix, and among the many things it is about are the dangers and depradations of social media!
But my point in the blog was about the nature of a particular process, a series of processes really, developed and employed by Netflix to tailor content to the preferences of its audience and, it would seem to me, by knocking off a lot of worthwhile edges.
It is not alone in this regard. There could be a horde of examples but Spotify provides one precisely made to order. (Spotify being the world’s leading music streamer with over 30 percent of total volume.)
In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist Liz Pelly describes how, in 2016 under pressure from investors, ‘Spotify’s internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content programming was created.… The message that quickly filtered through to artists was that the more beige your sound, the more likely it was to find a place on a Spotify playlist and earn some cash. Hence the rise of a homogeneous genre dubbed “Spotifycore”, which you’ve doubtless heard even if the term seems unfamiliar. It’s a bit ambient, a bit electronic, a bit folky, a bit indie, a nonspecific wish-wash possessed only of a vague wistfulness.’
Spotify-associated companies have churned out and loaded millions of hours of this ‘music’, also described as ‘aural wallpaper’, sometimes created with Ai and pushed by the company’s algorithms to a dominant position on Spotify playlists. Six months ago CEO Daniel Ek — who is Swedish; being an arsehole is not confined to any particular nationality — tweeted that ‘creating content costs Spotify close to zero.’ Pelly correctly claims that Spotify is not in the music business; it’s a technology enterprise.
• While you can talk about body image controversies and doing silly things which are dangerous, a fair bit of what’s on You Tube Shorts, TikTok and other short form video media is harmless. But if you spend two or three hours a day with eyes and brain glued to its content you can expect a negative result. Not all users do this. Some do. As Victor pointed out in his response, some people, at least initially, also choose to use crack cocaine. Or for that matter SportsBet. There aren’t enough of them however, and certainly enough of them with a political agenda, to elect a government.
• I am genuinely in awe of the cleverness of much of what I’m writing about. It represents apex thinking on top of mountains of research a lot of which may well have been conducted by people who had the best possible motives and aspirations.
In February 2012 Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to prospective investors in which, inter alia, he suggested: ‘Today, our society has reached another tipping point. Facebook hopes to rewire the way people spread and consume information … by giving them the power to share. … People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.’
As it turns out, that and a few other things as well. As Jerry Seinfeld said, ‘There is no such thing as fun for all the family.’ Everything comes as a package.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by former senior Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams (a book which should really be read asap) contains a four-page description of the way in which Facebook and other social media were used to get Trump elected in 2016. This is some of that.
‘Trump’s campaign [for which Facebook provided a number of its most skilled personnel] amassed a database … of over 220 million people… It charted all sorts of online and offline behaviour: gun registration, voter registration, credit card and shopping histories, websites visited, what car they drive, where they live and the last time they voted. The campaign used Facebook’s “Custom Audiences from Custom Lists” to match people in that database with their Facebook profiles. … Then they’d pair their targeting strategy with data from their message testing, so people likely to respond to “build a wall” got that sort of message. … At any given moment, the campaign had tens of thousands of ads in play, and by the time they were donemillions of different ad variations. … Many of these ads contained inflammatory misinformation that drove up engagement and drove down the price of advertising as these ads were shared among like-minded people.
A propos of this, Robert W reminded me of the nature and influence of Milton Friedman’s doctrine:A company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.
Apocalypse now? Or soon anyway?
After they finished reading the blog Andy reports that he and Ruth said as one (which would be unusual), ‘We’re fucked!’
Any construction, like a blog say, entails selection of emphasis and detail. I might be just as guilty as the people I’m talking about in the blog of engendering panic, distress and anger. A perpetrator as well as a victim! Eeeeeeeeeeee …
I haven’t tried to dampen things down, nor have I tried to ramp them up. I was predominantly interested in seeing how far the hyper processed/ hyper palatability notions could be pursued when applied to social media, and I think the answer is a very long way indeed — and the more evidence I collect, like the Spotify example above, the more certain I become of their pertinence. Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book is an extended and highly detailed dissertation on my thesis.
But I go outside and the sky hasn’t fallen in. The fruit in IGA is much as ever. They are selling eggs, expensive sure, but there are eggs there. Do I have a problem with too much immersion in news media? Maybe. Not enough to do? An inadequate number of suitable distractions? Hmmm … If I went to America what would I find? Things chugging along happily with hardly any recognition that the country had a new President, you know, all much the same as ever, 350 million people in a settled state. Nothing like what is being portrayed in the sorts of things I read. (On the other hand, maybe not. Yesterday was Liberation Day, and not so good for Lesotho, or Heard Island. Yeah, maybe not.)
Terrible things have happened in the past. These issues are pretty low key compared to 1938-50 in Europe say, or the plague that nearly completely eliminated the population of Central Asia in the 14th century, or the ice age which began with the volcanic eruption of 536. And from a more contemporary perspective, is this worse than what might happen as a result of climate change? (Just incidentally, one of the terrible things that Trump and his boys have done is to stop the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which, with the UK’s University of East Anglia, has been by far the world’s most important source of climate information.)
And even if it seems bad, how should we react? Wait and see what if anything happens? Wait till we’re personally affected? Limit our kids’ screen time? Ban functions of Insta or Facebook? Or, recognising how madly unpopular (and probably impossible) this would be, just block the lot? Or hunker down and keep our heads low waiting it out?
This isn’t the first time anybody has thought about this. As recounted in Careless People, Facebook’s entry to China is a case study of this process, a story of uncertain steps and the chilling commercial impulses which resulted in the ceding of control over Facebook’s data and ‘privacy’ to the Chinese Government. But the message, hardly ever heard in the West: you can make the tech bros bend to your wishes if you choose to.
The popular target seems to have shifted to the impact on children and adolescents, something all adults who don’t work for techo companies might agree about. (Altho I note the number of tech company bosses who strictly regulate their children’s screen time and social media usage.)
• • • • • • • •
On the 3rd December last year legislation was rammed through the final sitting of the Australian Parliament (for the year), supported by both government and opposition, setting a minimum age limit for the use of social media platforms Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 requires ‘age-restricted social media platforms’ to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years from having accounts on their platforms. Social media platforms operating in Australia have 12 months to develop and roll out systems to enforce the age restrictions, which are expected to be in place by the end of 2025.
The platforms will be subject to penalties ‘to a maximum of 150,000 penalty units (currently equivalent to AU$49.5 million) for a breach of the minimum age obligation by corporate actors, and for breaches of industry codes and standards, to reflect the seriousness of the contravention, consistent with community expectations.’ So there.
But I fear that could be just bouncing up and down on the high board without really looking at what’s in the pool, or whether there’s a pool there at all.
There is the matter of the targeted platforms (Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X). They’re the big ones but all of them have multiple forms and are constantly changing and adapting to whatever is popular. Where’s YouTube and YouTube Shorts? Or is that ameliorated because of the existence of YouTube Kids? How about Reddit, Quora, Threads, and Tumblr one of the most popular sites in the UK among adolescents onto which until recently you could load porn in almost any form. You can’t any more, only nudity; but then there are the myriad other sites which are not ‘age restricted’. Roblox was supposed to be for kids, but look what’s happened here and here.
Next there is the small matter of establishing the age of users.
Five to ten years ago the big issues were maintaining young (and older) users’ privacy and security. There is a monster flip involved here to providing enough personal data to establish and confirm age and allowing the companies to collect and store that data. EXCEPT the legislation requires ‘the destruction of information following its use.’ It does seem a lot like wishful thinking. If you say something it will come true: the sine qua non of Trump-ism.
In their submission to Judge Robert French’s recent and relatively thorough investigation into legislating about kids and social media for the South Australian Government, the tech companies noted: ‘The hard fact is that there is no error free means of determination of the age of users of an account. The antagonists are the users themselves: current age verification is extremely easy to get around by lying about your age.’
Age verification that relies on personal information for ID has a low success rate and is too easy to avoid and generates all sorts of privacy issues. Age verification that relies on facial recognition technology is too often inaccurate to be of much use. (‘Such technologies can create barriers to inclusion as they may not perform well for some skin tones, genders or those with physical differences.’) Meta, remarkably and without complete confidence, uses Ai to flag users under the age limit based on their behaviour on the app.
For these reasons and others, the platforms vigorously assert that age verification should occur at the point of purchase via app stores. You might consider that as kicking the can well back up the road. We might conclude that they really really really don’t want to be responsible for user age verification. But you might also wonder just how effective that would be. Age verification would still be required.
French’s conclusion was as follows: ‘Whatever regime is established by the South Australian Government, it will not be perfect. Effecting compliance across the industry will be challenging. Compliance will require age assurance measures, location measures [in this instance re living in SA] and, where applicable, verification of parental consent. Enforcement measures may be complicated by the fact that many providers are companies which are located outside Australia. The legislation would apply to existing as well as prospective users of social media services. There will undoubtedly be workarounds by knowledgeable child users. However, the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
In 2019, efforts were made to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to be online’ via the Online Harms White Paper. Social media firms were to abide by ‘mandatory duty of care’ to protect users and would face heavy fines if they failed to deliver. A new independent regulator was to be introduced to ensure companies met their responsibilities. One practical step was to ban under 13s from use of social media. But Theresa May was Prime Minister and it was the Tory Government in its very last throes of attempted competence, and it didn’t work as data drawn from a subsequent (2022) UK investigation shows.
You might take note of the online behaviour of 3-7 year olds (in the UK) in 2022. These data also indicate that 17% of UK 3 year-olds had their own phone. You can read OfCom’s most recent report here.
Denmark has led the EU in thinking about and action on these issues recently suggesting that no under 13s should have a phone or tablet and that these devices should in any case be banned from all primary and junior secondary schools and after school clubs.
You might be thinking, yes, hoorah. However, while finding that spending longer on phones and social media in general was unequivocably linked to lower grades, poorer patterns of sleep, disruptive behaviour and a lack of exercise, researchers from the University of Birmingham also found that these outcomes did not differ between students in schools that banned phones and those that did not. The study, published in the Lancet’s Regional Health Europe journal, also found that attempts to restrict phone use at school did not lower the overall time children spent on their devices throughout the day.
The report of this type I have found most useful is the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory Social Media and Youth Mental Health (2023, pre-Trump). Crisp, clear, comprehensive, all the characteristics of the best American research and thinking, it begins:
‘Social media use by youth is nearly universal. Up to 95% of youth ages 13–17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly.” Although age 13 is commonly the required minimum age used by social media platforms in the U.S., nearly 40% of children ages 8–12 use social media.’ (See for comparison the UK figures cited above.)
