Buying clothes with prints on them
Hello, it's me, your freshly-scented TinyLetter pal, reneging on a promise to not write a quitpiece or a leavepiece or a sadpiece! This is ostensibly a newsletter, my first, which is why it's 1500 words, summarising 2019, The Year of The Dog Act, and I’m apoplectic and depressed but also cute and smart and coming around to the idea that bridges are safe spaces for pyrotechnics. Being mad is fun with all these hatchets to grind. Florid oversharing is how I keep my kink for emotional intimacy at bay and save Art Likers from the tedium of amateur art/music borne from self-flagellation. Leave that to the prose (that's a good pun I think but whatever).
This year my doctoral thesis was handed into the fucking sea along with its author. Lighting your own proverbial gas every day for four years is not the brightest way to spend your mid-20s, but PhD study has its perks, like I’m pretty well radicalised now, although you can be radicalised more efficiently by following @prisonculture on Twitter. Another perk is that it cultivates a perception of context, a clutch at the flammable deluge we call culture from which technologies and institutions emerge to mess up our circadian rhythms. And no PhD experience is complete without applying that knowledge to at least hypothetically deconstructing the university-industrial complex. The neoliberal university, in The Year of the Dog Act, is a soft-handed psy-op for indoctrinating well-meaning smart people with suspicion of their own subjectivity, something 23-year-old Michael interpreted as ritual ego-obliteration rather than a day job I’m allowed to hate while having a life outside of it. This isn’t unusual, I gather, going by the PhD students I dated this year and other comrades who have mental health problems before and after wearing their Renaissance cosplay outfits at the convention centre. That’s not to blame the staff, per se, more the political and administrative climate that hates us.
My day job now is a “sessional academic,” at three universities, a point I make in my email signatures on all three of my .edu.au addresses. The institution I’ve taught at for five years is ‘restructuring’ so the vice chancellor can pursue his vanity project of potentially moving campus to the Perth CBD, soon to join Elizabeth Quay and the Yagan Square food court thing as icons of the city’s moneyed inertness. (Performing) arts schools always take the brunt when the rich want their dicks memorialised through architecture and real estate acquisition. I enjoyed teaching—electronic music history, film music, a kind of ‘philosophy of sound’ class—until I realised how many thousands of dollars of my labour I threw to the charging bull. I made and remade my syllabi every semester, unpaid, because the dynamism of music and sound and the sociocultural milieux therein constantly require updated conceptual tools and first principles that young people today, I think, have little choice but to ride or die by. The galaxy brain meme is like four years old and still funny, but the buff-guys-giving-earnest-advice-online meme was run into the ground in days; what I'm getting at is that I take temporality seriously, but I take philosophy less seriously than 20 youtube videos and an open-ended class discussion. Those classes are getting cut back because “creative industries” is the term du jour and “art” is not.
I also teach electronic music production at a university that thinks Western Civilization and transphobic think tanks are yeah nah pretty good, to like 70 non-musicians, which is dispassionate work and thus kinda nice. I’m also a research assistant at a third university currently suing a whistleblower for millions in damages for exposing their tendency to bankrupt international students who don’t speak English well. Last financial year I made $12,000. The Newstart allowance is about $17,000. This year my income might be double, $24,000. Minimum wage is $38521.60. I joined the union and attended a meeting about sessional academics like me—about being the operative term, because it was mostly tenured academics tripping over their flaccid solidarities to assure me how rock-hard their solidarities are.
Having nearly crested the hill that was my quarter-life identity crisis, I went to India for five un-cathartic weeks with like two changes of clothes and good earphones. People who say they ‘find’ ‘themselves’ in India are the same people who think that depression is a big pharma conspiracy to privatise serotonin and I met a lot of them. They reaffirmed a routine disappointment of mine that you can’t trust hippies or vegans or other quaint anti-establishment types to not be tories or libertarians or Modi sympathisers. Due credit, India would've been more fun if I’d spent less time on my phone, though I did find it useful for anxiety-writing 500 words in alphabetical order that start with B while eating a uh, woodfired pizza for $3, or reading Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste while Israeli backpackers compare their hemp satchels and aggressively fucked toenails next to me. Go to India for the food, stay for the hash, leave for the violent realisation that all the roadside rubbish you scoff at is your colonial ass conveniently forgetting that every howyagoin Australian generates 6kg of waste per day and we’re only social-democratic enough to support public services that keep commodities fetishised by systematically burying them after consumption.
The trip wasn’t quite relentless enough for me to forget about music. Since 2013ish my ethos for making music was to make hermetic puzzles, abstract walled-off gardens thick with internal logics and contradictions, because recorded music is alive, in the animist sense, and potentially alive for a long time, long enough for humans to project all sorts of unpredictable cultural hangups as the decades pass, and trying to keep up with that runs the risk of aesthetic day trading. Nowadays—and this illustrates the problem of this approach—we call this “separating the art from the artist,” or “showing early Disney cartoons without the ‘hey this is racist as shit but so was everyone back then’ disclaimer.” As a mediocre person with mediocre desires who materially benefits from white Australian patriarchal normality and tries hard not to abuse that privilege but sometimes I do and I get all self-loathey when I’m called out for it, this appealed.
That approach now feels like a hustle to climb the ivory tower. Music borne from university degrees is too often centred in technical gimmickry encouraged by an academic inertia that privileges form over affect, and I think music should be more of a tradition of audiovisual engagement with the world than “organised sound and silence.” Less craft, more gesture; less interpretation, more intervention. I’ve been disillusioned by experimental music for a minute because playing shows to six people is demoralising after a while, and outside of small-pond scenes like Perth it’s being institutionalised rapidly, and not even by universities. Lawrence English, an important organiser in Australian experimental music but also definitely a businessman, charges Australian artists