It is unequivocal about their perceived value:
‘A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%).’
And pins down the actual issues:
‘Social media platforms are usually designed to maximize user engagement, which has the potential to encourage excessive use and behavioral dysregulation. Push notifications, autoplay, infinite scroll, quantifying and displaying popularity (i.e., ‘likes’), and algorithms that leverage user data to serve content recommendations are some examples of these features that maximize engagement.
‘Some researchers have shown that social media exposure can overstimulate the reward center in the brain and, when the stimulation becomes excessive, can trigger pathways comparable to addiction. Other studies have shown that people with frequent and problematic social media use can experience changes in brain structure similar to changes seen in individuals with substance use or gambling addictions.
‘A longitudinal cohort study of U.S. adolescents aged 12–15 (n=6,595) that adjusted for baseline mental health status found that adolescents who spent more than 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes including symptoms of depression and anxiety. According to a survey of 8th and 10th graders, the average time spent on social media is 3.5 hours per day, 1-in-4 spend 5+ hours per day and 1-in-7 spend 7+ hours per day on social media.’
Robert French hoped that ‘One non-legal beneficial effect of the law may be to arm parents with the proposition that it is the law not them that restricts access to social media for children in South Australia.’ And for some kids and their families he may well be right. It would seem that a whole arsenal of weapons might be required to take on this issue.
It runs up against the free speech issue of course and the selective notion of liberation that is evolving so quickly, the one that goes ‘I should be allowed to do anything I like, but as for you …’. This is the constant Musk response and why he claims he bought Twitter to free it from the ‘woke’ interference of fact checking misinformation and removal of egregious posting. ‘Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
This takes us into complex territory. What sort of controls are socially desirable or acceptable? Think smoking; think gambling; think nonsense cures which might make you more sick. One line of argument here goes you let people do what they like until they incur a shared social cost, like that of health care, and then you have a fair basis for intervention. But there will still be argument, and resistance. This is not unlike the tension in a democracy between the rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of The People and their wishes. Then you think about the diet of what The People may have been fed and how assiduously it has been tailored not just not their wishes but to pleasure centres of which they might be quite unconscious.
I don’t have a solution. There are people who do and some of them seem worth listening to. A great deal of the related advice on the internet is about managing personal behaviour and addiction, but that obviously veers away from the source of the problem. There are things that could be done. The list of things above in the Surgeon General’s Advisory that begins ‘push notifications’ could be regulated. An interesting idea mooted in the UK was to show all kids Adolescence and try to get them to think about it. But this territory is just so unchartered.
When I get glum I think of seat-belt legislation, an unarguable infringement of personal freedom but at the same time an unarguable good. Instituted. Sustained. Effective. Cause: Effect. When things shake down and when the requisite number of cataclysmic things have happened something brainy like that might be employed. I hope so.
Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election with 77,284,118 votes, 2,284,952 more than his opponent. 63.9% of eligible voters voted, round about the average. From this distance and vantage point you can only wonder why any of those 77+ million votes were cast for a convicted felon, a bankrupt, a corrupt fraud, a vulgarian and, not least, for a vengeful, cruel, shameless and erratic old man. What were they thinking?
There are many explanations for why Trump won: Biden hanging on too long, poor campaign, wrong candidate, general distrust of government, a mood for disruption, and anyway he didn’t win by that much. All true no doubt. But it seemed to provide evidence of something more fundamental which is occurring. What were they thinking? Perhaps they weren’t thinking at all. Perhaps something had shifted in their consciousness. The need for entertainment had become much more pressing than any concern for governance.
What follows is inevitably conjectural. Not everyone is addicted to hyper processed food, not everyone pursues life as a TV show, not everyone watches the slurry on Netflix, not everyone spends all day on Tik Tok, not all students have AI write their essays.
But a lot of people do; and these things and their multitudinous like inevitably have an impact, a powerful impact, the most powerful impact that our ingenuity can manufacture … a shift driven by mountains of money heedless of consequences and well out of sight of regulation — because it’s just what happens these days. And I guess that’s the issue.
It was Steve Bannon that got me wondering.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” he told writer Michael Lewis [as long ago as 2017]. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
• • • • • • • • •
Life as Bliss Point
And then we recently watched a show from SBS On Demand called ‘Irresistible: Why we can’t stop eating’. It is about ultra-processed food and its increasing prominence in diets world-wide.
Ultra-processed food is made by manufacturing companies. The top ten world-wide are Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Unilever, Tyson Foods, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez International, Conagra, Campbell Soup and General Mills, all but two of which are based in the US. Collectively these ten — there are many many more — had an annual turnover in 2023 of $US4.668 trillion (if a trillion is 1000 billion) and a world-wide reach. They are particularly active in Africa.
And what is it? It is often a slurry of cereal (rice, soy, wheat, corn) and/ or modified dairy products (whey permeate for example) with additives which allow it to taste, feel, smell, and SOUND (say ‘snap’ ‘crackle’ and ‘pop’) like something you’d really really want to eat. It can be baked, grilled, puffed, breaded, sauced, and reproduced endlessly. It can be frozen, reheated, micro-waved, deep fried. It can be made to look simply amazing and our supermarket shelves are full of it … bright, exciting, attention-grabbing.
And we buy it. And you buy it. And we all buy it. Not necessarily in large quantities, but when we’re in a hurry and blah blah blah. It’s just convenient. But there are some people, a growing number here as well as in the US, who buy it far more frequently and for whom it has become a staple food source.
Why would you want ultra-processed food?
A lemon cake you cook yourself with standard ingredients might cost you $4.60. It will have a shelf life of a few days. The same item produced in this different way, to all intents and purposes looking and tasting the same, will cost 40c and last for anything up to two or three months. I’m running a shop; what am I going to go for?
Vegetables and fruit especially have a short life once picked, they’re expensive to transport and relatively difficult to process. If I can offer you two lots of powder which will make yoghurt taste like it has got actual strawberries in it and some modified starch which will give it a delicious creamy feel on the tongue and some strings of colouring that seem like fruit traces, are you going to say no?
This process and its component additives have been okayed by regulators. (Well, self-regulators anyway.) As required by law the ingredients are listed on the packet. And of course all food consists of chemicals one way or another.
However as well as being ultra processed, these foods are made to be hyper palatable. They often combine fat and sugar in ways not found in nature which draw immediate and sizeable responses from the reward centres in the brain which say ‘I would like more of that and pretty much straight away’. They are often made soft so that they can be eaten quickly (or crunchy but dissolve close to instantly in your mouth. Think Cheezels, Twisties) with two results: you want some more because of the impact on your reward centres; your body doesn’t have time to produce its standard response that you’re no longer hungry and don’t need any more food.
This is compounded by encouraging the idea of eating as grazing. You eat all day, not just at mealtimes, to keep your energy up through that blast of sugar. You need a Snickers now. ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’; ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.’
But we’re not just talking about junk food or fast food or snacks. Any food you buy in a box — apple pies, fish fingers, frozen pizza, frozen roast dinners — is likely to have been manufactured in an interesting and sophisticated way.
These foods have been around for a long time. American supermarkets began stocking them in the 1950s. But the industry really took off in the 1970s not least because of Howard Moskowitz’s work. He believed in, and established in practical form, the idea of the ‘Bliss Point’.
“The Bliss Point for salt, sugar, or fat is a range within which perception is that there is neither too much nor too little, but the ‘just right’ amount of saltiness, sweetness, or richness. The human body has evolved to favour foods delivering these tastes: the brain responds with a ‘reward’ in the form of a jolt of endorphins, remembers what was done to get that reward, and makes us want to do it again.”
Moskowitz’s ideas took firm hold. They were later validated by MRI brain scans during some of which people ate various forms of chocolate ice cream which caused the orbitofrontal cortex, the ‘pleasure centre’, to ‘glow like a furnace’.
If there is a way of optimising food in that way, making it cheaper, more durable, tasty and attractive, food that people really want, what’s the issue? It sells. People are happy. Some make money.
The ’70s were also the time when the rates of obesity and its consequences began soaring in the US, more than doubling in 10 years. Some of the consequences of a diet heavily skewed to ultra processed food include higher rates of a variety of forms of cancer, cardiac disease, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, sleep disorder and, very commonly, Type 2 diabetes. You die earlier.
[Digression: Two adjacent Googled questions. 1) ‘Are Cheezels baked or fried?’ ‘Baked to crispy, crunchy perfection and smothered with deliciously cheesy flavor. Pop them on your fingers and eat them one-by-one for some finger luscious fun. Cheezels are a popular party snack for children.’ [And yes of course they are. That’s a key part of the deal. Train ’em up.] 2) ‘Are Cheezels healthy?’ ‘No, Cheezels are not healthy. They are high in fat, calories, salt, and saturated fat, and low in fibre and protein. They also contain high levels of artificial flavouring, colouring, and MSG.’ ]
You know the solution to these problems. Buy fresh food. Cook it yourself. That’s relevant but not why we’re here.
• • • • • • • • •
There are two things I want to point out. Firstly, how ingenious to be able to pull flavours apart and reconstitute them artificially. Brilliant. Astonishing. There is no end to human ingenuity. Secondly, this process has been driven by commerce rather than any wish to improve, or with much concern for, the quality of human and other life. $US4.668 trillion remember? That’s a lot of Doritos, and a lot of people eating them.
But that’s not the mission either. It’s more in this ballpark.
The current Vice President of the United States is having an angry debate with some of the Catholic bishops of America. ‘Speaking with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Vance suggested that efforts to provide charity to immigrants, which are favored by “the far left”, contradict Catholic teaching. “There’s a very old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow-citizens in your own country, and then after that you might consider the rest of the world.” He was apparently referring to St Thomas Aquinas’s idea of “ordered love,” or ordo amoris, set out in the “Summa Theologica” — an immense work, foundational to Catholic thought, that Aquinas left unfinished at his death in 1274. This is at odds, he suggested, with Americans’ care for immigrants.” (Paul Elie Vance brawls with bishops New Yorker 11/2/25). Vance isn’t just a hillbilly. He has law degree from Yale. Under the new dispensation he can propose fearlessly that selfishness is a fundamental tenet of Christianity.
James Martin, a Jesuit priest responded. ‘In its simplest terms, the apparent demise of #USAID is the result of the world’s richest man ending a program that helped millions of poor people. You don’t need a Ph.D. in moral theology to see why this is evil.‘
I think of Vance’s argument as something ultra processed. The second is simple fare, but food.
The mission is to think about what we’re currently feeding our brains, how that’s changing, and the contribution its consumption makes to the socio-political climate of which Trump is just one lurid peak.
• • • • • • • • •
Life as TV
What we consume shapes us, cognitively. What we do, and especially do repetitively, shapes us. Repetition, as every musician, dancer, scientist and dictator learns, trains the neural networks to make some thoughts and thought patterns more durable than others. They stick.
‘I strongly believe that the Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly who’s been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It’s been an unlucky place for a long time.
‘Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this. …
‘This can be paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth. It could be one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12. It could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site. But the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll make sure something really spectacular is done. …
‘The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.’ (D. Trump, press conference with Netanyahu, 5 Feb 2025)
Satirical clip made with AI, published privately then taken down by its creators, then reposted by Trump on his website ‘Truth Socials’ with an approving comment.
I know 78 year old men. I hang out with them. I’m in the ballpark of being one. I know they’re not 36 or 45 anymore. I know the way their thoughts aggregate, concentrate and lose range. I know that what they know is what they learnt some time ago. I know they become more absolute in those beliefs and less able to apply them to new contexts. I generalise, but Trump on Gaza is an almost perfect example of randomly reaching for the familiar in an utterly alien context.
He’s not a 4-D thinker, nor a master strategist, nor a diplomatic genius, nor a nonpareil deal maker. He’s an old man, a retired, and grasping, real estate developer and that is his default setting. I’m not sure he has many other settings.
Except one. He’s been a TV star.
He’s an entertainer. He knows how to attract and hold attention, and he’s learnt to forswear all shame, even the idea of it. ‘That’ll make great television,’ he muses out loud, as he sends Zelenskyy on his way and destroys the Western Alliance.
• • • • • • • • •
The man in front of you, it always seems to be a man, counts silently making large gestures with his fingers, … three, two, and in you walk. You’re on. Prompted by large flashing signs the audience — as one — welcomes you. As one. There are no naysayers here, no hecklers. The response is automatic, sustained, strong and warm. Basking in it and acknowledging it is the beginning of the show.
The show has a well-defined shape often according to a well-anticipated formula. It begins, it follows a scripted narrative arc, various anticipated things happen although there will be some sharp little shocks on the way to keep you watching. The characters will be drawn in heavy outline and act in predictable ways. Viewers can count on the routine comfort of catchphrases (‘You’re fired!’ ‘Drill baby, drill.’) and the prompt from a laugh or applause track to tell them how to feel. The formula, inviolate, will be worked through to a conclusion that will find the Bliss Point but which will leave you hungry for more.
The Apprentice, Trump’s show, survived on a certain amount of melodrama (contingent on Trump’s moods and unpredictability), glamour, and the underlying idea that your dreams, all of them, are achievable if you try hard enough. The show’s spectacle of suffering (another attraction to tune in for) came from people not trying hard enough and not being sufficiently obedient to the tenets of The Big Man. They were fired, and the audience roared for more.
It was a ‘reality’ show. It ran for 15 seasons, 2004-2017, all but one of which Trump hosted. That’s long enough for it to shape your understanding of how the world works, for it to become real in your mind. It was a reality show.
During his first Presidential stint, Trump played Trump as President. He made modest and sporadic efforts to do what Presidents do, to observe the protocols and conventions, to sometimes say and do appropriate things.
But in this second and so much darker series with so many more daily thrills he is playing Trump as himself, Trump as Roy Cohn trained him to be. He has mightily improved his script writers, the very best that the American Heritage Foundation can provide (through Project 2025). He has stocked his cabinet almost entirely with oddities who will guarantee attention, be utterly biddable and ‘look good’. ‘Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved’ (Stephen Marche ‘America’s Cultural Revolution’ in The Atlantic 3/3/25).
As Megan Garber put it in the same journal (6/3): ‘In the context of history, this is an emergency. In the context of the show, however, it is simply one more twist in the story. Government by “reality,” like the TV genre, has no obligation to be factual. It has no obligation to be moral. It has no obligation to be anything at all. Wisdom, cruelty, accountability, democracy — in the bleak politics of “reality,” these things no longer exist. They can’t exist. Only one thing matters, as the show goes on: Is it great television?’ She could have added: And how is it playing with my audience?
You could see this as an unavoidable but chosen route to becoming hyper processed. How might an appetite for this sort of sustenance be constructed?
• • • • • • • • •
Life as Netflix
Including Vatican City and Palestine, there are 195 countries in the world. Netflix has subscribers in 190 of them, 283.2 million all up. Last year it generated $US33.7 billion in revenue, with a profit of $US5.4 billion. Those facts alone would make would make it worthy of attention. But it’s got more to tell us.
‘For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theatre seats. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, and on toilets. But most often they aren’t even watching.’
Genius or what!
The main source for this part of the story is an article by Will Tavlin in n+1. His primary interest is in showing how Netflix first ate up video stores, then dug its way into live broadcast television (especially as its streaming clones multiplied), then ‘brought Hollywood to the brink of irrelevance’ by shifting the ways movies get produced and distributed but, even more, changing the nature of what films are and what they might offer.
All that’s telling, but what interests me more are the remarkable parallels with the manufactured food story. Let’s talk hyper palatability.
The platform has an unimaginable amount of data about its subscribers. It knows what sorts of devices you watch on; which scenes you skip, pause, or rewind; and how long it takes you to abandon a show you don’t like or finish a season that you love. (These data created the option to ‘binge’.) It also has the capacity to know in granular detail what you and the other 283 million subscribers will watch.
Netflix now has about 17,000 or 19,000 items for you to watch, the vast majority Netflix Originals. (The figure is disputed. Netflix has only recently started releasing information about its operations.) But it doesn’t matter to you because you’ll never visit the labyrinthine chambers of its library. In an immediate and easy access process you will be served a selection of what it has been determined you will like. The algorithm, now with the assistance of AI, has spoken. You are in fact a member of one of approximately 2000 ‘taste groups’.
If you rely on subscriptions for your income as Netflix mostly does, you need to reduce ‘churn’, the rate at which customers cancel. So instead of acquiring films cheaply from independent film makers and out of date blockbusters, Netflix led the way in turning to safer, more uniform product that could be made in-house, and replicated and tailored to the tastes of their subscribers.
Tavlin talks about the Typical Netflix Movie. ‘The TNM covers every niche interest and identity category in existence, such as a movie about a tall girl, Tall Girl, but also Horse Girl, Skater Girl, Sweet Girl, Lost Girls, and Nice Girls. Seemingly optimized for search engines, the title of a TNM announces exactly what it is — hence a romantic comedy about a wine executive called A Perfect Pairing, or a murder mystery called Murder Mystery. … The characters’ dialogue is stilted, filled with overexplanation, clichés, and lingo no human would ever use.’
Netflix’s product is filled with overexplanation because the company has led the way in ‘second screen’ material, stuff you have on when you’re doing something else like knitting or cleaning the dining room or looking at your phone. There are some famous examples of this. One is from a shocker called Irish Wish. ‘We spent a day together’, Lindsay Lohan’s character tells her lover, James. ‘I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.’ ‘Fine,’ he responds. ‘That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.‘
This super-obviousness has newly infected mainstream cinema as though the makers and producers can no longer expect audiences, any audiences, to connect dots or to take time to make sense of more than trivial ideas. THIS is what’s happening the film shrieks, and we’ll not only show you but have a character say, ‘THIS is what’s happening.’ This comes into sharp relief somewhat startlingly when it doesn’t happen. We’ve just seen Francois Ozon’s new film Quand vient l’automne and it’s in the last few minutes or even after the film has finished when the light bulb goes on, and what a snakey startling light bulb moment it is. Fabulous. Because he respects his audience, he hasn’t been afraid to give it some cognitive work.
Then there’s one of my big beefs: the endless stuffing of landscape shots and plot reiteration to fill out the required eight hours for a series. If no one much is watching and no one at all is watching intently, economy and precision are not priority requirements.
Netflix has also discovered people don’t much like documentaries (unless they are about David Beckham or car racing). What do they like? ‘Grisly true crime, garish cult exposés, celebrity hagiography, sports and food miniseries, pop science, and pets.’ (Hey! Isn’t that what I used to see at the checkouts in supermarkets?) Yeah, that’s what we like.
Do I need to underline that the quest here is for hyper palatability, and that the consequence is hyper processed entertainment food in the service of making money from subscriptions that somehow you never remember to cancel?
Tavlin concludes: ‘Economists talk about so-called “zombie businesses”: companies that survive only because of the availability of cheap capital, who stagger along, refinancing debt, never failing — artificial, undead things. And I think about this concept when I look back at the tech world’s takeover of culture. That these business strategies, and this river of money diverted to bring them to fruition, created a sort of zombie discourse in our culture, one that appeared vital and real, and then — coincidentally or not, over the last few years — dissolved before our eyes.‘
And do I need to say just how ingenious to be able to pull aspects of film apart and reconstitute them quite directly according to data collected about the wishes of the audience down to the level of individual user preference, a process which itself would once have been deemed miraculous. Brilliant. Astonishing. There is no end to human ingenuity. Secondly, this process has been driven more by commerce than any wish to improve, or even with concern for, the quality of human and other life.
Soma: a drug that produces artificial happiness and keeps you at a perfect equilibrium between happiness and sadness. Aldous Huxley, 1984 (written in 1931) No news. But we’re so so much better at it now.
• • • • • • • • •
You also must have stimulation.
Life as Tik Tok
‘Pur’ = purchase. Yes really.
The US Government has had TikTok in its sights for years now on the basis that the Chinese Government is/was using it to gather data that will be useful from a security point of view (including from armed forces enlistment ads). Maybe. Who knows? (You can read the whole weird story here.) But one of the things that distinguishes TikTok from other social media platforms is the enormous amount of data that is made available about itself, its users, its product and especially its commercial impact.
Some things you may not know about TikTok.
TikTok has 1,925 billion users globally, with 190 million monthly active users in the United States. It is still only the fifth largest social media platform (Facebook/Meta has more than 3 billion users). The TikTok app has been downloaded 4.92 billion times world-wide.
There are 272 videos posted on Tik Tok every second, 16,000 videos posted every minute, 981,000 thousand videos posted every hour,34 million videos posted each day.
70% of its users for whom age data are collected are between 18 and 34. A vast unrecorded group, estimated to be 44% of all users, are under 16 attracted by exactly the things that younger people might be attracted by.
The slight majority of users (55%) are men. Men also access it considerably more frequently. (They’d like the pranks, men.)
At April 2024, India was the country with the largest TikTok audience, with almost 680 million users. Indonesia was second. The US was third with around 121.5 million users. Brazil was fourth. The Chinese version, Douyin, had 380 million users.
The average user opens the TikTok app 20+ times per day.
In the US, kids who are on TikTok spend an average of 113 minutes daily using it, which is slightly higher than the global average of 107 minutes. That time has doubled since 2019.
61% of TikTok users discover new brands and products on the platform. 92% of TikTok users take action following the content they see on TikTok (share, comment, follow, like, etc.).
In 2024, Khaby Lame, Senegalese-Italian influencer and the highest-paid content creator on the platform, made US$20 million through his posts on TikTok. He has over 162 million followers. He has never spoken in a post.
TikTok earned an estimated US$18.2 billion in 2024.
I’m not a user of TikTok but for the purpose of researching this story I have watched several hours of YouTube Shorts, (You can too: YouTube Shorts) to all intents and purposes the same thing. The Shorts are capped at a minute, shorter than the cap for TikTok, but have very much the same content.
From the top left clockwise: crazy cute supermarket jokester; policeman asking arrested man why he’s so happy; car being chased by a cop car suddenly turns right in front of a truck, tricks cop car; family doing the same dance separated by six years; prone bloke throws a basketball the length of the court for an extraordinary goal, girlfriend doesn’t film it (irony: someone else is; kicker: girls are inattentive and stupid); set up so a stationary person on a platform is hit by the front window of a bus and travels through the entire body of the bus coming out unhurt. None of them should be missed.
What is the content of those 34 million a day videos?
The numbers refer to the number of billion hashtag views. That’s also about what the proportions looked like to me. One in four or five is an ad very carefully integrated into the flow and style of the other offerings. It is worth noting that 82% of views of ‘Beauty/skincare’ posts result in a product purchase.
I seemed to get a lot of DIY. But in addition in about 1 in 12 cases the algorithm gives me Donald Trump doing or saying something stupid. I imagine that would come under ‘entertainment’. It would also however be generated by nothing I’m doing on YouTube but on the way the cookies embedded in the sites of the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times and various other platforms I frequent read my viewing preferences.
I am data on the internet. I have a shape. My appetite is known. I am being fed.
I could have been there for hours. I was. There was unrelenting supply. They’re short. They require very little concentration. Fundamental advice to constructors: ‘TikTok’s format encourages quick, engaging content, and videos around 7 seconds can be easily consumed and shared, making them more likely to capture attention quickly.’ Slurp. (Cheezels!!) They start big with an attention grabber and stay big with plenty of OMG! Did you see THAT moments. And what will the next one bring!?! They slide down like sandwiches made from Tip Top Supersoft White. They melt in your mind. You scarcely notice. It’s just that that roll of fat round your capacity to discriminate might be getting bigger, and the idea of cognitive load is becoming a distant, and rapidly evaporating, memory.
For when you’re making your own TikTok contributions here is a list of ‘5 steps proven in 2022 by a group of scientists to generate viral videos’ (ones with several hundred thousand views or more in a 24-48 hour period). They include: find out when your audience is tuned in and post at least four new videos a day (and not more than 10); use captions; use close ups not mid or long shots; shoot using the point of view of the viewer — probably all excellent ideas if that’s the mission you’re on.
But Number One is ‘Be Popular’. ‘Cultivating popularity is at the core of TikTok’s virality. Building a loyal following and establishing credibility within the TikTok community are key factors for success.’ That would probably be correct. I remember the popularity phenomenon from the early days of Facebook. ‘She wants to be my Friend? Who is she? At school? Really? That’s 30 years ago. Oh look here’s Roger. I thought he was dead. How many Friends have you got? I’ve got …’
Another strongly associated tip is to ‘Discover Your Niche’. ‘Social affiliation plays a crucial role in going TikTok viral. Humans are inherently social beings, driven by a desire to connect with others with similar interests.‘ And apparently, in a surprising number of cases, with a desire to hate anyone who doesn’t share them.
Because this list doesn’t contain some of the most important and well established ideas for going viral: Be Enraged. Be Outrageous. Farm Engagement. What A Joy It Is To Spread Conspiracy Theories. I’ll say anything, JUST GIVE ME YOUR ATTENTION. And this is not TikTok, which in this context appears utterly anodyne: it’s Musk’s Twitter/X, it’s Zuckerberg’s moderation-free Meta/Facebook, it’s 4chan where among other horrors you can actually watch libtards being violently assaulted and many million other websites, an enormous proportion of active sites.
And it’s Alex Jones claiming the Sandy Hook massacre of school children was a fake set-up.
Went viral with that one. 👍👏👍
On the 24th September 2012 on his website ‘Infowars’ Jones claimed that the shooting deaths of 20 primary-aged students and six of their teachers was a ‘giant hoax’ and ‘the fakest thing since the $3 bill.’ Daily revenues to the Infowars online store increased from $48,000 on Sept. 24 to more than $230,000 on Sept. 25. Total user sessions on the Infowars site increased from about 543,000 on Sept. 23 to about 1.8 million on Sept. 24. Success. (President-elect Donald Trump contributed a message of support at the time and promised not to let him down: ‘Alex has an amazing reputation.’) Relatives of the victims who have been harassed and threatened by Jones’ supporters (! can you believe that?!!) have not yet received one dollar of the eventual $85 million settlement which in any case would hardly make up for their loss. (I use this ageing example because the lawsuit it gave rise to provided relevant data and because of its particular egregiousness. If you want an example happening right now, well … look anywhere, but try Turtleboy.)
Hatred feeds on itself and spreads its targets. Suspicion is an appetite that is never fully sated. It’s emotion that counts. These media provide the (mostly anonymous) chance to rant. Publicly. The louder and weirder your rant, potentially, the bigger audience you will garner — and the more satisfied you will feel, the more endorphins will be released.
And that’s how you discover your niche, how you find out who your friends really are. This process will provide confirmation of what you already think cementing your views into the hardest concrete. (And this is so comprehensively established I need no references. Look up Confirmation Bias.)
I’ve got a friend who (like 38% of people who vote Republican in the US) thinks, believes, is supremely confident, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Obama’s birth certificate, which has been posted on the Internet, shows that he was delivered in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 P.M. Confirmation of these facts exists in the form of birth announcements that appeared in two Honolulu newspapers, the relevant pages of which have also been scanned and posted on the Web.
This became an issue during Obama’s Presidential campaign when a blog of a woman objecting to the possibility of his candidacy went viral. Obama’s campaign aides set up a website in response called Fight the Smears. On it, they posted a scan of his birth certificate. ‘Next time someone talks about Barack’s birth certificate, make sure they see this page,’ went the text.
Do the job? When those who had been ‘talking about’ Obama’s birth certificate looked at it on the Web, they found exactly what they thought they would. Some blogs noted that if the scan of the certificate was enlarged several times a light halo could be seen around each letter. The crosshatched border on the document did not seem to match the cross-hatching on another birth certificate issued in Hawaii around the same time. The scan did not show the raised seal required of an official state document.
‘The image is a horrible forgery,’ a self-described ‘forensic computer examiner’ calling himself Techdude declared in a blog on Atlas Shrugs. ‘Enough work has been done by photoshop experts to show that this is not a real document,’ ClearCase_guy asserted on the site Free Republic. “And that begs the question: WHY?‘ As indeed it does.
Apparently still operating under the assumption that people turn to the Web for information, the Obama campaign tried again. It allowed FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan research organization, to inspect the document at the campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago. ‘FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate,’ the group’s website announced on August 21, 2008. ‘Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.’ Nine high-resolution photos accompanied the post, showing the raised seal, as well as a set of creases.
‘I, for one, of course, am not surprised,’ JM Hanes wrote on the site JustOneMinute. ‘I mean he’s had more than two months to find a better forger.’ When, on October 31, 2008, Hawaii’s Director of Health, Chiyome Fukino, issued a statement saying that she had ‘personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record,’ she was dismissed as a plant (today, probably, a ‘DEI hire’). (This story is derived from an article in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert. Further evidence for its fake news-ishness?)
Nor has any of this had the slightest effect on the view of my very highly educated friend. He is a bit shocked by my credulity.
There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so untethered, so crazy, that he or she will not find other adherents on the internet. ‘Views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities,’ Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar and distinguished public servant writes. (The American Medical Association estimates that more than 85% of internet posts on cancer contain inaccurate or misleading information.) ‘The most striking power provided by emerging technologies is the growing power of consumers to “filter” what they see.’
He suggests, with evidence, that certain tendencies of the human mind interact badly with certain features of modern technology, much as certain prescription drugs interact badly with alcohol.
That was 15 years ago. What appears to have happened is that in a phenomenally crowded field the nonsense and worse, much worse, content has increasingly been validated by being mainstreamed, among other ways, through ideas about ‘Freedom of Speech’. After all measles can be sorted through diet and Vitamin A.
And after all — have I said this? Are you still there? — it’s only ATTENTION that matters. (HEY!!! Did you just see what that cat did with the ping pong ball and the fire hydrant! Holy smokes.)
Oh attention and um … well, the bottom line. ‘The content of these websites does not reveal the machinery of influencing, the deals signed, the nondisclosure agreements reached, the metrics used to measure the dollar value of the audience’s emotional response. It can look like information while carrying very little or no meaning. As long as it generates emotion the owners of the medium do everything they can to stop you taking any action that would harm their economic interests.’ McMillam Cotton in the New York Times 9/2/25.
There are two things I want to point out. Firstly, how ingenious the operation of the internet is and how extraordinarily it has drawn on popular creativity and given everyone a voice. Brilliant. Astonishing. Incredibly positive. There is no end to human ingenuity. Secondly, this process has latterly been driven by commerce rather than any wish to improve, or with much concern for, the quality of human and other life.
[Addendum, from The Everything Market Insider: ‘We are all drowning in this massive content space with podcasts, videos, and articles, among others. This will increase exponentially with Gen AI playing across content creation to delivery. Users will gravitate towards content that resonates with their interests and needs, and the social platforms’ continuous evolution of algorithms to focus on user behaviour, engagement, and preferences underscores this trend.
‘However, many brands are still not taking an audience-centric approach to creating content. Brands are creating content based on what they want to publish. While there’s a place and value for brand-voice content, brands will need to diversify their content strategies and content mix. With the rise of AI-generated content, it is not about producing more content but also considering the right content that aligns with the brand messaging while appealing to the nuanced preferences of your audience, ensuring that your content intersects with their FYPs.’ (For Your Page, a much sought after TikTok advisory for what you’d like.)’]
Life as Feels: a subset
If you want to know what’s going on the world watch at least a few minutes.This video has had more than 40 million views. It goes for an hour. It is one of dozens created by this person. She is one of thousands of people doing this. The message: scrape a book, don’t read it.
From The Guardian, 3/3/25:
Visceral videos of people playing with slime or braiding hair soothe those who feel overwhelmed by in-person contact
‘Younger adults are increasingly overwhelmed by in-person interaction and soothing themselves instead with sensory online content, according to a report on the wildly popular online content known as ASMR.
‘ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response – describes a particular sensory phenomenon that is triggered by specific sights or sounds, which usually begins with a tingling sensation across the scalp and results in feelings of deep calm and relaxation.
‘Platforms such as YouTube and TikTok are crammed with thousands of these visceral videos, in which ASMR creators play with squishy slime, role-play braiding the viewer’s hair, whisper loving affirmations or paint the camera lens with spit, all aimed at stimulating these “tingles”.
‘Now the award-winning behavioural insights agency Revealing Reality has published a landmark report on the phenomenon, interviewing viewers and creators of ASMR content and analysing thousands of videos based on common triggers – such as exaggerated whispering, breathing and mouth sounds, tapping and crinkling sounds, gentle or fluttering hand movements – which many people use to help them unwind and sleep.’
• • • • • • • • •
I can’t bring myself to write anything about this.
Life as AI
‘The proportion [of British tertiary students] using AI tools [to submit written work] surged from 66% in 2024 to 92% in 2025, meaning just 8% of students are not using AI, according to a report published by the Higher Education Policy Institute and Kortext, a digital etextbook provider.
‘Josh Freeman, the report’s author, said such dramatic changes in behaviour in just 12 months were almost unheard of, and warned: “Universities should take heed: generative AI is here to stay.”‘ ‘UK universities warned to ‘stress-test’ assessments as 92% of students use AI’ The Guardian 24/2/25
And what that means is that you have to learn how to use one of the AI apps, but that would be about it.
Not only will IT hyper process your diet, it will eat it for you too.
• • • • • • • • •• • • • • • • • •
Life as Something Else
I said Hurricane Dorian is going into Alabama, and I think it will. You can see the line. Alabama. Great State Alabama. Very good line, one of the best. Same sort of pen I use for my signature. A great signature … probably World’s Best.
In this story Trump is not the problem; he is a symptom. He was elected, albeit narrowly and with some voters at least expressing buyers’ remorse, because he was able to find a sufficiently large bloc of people living out their media lives, social and otherwise, as reality. He was perfectly tailored for this role, his shameless unfitness actually being a major drawcard. This is hyper processed food making itself hyper palatable at a scale difficult to imagine and with potentially dreadful consequences.
Alarmist? When radio was broadcast for the first time in the early 20th century there were critics who thought that it would generate confusion and hysteria. For the first time you could send unfettered material into people’s living rooms, a process which couldn’t be regulated or stopped. Then there were the issues with the advent of TV which I am old enough to remember. It would rot children’s minds. They would sit there in front of the idiot box (yes, the idiot box, you may remember) goggle-eyed, not do their homework, and go to bed with their head full of rubbish.
Is this situation different? Here are three reasons why it could be.
One is scale. It hardly needs saying just how big and diverse the social media phenomenon is, and how rapidly it is changing. In front of your eyes it expands in all sorts of directions and in ways you can’t anticipate. (TikTok, for example, began in 2016 but has only really been going bang for six years. Just wait for the impact of AI. You will not believe it.) And of course, although I’ve been focusing on the US, it is a world-wide phenomenon. From past work I remember that Indonesians are the heaviest users of social media in the world. You can find connection in the Brazilian rainforests and the Norwegian tundra, literally anywhere you’d like to look. And you can find the same sorts of things happening in Turkiye, Hungary, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, East Germany, Holland, … and serious attempts going on to find that audience in Australia. (Not as developed yet Dutts. It will be.)
A second reason is the nature and distributed form of engagement. Television was thought to be a particularly a problematic case because it combined image with sound and was thus vastly more impactful. But even so it was just received. Now you can answer back. Immediately. And, if you want to be in the game, you must. Everyone is or can be a publisher; this time it really is unfettered, and extremely powerful ways have been found of building your involvement. An incredibly sophisticated understanding of your cognitive bliss point has evolved, so much of which is emotion and so much of which can be rage. Fox Media and Murdoch’s journals might light the fuse, but the explosion occurs in your head and comes out via your typing fingers.
And the last is the ways in which this experience is monetized. So many ways, so very many ways. Netflix subscriptions, iCloud storage, WordPress payments are too obvious. You’d forgotten Alex Jones’ merch, Belle Gibson’s cancer cure tonics and Gwyneth Paltrow’s vaginal candles. The impression left after reading quite a lot of material about digital marketing is that it has become another economy with its own identity and rules and in the end not a thousand miles away from the scam which is bitcoin.
Thinking about the past American moguls, you could travel on their railroads, you could use their banks, you could put their petrol in your car which they had made for you. But what’s the product you’re consuming here? It’s somewhere in the air. You have to be persuaded it exists, you have to be persuaded of its fundamental necessity, you have to be persuaded that it’s one of the core functions of your life. And of course that’s happened. Could you live without digital connection? (Lost your phone? Bloody hell. What are you going to do now?) You don’t have to be persuaded any more; you and your friends are doing the companies’ work for them. That transition has occurred, is well over. You WILL pay because you MUST.
• • • • • • • • •
I haven’t neglected the obvious point that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, be writing this and you wouldn’t be getting it without access to these technological miracles. I am not trying to make a moral point here, just here anyway. It is just something that has happened: clever boys have run wild, driven by vivid and striking imaginings. You can make a lot of money, that’s part of it; and, like any mogul you can accumulate a lot of power. But, like clever boys who have run wild, they haven’t really been thinking about what they are doing and the whole range of its consequences.
Musk’s Twitter posts provide an outstanding illustration. After reading them — they were a must read for the industry — a social media executive said: ‘The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks so fucking dumb. It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.’
In other words, like a reactive organism rather than a cognate and civil being. This is also the biggest impact for their customers. Some — not all of course, but enough to elect Trump — are being turned from cognate and civil beings into reactive organisms. It’s not the amount of screen time although that matters; its the new ‘language’, in the broadest sense, of the content, and its violence. The ‘Like’ button changed everything.
• • • • • • • • •
There are two precious things at risk.
I have long thought that rationality in the sense that I want to use it here is a very fragile thing. It’s not something that you grow into automatically. It’s like a foreign language that has to be learnt over time and with a great deal of practice. Even then its use might not become habitual.
What am I talking about? We leap backwards to the Enlightenment where, to the chagrin of the church, a number of ideas about rationality and rational process were established. In no particular order and just for example, how to investigate causal relationships, how to explore and identify patterns in data, how to use and talk about the relevance and usefulness of various forms of evidence, the very idea of a fact and the separation of fact and fantasy and fact and opinion, and the value and practice of objectivity. If you had to summarise, you might describe this as a search for truth, an explanation of the world around you in which anyone could have confidence. Science from the Latin scientia, ‘observing and understanding our surroundings’.
I don’t think these are natural or instinctive behaviours. They are hard won byproducts of formal education, and always need protection and support. They are now being associated with behaviour by the ‘elites’ … the untrustworthy ‘elites’ whose only purpose in life is to shore up their own comfort, ease and security in their gilded towers and who also try to force everybody to respect choice of pronoun, Welcome to Country and men changing in the girls’ toilets. You say you’re an expert … well so am I. IMHO I know as much as you do because I’m alive.
Do these notions of rational process matter? They are artificial constructs but they are functional to the point of absolute necessity. Forget making fighter planes or flying to Mars, do you cross bridges with confidence? Do you have electricity? Does hot water run out of your tap? How is the pipe that brings that water fabricated? How are the plants you eat grown and nurtured? How do you avoid measles? Vaccination would be my choice, but then you might have another idea. Freedom of Speech. By the way have you seen the TikTok with the dog counting beans?
The idea of objective versions of truth has no obvious purchase on Trump and his crew. Acting as influencers for the influencable, they consistently model the way it can be ignored. But, on the other hand, they are operating in an increasingly fertile and newly supportive ‘I have alternative facts’ environment.
The second is the disruption of the social compact, the set of taken-for-granted understandings by which, for example, you are polite to people you don’t know, that you take turns, that you queue, that you are generous to people who are clearly less well off than you are, that you win with grace and speak courteously of your opponents, that you respect people’s right to air their views, that as a default you look for common ground. There’s those ones, and then there’s ones like accepting the outcome of a fairly contested election, respecting the legislative process, not interfering with the rule of law, trying to promote peaceful and constructive relationships in both micro and macro contexts.
For decades, for the term of my life, those things have been left lie, understood as ways you probably should behave. It’s how you train kids at primary school — a very good marker. You don’t always follow through of course, but if you think about it you assume they’re the optimum position. And you think that without detailed investigation. It’s just how things are. Obvious. We need to bump along together. Two lots of supporters can go to the footy and sit next to each other without getting into fights. Who’s going to try to pick that apart? It’s good. It’s how we get by. That’s all.
[WHAAAAAT! You think that? You’re a fucking idiot mate. Tell me your address and I’ll fucking dox you and your fucking mother.#auntie_jean]
What if you say manners are rubbish, you can just ignore them? Or, who said you have to be polite, or thoughtful, or considerate? What’s the comeback? Well dear, it’s a convention we have. Everybody does it or should do it. You don’t have to think about it.
‘A democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.‘
We depend so much on stable assumptions and expectations which are rarely subject to contest. When the hammer drill of social media, some social media, is applied to them the whole situation becomes far more insecure. And YOUR side is just as guilty of this as MY side.
‘It identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
‘These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.’
The ‘lefty’ ‘liberal’ ‘Cancel Culture’ warriors are at least as culpable for the current situation — and probably for Trump’s win — as ‘the MAGA base’. The content of the conflict is almost irrelevant. It’s the conflict and all its testosterone-fuelled thrills that count. Fuck the damage. Fuck the consequences. My-rocks-are-off.
• • • • • • • • •
I know. You don’t eat much processed food. Yeah I know that. Me neither. You watch the ABC, maybe a bit of Britbox. Uh huh. You’ve forgotten to cancel your Netflix subscription. Yeah. Me too. You’re not on Socials except for a bit of Facebook to see what the kids are up to, but you don’t spend much time on it. Digital news media? Oh yeah sure. A couple of feeds. You’ve got Foxtel too? Yeah but just for the footy. You watch Sky every now and again, heh heh, to be honest just to get furious with that poor old prick Andrew Bolt and those preening young girls they have on. Like Rita Panahi, who the fuck does she think she is! Peta Credlin! Tony Abbot in drag you mean! You spend a bit of time, I know surfing is an archaic term, an anachronism, but surfing, seeing what’s around. Quite a bit of time really. Check things on Google. Someone said the other day, ‘Remember when people didn’t know things?’ I do, but I’m a bit of an outlier. You?
• • • • • • • • •
I have mentioned the SBS program that set me off thinking about this business. Another prompt was the sight of an apparently demure 60 year-old Texan woman walking down a road wearing a cape embroidered with ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ in enormous letters.
This was a third:
According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are ineligible to join the armed forces, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record.
It came from an article about the shortage of personnel in the American armed forces. It surely couldn’t be right I thought. Couldn’t be. I chased the source and it came from Military News Daily, what appears to be a sophisticated and authentic recruitment news site connected to the military.
But, like, who knows? The Zone is flooded with shit.
Yes. ‘Sunday’. Ken Done. Dominant in its gold frame at the public threshold of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The attached note says: ‘Sunday was painted from a beach house on the Wyargine Point in Sydney Harbour that Ken Done calls “The Cabin” nestled into the landscape of Rosherville Reserve and overlooking picturesque Chinaman’s Beach. … While Sunday was painted from and inspired by this setting, Done says it’s not a direct representation. It “reflects a feeling that shows the joy of being in this space. The pattern of the clouds, the boats, the people on the beach … it is a feast. And if colour is a language, then the language for Sunday is joy.”‘
It would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Ken Done? Not to be taken seriously. A bit awful really. Hopelessly commercial. For tea towels, place mats, cheap scarves, possibly swimwear; and for people who don’t know anything about art.
But, frankly,how absolutely correct that placement is: Sydney as it would like to see itself and sometimes is. Gorgeous.
The Harbour was covered with scales of sun glitter, the bridge exhibited itself like a formidable flexed (and symmetrical) bicep, the Opera House was perched on Bennelong’s Point like a ruffled cockie. And then in the evening there was the breeze, an erotic whisper, the fag end of the Southerly Buster massaging your sensibilities and because it is summer leaving dainty beads of humid sweat.
Melbourne to live, but Sydney for a visit.
We’d come as the final leg of the Tour de Siblings to celebrate my 75th birthday — we’re all getting on — and this was to see 90 year-old Dorothy. I thought we would stay at Kings Cross. I hadn’t been there for a while and the station is handy. It was also just a walk to her church in Waterloo where we would meet.
I had some uncertainties about the accommodation I’d booked and paid for. It had been very hard, impossible actually, to get in touch with the property owners to find out, for example, how we would get in. So I was disappointed rather than flabbergasted to arrive at a laundrette with no obvious place to sleep or make a cup of tea. I had two ideas in my pocket. The first provided a room but with no view and we needed some offset for our distress. The second — the Hotel Indigo, warmly recommended — had everything we needed including wide perspectives through our windows over Woolloomooloo to the city.
The Cross has tidied up and gentrified since I last looked, especially the Potts Point end (which was always pretty schmick).
In the 1930s buildings of this sort
were replaced by buildings of this sort
with entrances like this.
Art Noveau Deco run wild. [There now Graham. Okay now?] And after nearly a century they’d still be good those apartments.
Just for the memories.
The Gazebo, the ‘Gazza’, once a hotel and for a long time my Sydney accommodation of choice, now apartments and a distinctive building visible from many points of the skyline.
I knew this was the El Alamein Fountain but thought it was located in Anzac Square. I now discover that acre of paving and concrete is the Lambert Peninsula National Park and think that to be a bit weird.
The walk from the Cross to South Sydney Uniting ambles its way through the tree-lined streets of Darlinghurst and Redfern full of blunt but picturesque Georgian cottages tight to the footpath. Every 100 or 150 metres there are hole-in-the-wall places with a dozen boxes or stools on the footpath where people eat pain au chocolat and drink coffee. Runners pad past in their leisure wear; torsos often naked for the men, nearly so for the women. Buff bodies everywhere. Gay couples (in the week before Mardi Gras) lean in to each other, sublimely indifferent to public interest. These streets are theirs.
There are cities in the world that would kill for areas like this. There are other cities which would kill them off promptly and decisively.
Dorothy is 90, a sweetheart and a bit of a dag. As well as that she is the Reverend Dorothy McRae-McMahon, resolute pioneer of the place of women in the church, the author of a dozen popular books of liturgy, and a warrior — without necessarily meaning to be so, it came to her as naturally as breathing — for the rights of the downtrodden.
She has a gift for saying and writing things that people can connect with, especially those living with trouble, helping to ease their pain. God has spoken to her mysteriously but directly. Her certainty of that is complete. You can make of that what you will but in her line of work it is practical.
For many years she was the minister at Pitt St Uniting in the heart of the city. But now she is a parishioner at South Sydney, a most remarkable church on the southern fringe of its inner suburbs. The church property is 100m from Redfern Park where the Rabbitohs used to play, and more saliently where Paul Keating gave the Redfern Address, still a vivid reminder of what all Australians should know, remember and take to heart: “It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol.”
The church’s congregation is unusually diverse: in terms of sex and gender; in terms of affluence; in terms of cultural and ethnic background; in terms of education; in terms of health and wellbeing; in terms of drug of choice (which might be Ceremonial Grade matcha). Dogs, kids, people in off the street looking for some shelter just absorbed into the mass which I remember on my visits as being striking for its relaxed intimacy. Stuff going on all over the place, but still having a purposeful shape, capped off with a shared feed.
That’s a church service. But a year ago. Various parts of the church building are being renovated because the Sydney sandstone of its decorative front has turned out to be porous and flakey. The service I went to most recently was held in a community centre a short way down the road. But just the same sort of thing. Everyone publicly welcomed by name, the minister providing the homily but not a lot else. There were a dozen ways to contribute and perhaps 20 people did, reading lessons, providing notices, or mentioning people and their situation to be remembered in thoughts and prayers.
One reason I wanted to use this photo is because Andrew Collis is in it. It is shared magic, but he’s the magician. Slight, quiet, but both deft and definite, he is such an admirable presence. There is not the slightest sense of disorder, nor is there anything about these services that is dumbed down. A lot of the ideas discussed are chewy and testing.
The text for that Sunday’s thinking out loud — like everything else, so carefully prepared — was Luke 4: 14-30, a curly one made more so by the reality of its rendering.
Jesus goes home to Nazareth and at the synagogue reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.” He rolls up the scroll and sits down. You can see it. This is direct reportage. Then he says, ‘It’s me. You heard it here first. I’m the one.’ After the ‘That’s Joseph’s lad though isn’t it? I thought he was a carpenter’ moment, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”
There follows a bit of to and fro where Jesus seems to be demanding to be a prophet but without honour in his own country. The history of prophecy, he suggests, is that people like Elijah and Elisha largely ignored local issues and did their best work elsewhere. But “when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” A sharp turn, about which you’d like more detail for full comprehension. However, and what might or might not be the moral of the story: “But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
It’s a story with its share of puzzles, but this day it seemed to be about courage in the midst of adversity, about adhering to your principles, about being honest and open regardless of the consequences. And that would all fit.
Andrew has been there for 10 years and I imagine the fact that there is a garden and chooks in a chook pen at the back of the church might be at least indirectly down to him. I grow in confidence when I look at the list of the church’s working groups: Arts, Mirrung Garden, Hospitality, Ministry Development, Property and Finance, Safe Church, and the ‘South Sydney Herald’ a monthly with a circulation of 10,000. How do these things grow out of such apparently sparse resources? Andrew has been there for 10 years, but for only a few weeks longer. I hope another hero emerges.
This might be the modern church everywhere. I don’t know. I’m not an adherent. I don’t as a rule go to church. But this is the ultimate Anti-Trumpism, alive and well. However modestly, ‘Great’ in actuality rather than as a word on a red cap. This is lived and productive and sustaining diversity, equity and inclusion — the much maligned DEI — and proof that it can happen at least somewhere and be beneficial for all concerned.
• • • • • •
Finally the gallery seems to have been tarted up. There’s better stuff in the new building; there has been some re-hanging among the Victorians for the first time in living memory; the Asian section has been re-imagined. My arts correspondent tells me there is a new director. This turns out to be only prospectively true. July. So it wasn’t that. Just time for a bit of house-keeping, and the revelation again of the superior quality of the AGNSW’s Indigenous collection.
A fine way to finish. Ginger Reilly at his best: Nyamiyukanji, the river country with gnak gnak, Ginger’s Jukurrpa, in the foreground.
The correct answer which you probably will have had at your fingertips is: Pretty Bloody Good. That would be my view certainly as well as this young gentleman’s. Liebig Street, humming, ice cream shop doing good business, Hole in the Wall coffee shop mopping up the last caffeine-heads of the day, an on-shore breeze moderating as much heat as the Western District can muster, The Whalers getting ready to feed a crowd. The Bool: 12.81% of a Geelong, so … substantial. How good? Bloody good.
What’s it got? The beach for a start.
And it’s far enough away from The Big Smoke (258 kms) to discourage day trippers. Getting there requires a commitment. The weather mightn’t necessarily draw you unless you enjoy variety and majestic southerlies.
It has Tower Hill, where you will find emus which, as in this case, may boldly reach forward and snatch from your lap the apple slice from Wyton of Warrnambool (‘Beautiful selection of interesting baked goods, salads and impressive desserts in a classy-yet-casual atmosphere’) you’ve been really looking forward to eating and scoff it in a threatening manner in four (4) seconds. Culprit at left.
It has a gallery where you are very likely to find Indigenous representation, this time from Kait James a proud Wadawurrung woman who lives in Melbourne: Treaty Barbie, large and small, and poor old Cookie taking another pasting.
It has, well lots of churches, heaps of churches. It has been a very god-fearing location in its day. But it has this Uniting Church which has in the past been the main Methodist church (once served by Meredith Freeman’s father).
I like the original building which is just a tiny bit Frank Lloyd Wright and unlike any of the other churches in The Bool.
This photo is included however, not just for the cyclist, but because our accomodation overlooked the entry to the church (now at the rear). Sunday service was about 25-30, not a bad roll up, but unless there is a successful recruitment drive focused on people under 70, I wondered if there would be anyone at all there in 10 years time. The new wing at left is a very well patronised early education centre. At the rear is a large accommodation complex for the elderly. Between them is a large and busy public car park on church property. I am reminded of the three nuns of Belorado in northern Spain who despite being excommunicated refused to leave their expansive and highly valuable property. I am thinking that as the congregation declines the worth of the church (in the centre of town) and its operations will increase and not necessarily proportionately. And I find that interesting and wonder how that situation will resolve itself.
Elsewhere Extreme Life is offered.
Although it has ‘Zero Tolerance for Disrespectful or Abusive Behaviour’. What the hell has been going on in there?
But perhaps above all The Bool is a land of symmetry and order. In its treatment of lawn, for example, I have thought it may indeed be the Service Club capital of at least the Southern Hemisphere.
Just here is someone trying to break out.
Five parallel planes including the most regularly creamy bricks capped appropriately in Mission Brown glazed terra cotta carried upwards through the property to the highest roofline. What’s with the bits of sandstone? Do they want to muck it all up? It can only be a misunderstanding.
But we’re on lanes.
We’ve been to The Bool a lot. We go there by choice, not misadventure. Strong choice, and enjoy it each time. I know there is a certain amount of public art (and it is a stronghold of live music!) but this is the first time I’ve really noticed the lanes. I don’t know how this has shaken down but the blocks of the CBD are big and their hinterlands are accessed by lanes, some for cars and some for pedestrians. There is a bit of decoration via intentional art, but I thought in the vistas they offered, maybe with the lurid colours of a Toyworld or a Chemist Warehouse in the background, they also provided some sense of the place, its flatness and order. But also a lot of unintentionally attractive aesthetics.
Maybe it’s just me. Okay. It’s just me. But here are some of them. (You may be wondering where those 35 thousand four hundred and six people are and I can’t tell you. They’re not at the beach.)
Yes. I’ve convinced myself. They’re wonderful.
And I’m not sure if this is my favourite photo from our recent visit but there are good vibes floating out of it: the East Warrnambool Milk Bar where you (and especially the overseas reader) may not have been. Didn’t look promising initially but great salad rolls and excellent coffee. And, really, fair dinkum, what a Cherry Ripe.
Go The Bool. Love The Bool. Be back in the winter to watch the footy.
A collection of pics that didn’t really go anywhere else of things I’d like to rememberfrom Japan in 2024.
Atmospheric. At an izakaya (small neighbourhood pub that serves food and beer) under the main northern rail line flyover near Tokyo Central Station. It’s hot and the end of a long day. We are eating edamame (‘A great source of plant-based protein, fibre, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals. It is also low in calories’) and salad and, like the gentlemen nearby, drinking excellent Japanese beer.
Our bedroom at the Sonic Apartment Hotel in Dazaifu. Plenty of bed, not much room. I am standing in the shower.
Where salarymen have their smokes in central Tokyo, but you need a phone as well.
Korakuen (‘Lake Paradise’) of Okayama, one of the four ‘Great Gardens of Japan’. Michael and Myrna thought it was pretty good. I was disappointed. I wanted more variety and inventiveness in the layout. But what do I know?
A motorbike shop over the road from our hotel in Nagasaki. There was something about the busy-ness of the illuminated highlights and also the way the T-shirt rises so ghostfully out of the machines.
The trams and tram stops of Nagasaki. Trams several decades old with very peculiar driving control mechanisms which produce a great deal of jerking, but otherwise just so functional. And cheap to ride. Panels at each tram stop include a stylish floral decoration.
Nagasaki again. Looking closely behind Myrna you can see the tori which became one-legged after the atomic explosion. But to the right arrayed along the hedge behind the seat and protected by bollards is all the rest of it. A fine act of remembrance.
This is some of what sits under the red heart on your iPhone. Often not terribly reliable. If you want to know exactly where and how far you’ve walked you need another version of a GPS. Or a GPS. Either will soak up a large amount of power. The red heart doesn’t. Usually you don’t even notice what it’s up to. And as for being accurate I’m sure it didn’t know what time I went to bed and may have interpreted being carried around as being awake. It doesn’t seem to have registered how my walking asymmetry was going — it would have to have been much worse than that as I staggered along. On the other hand, I’m not sure how it registers ‘Flights climbed’ but 237 both seems about right, and seems like a lot. That benchmark edifice, the Empire State Building has 102 floors and the tallest building in the world Burj Khalifa in Dubai only has 163. There is some suggestion that a ‘floor’ equals 3m. which would make sense. So we might have climbed 711 m. How much is that? The Empire State is 381m high. Burj Khalif is 828m, but only 585m can be occupied. This was the last day on the Kumano Kodo and my sense of things is that all that’s missing is the additional descent of 237 floors.
The walls and power poles of Kyoto. So good looking and such an expansive policy. I hope he got in.
Tokyo’s National Art Centre. A photo of a photo from an art society’s massive biannual exhibition. Stairs, pain, effort, teamwork, artificially added difficulty, a religious icon. Can you get more Japanese than that?
Shibuya. Rich Tokyo. He is not part of the display. He has simply walked in for a photo. The heads are wagging backwards and forwards, up and down. I think the eyes opened and shut as well. It is a sunglasses shop.
Takeshita Street, Harajuku, a suburb of Tokyo. Somewhere everyone should visit to be reminded how much variety there is in the world. (See also The Substrate.) Thrilled to have her photo taken. This was just over the street from the Micropig Cafe. I have video of this which I can’t load here which would show small pigs running over people sitting on the floor of a room. In this instance these people include our granddaughters along with another customer who appears to have three pigs climbing on her one of which might be being kissed. Otters were also an option.
One of the reasons we went to Japan was because Simon, our son-in-law, wanted to see Mt Fuji again. Fuji-san, one of Japanese Buddhism’s three sacred mountains, peak 3776m above sea level 600m higher than any other Japanese mountain, World Heritage Site, social and cultural icon, Japan’s national visual branding. And very often hidden by cloud. And that’s pretty much how it was for the three days Simon and family spent at Kawaguchi. It might have peeped out once.
It’s our last night in Japan and I’m cleaning my teeth in our hotel bathroom. Peer out the window … and look it might be Tanzawa but, right direction right size, I’m calling it Fuji.
the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment.
I liked this. In fact I loved it. I loved it all. ‘Adventures in Memory’, a massive retrospective of the works of Keiichi Tanaami which opened at Tokyo’s National Art Centre just as he died at the age of 88. It simply teemed with life and vitality, an electric sensibility pouring out versions of the fantasmagoria assembled in his mind. Room after room after room.
(He had a thing about bridges which he assigns to an early experience of Hokusai’s ‘One Hundred Bridges in One View‘.) It wasn’t just the ones on the walls which you might think of as messy. He seemed able to do anything, and so much of anything: collage, 3-D sculptures on all sorts of scales, storyboards, toys, magazine layouts, marketing art, video, a wall of his own thoroughly credible ‘Picassos’ as per the Dora Maar period.
And this is him.
Expressionless, opaque. Those art works emerged from him.
This seems to me to be such a telling photograph. Can we say that simmering underneath the so carefully ordered and stable surface of Japan is something quite different to which art provides a clue? Japan? Japanese? Generalisations are always flawed, ridiculously flawed, but I have to think so. Perhaps it’s obvious. It’s certainly not an original idea. That surface order — Myrna was scolded and firmly redirected after she had walked the ‘wrong way’ round a room in a gallery at Nagasaki — must surely disguise a tumultuous underground, heaving, wild, passionate, perverse, transgressive … and sometimes, often, great fun.
• • • • • • • •
Soon to be the subject of a major exhibition in Melbourne, Yayoi Kusama is known for her dots, pumpkins and ‘infinity nets’. Above, Myrna is sitting at the site of a major retrospective in Kusama’s home town of Matsumoto where we also found reasonably contemporary versions of her ‘infinity nets’.
Critic Claire Voon has described Kusama’s mirror exhibits as being able to ‘transport you to a quiet cosmos, to a lonely labyrinth of pulsing light, or to what could be the enveloping innards of a leviathan with the measles’, a witty and insightful comment on their absorbing and otherwise anodyne nature.
This pumpkin of hers is how visitors to Naoshima, the ‘art island’ in Japan’s inland sea, are greeted.
No collection of contemporary Japanese art would be complete without her being represented. But for that work. Not this.
Yayoi Kusama, 1969, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MOMA
She left Japan — ‘too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women’ — for the United States when she was 27. I think it would be fair to say that she had considerable trouble establishing a presence. She was also left reeling from the theft of several of her ideas by Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. Female, Japanese … short, what chance did she have really? Her recourse was to very public nudity and very public sex. She had found another surface for her dots. And another way to work out her demons.
She became briefly famous at the time for offering to have sex with Richard Nixon if he stopped the Viet Nam war.
When she returned to Japan she was modestly famous, but for being a ‘Scandal Queen’. Matsumoto Secondary School expunged any reference to her from the relevant Year Book and school records, one of many forms of social elision which she incurred at the time. She committed herself to a mental hospital where she chose to live for some years. It was the late 1990s before her work began drawing interest, the interest which exploded — EXPLODED — internationally a bit over a decade ago. She describes the purpose of her work as ‘self-obliteration’. This has not come to pass.
The exterior of Louis Vuitton on the Champs Elysees
• • • • • • • •
Yasumasa Morimura, who we found in another major exhibition at the Osaka Gallery a few years ago, has found another form of ‘self-obliteration’.
This is one of a series of 16 works ‘Revolutionising the World through Personal Pain: An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo’. And yes that’s him.
So’s that. A photo of a made up and painted face, jacket and background.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. What’s he look like? Like that I suppose. No idea. Or perhaps like this, standing at the window in his version of Vermeer’s studio.
His work extends far beyond these portraits of ‘self as others’. His series dismantling and rebuilding Velazquez’s Las Meninas, ‘What the painter was looking at’ … What can I say? So many brilliant tricks, so many trompes of the oeil, so much fertility in the imagination, such brilliant craft skills. And so gloriously nutty.
He is not playing by the rules.
• • • • • • • •
In Nagasaki we found the works of a local, Chihiro Watanabe. Incredibly skilful woodcuts and mezzotints. This one was called ‘The Weekend’. Mesmerising. Look at it carefully for a few moments. There is so much going on. Find the cat for example. (Top left.) What’s the date on the boot? (1979) Where’s the road sign? (Top right.) What’s the wave made out of? (Goodness knows, but it’s chunky.) That back wheel … (He might be mending it …?) It repays.
But even apart from the eventful bike ride, how’s he feeling?
A lot going on there.
• • • • • • • •
The figure. I must say something about the figure.
There were, of course, colour field abstractions on show. Below is one of the very good ones we saw, in Kyoto this time quite close to the line of figures above. (Even with this one there are glimpses of ‘the figure’, dressed arrows, the eyes.)
But what I want to say is that there is a focus on the figure in contemporary Japanese art that is marked and that you mightn’t find elsewhere. And also that it is a particular form of concentration.
The figures I am referring to are not portraits. The ‘figures’ are not contemplative or pensive or just sitting or standing there. They’ve got a cloud and a bucket of water with someone swimming in it on their head. Or they’re encircled by a dragon. They are embedded in a narrative. To understand them you must look further, you must see more. They are action. Like in a cartoon. (What does Tanaami’s work remind you of after all?) Like in manga. Like in hentai. It would not be enough for me to do a drawing of you however outstanding, however perfect, or realistic. I would have to do something that made it BOUNCE into a story.
• • • • • • • •
In Tokyo we also found an exhibition of a selection from Ryutaro Takahashi’s massive collection of contemporary art (more than 3,400 works) at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Takahashi initially wanted to be an artist, but exposure to work by Yayoi Kusama when a student ‘made him aware of the limitations of his own talent’ and he returned to medical studies and became a psychiatrist. Who knows what he found in art to make him such an avid and perspicacious collector (and how he could afford it!), but what he has collected would be the equal or better of all but a few of the major galleries in Japan. (What he does with it all when it is not on display is another rather pedestrian but for me unavoidable question.) But it was on display, and it provided a comprehensive survey of contemporary Japanese art.
I liked this as much as anything else.
Manabu Ikeda, 2006, History of Rise and Fall
It is heavily populated (not least by birds); in fact it is packed with life and detail which you can’t really see here. My apologies. The work below by Makoto AidaHarakiri Schooldays will be more legible.
As will these works by Takashi Murakami.
The octopus eats its own leg
This one is called Embodiment of “A” and, typical of guardians of shrines, it has a partner, Embodiment of “Um”. This was initially part of an exhibition called ‘Japan Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters’.
My case doesn’t rest here, but there is enough evidence to wonder about the substrate from which all this has grown.
And just by the way, how compelling is it that a psychiatrist is collecting this (wonderful) material?
And now … this is Jamboree-EP, 39 blocks of camphor wood carved by Mori Osamu (at left) collectively about 4 metres high. And yes, Elvis, Fat Elvis, with a superbly carved face. Iconic figure. The first universal celebrity. Maybe. Probably. Here in the middle of a signature gesture (with, what, ‘Suspicious Minds’ coming out of his mouth?) our attention is drawn to the fact that he has a broken finger. Broken off that is. Below a tuft of chest hair he has spectacular female breasts, or at least breasts constructed as spectacle. His left hand is caressing what can only be his erect penis. And he seems to be sitting on a pile of his own shit.
A lot of buttons are being pressed here. What are we to do with it? So many taboos to manage at once. Is disgust the only possible reaction, and if so why? In the flesh so to speak, when I was there looking at it I didn’t want to look away. There is something mighty about its transgressions, something that insists on your attention, insists on examining the nature of your responses — because there will be more than one. What are those breasts about? Why so much shit? Is it representative? Perhaps of all the rubbish, literal and figurative, that he consumed? Can I aggregate the sum of its parts, can I put it all together … and if so what have I constructed? What is it? Or is it too much to manage?
A lot of buttons are being pressed here. You might forget the work and think about the artist. What was he up to and why? Like Kusama, did he feel he needed to make a splash, a name for himself, by going above and beyond so many conventional boundaries? I am inclined to think that — as might happen with a lot of artistic construction — he became immersed in this monster project (yes, a monster project) and like us having to make of it what we will, so does he.
A lot of buttons are being pressed here. I didn’t want to look away. There is something so enormously pungent about it. It was the highlight of an astonishing exhibition.
• • • • • • • •
There is no doubt that personal trauma may play some role sometimes in feeding and shaping the substrate which produces such vividly crackling art work.
Going right back to the start of this blog, Keiichi Tanaami’s artist’s statement was unusually clear, honest and informative. It began:
“I was rushed away from my childhood, a time that should be filled with eating and playing, by the enigmatic monstrosity of war; my dreams were a vortex of fear and anxiety, anger and resignation. On the night of the air raid [in 1945; he was nine], I remember watching swarms of people flee from bald mountaintops. But then something occurs to me: was that moment real? Dream and reality are all mixed up in my memories, recorded permanently in this ambiguous way.” As expressed in his work, those memories are full of American planes, searchlights, bomb blasts, ‘crimson flames covering the entire night sky, flickering and wavering in a semi-circle like an enormous arched bridge … a stunningly beautiful yet terrifying sight to behold.’
Yayoi Kusama was born at a similar time. Her experience of the war included being pressed to work in a factory sewing parachute materials. She describes this time as ‘living in closed darkness … listening to air raid alerts.’ Prior to this she suffered at the hand of an abusive mother who besides destroying her art works insisted that she spy on her philandering father. ‘I don’t like sex’, she has said. ‘I had an obsession with sex. When I was a child, my father had lovers and I experienced watching him with them. My mother sent me to spy on him. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone for years […] The sexual obsession and fear of sex sit side by side in me.’
There might be stories of this type shared more widely by some of the artists who feature here. A whole section of Ryutaro Takahashi’s exhibition was organised around the impact and associated trauma of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima disaster. The curator of the exhibition thinks this is a category.
But I look at these works and commonly think religion, Japanese religion. Sometimes very clearly for the forms, almost copies in some cases, but also for their stories and teeming and unusual populations, their ‘figures’. And ‘religion’ meaning something a bit different, meaning something like the background stories that shape our understanding of ourselves.
• • • • • • • •
Shinto is the oldest and most pervasive of Japan’s religions. It proposes an animated world. Kami, spirits, can be found in rocks, rivers, mountains, trees, and most definitely in waterfalls. They can and do influence the trajectory of your life in complex and enigmatic ways. Their effects may be benign or malevolent. It is a world in motion which is unsystematic and heavily subject to your own imaginings.
Japanese Buddhism is its close friend and near relation, a very fine example of syncretism, ‘the [often scarcely conscious] amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought’. (In my blog about Nagasaki and Dejima I mentioned how the Catholic priests returning to Japan after 200 years found thousands of professing Christians but whose brand of Christianity was virtually unrecognisable. Kannon hadn’t simply been substituted for Mary; she had become Mary.)
In the past I have imagined Buddhist thought and practice this way. Human beings are not so much consistent individual physical entities as collections of constantly changing bundles of energy influenced by karma (the choices being made and the conditions in which that energy is operating). The task of improvement includes freeing yourself from the anchorage of the senses and the bondage of egotism. Self improvement is an intensely private journey driven by personal responsibility. Buddha was not a god. He was a man who found a/ the path to enlightenment which begins with the realisation and acknowledgement that life entails suffering. We don’t worship images or even seek comfort from them.
But I have been corrected. This is not as many others far more closely connected to the religion would have it.
The version of Buddhism established by the Japanese empire for several centuries was Shingon (‘True Word’) Buddhism. Shugendo (‘the path of training and testing’) which provides the religious flavour of the Kumano Kodo, evolved from that, as well as Shinto, animism and many other influences. But it is still described as Buddhism.
The point: these streams of Japanese Buddhism are so heavily populated by bosatsu they make the Roman Catholic Communion of Saints seem modest and responsible.
What are bosatsu? Well they are sometimes bodhisattvas, the literal interpretation, enlightened beings who have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment or bohdi. (Sattva = ‘on the path to’). And sometimes they are not; they are entities of uncertain provenance to relate and pray to (like for example the ox at Dazaifu). I have mentioned jizu and their relative absence on the tracks of the Kumano Kodo. Here are representations to this bosatsu near an isolated temple on Shikoku and at Miyajima near Hiroshima. Hordes of them, all different, an animate universe.
Jizu are caring bosatsu. Fudo Myo-o — who in this instance just popped out of the bush near Shosan-ji temple on Shikoku — less so. A figure central to Shingon Buddhism, Fudo converts anger into salvation. The purpose of his crazed expression is to frighten people into accepting the teachings of Dainichi Buddha. He carries kurikara, the devil-subduing sword which represents wisdom cutting through ignorance, and holds a rope in his left hand to catch demons as well as to bind and focus thought. He is often seated or standing on rock because he is immovable in his faith. His aureole is typically inflamed, which according to this strain of Buddhist lore, represents the purification of the mind by the burning away of all material desires.
On the way to nearby Fragrant Root Temple we found this youkai, if not religious at least a spiritual entity.
I like to think of his, her, its name as providing an insight into the linguistic substrate of Japanese.
The word youkai is made up of the kanji characters for ‘bewitching; attractive; calamity;’ and ‘spectre; apparition; mystery; suspicious’. Now you know what a youkai is. Or do you? Written Japanese seems to me to be as fluid and allusive as public Japanese behaviour is precise, confined and measured. The kanji meanings bounce off each other like echoes in a well.
But it is the visual references that are beginning to pile up.
Senso-ji, the very famous temple in Asakusa (eastern Tokyo) is guarded by two bosatsu, Fujin the god of wind (here) and Raijin the god of thunder.
We found a version of this pair overseeing the final entry to Temple 58, Senyu-ji, on the Shikoku Pilgrimage. They belong in this company. They live in the substrate, ‘the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment’.
• • • • • • • •
And they don’t just live there as visual ornamentation, however impressive they may be in that regard. If you want to relate to them seriously they are coupled with volumes of ideas and stories and acts and edicts and directives and mysteries and frustrating contradictions.
It might be that the only successful way to live on top of that mountain of emotional and psychological cultural substrate is a life of strict discipline and obedience to very careful rule-bounded behaviour. That might also be a good way to live in congested environments where there isn’t much personal space, physical or social.
So what do you do? From this intensely rich underground, tended in some cases by trauma and neurosis, but wound tight as a drum by rule-based behaviour, in a process of sublimation you make art. But, however thoughtfully, you EXPLODE onto the canvas, the model, the board, the sculpture, the paper — in a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction. And you produce work like the examples above, surely some of the most developed, interesting and unusual art to be found in the world today.
It might also be the Japanese zeitgeist: it’s what you do, it’s what everyone else is doing, it’s what sells. But I think for many of these artists it’s what they do on a much more profound level to survive.
The story of Japan? A gentleman in front of a Tanaami at the Hakone Sculpture Park
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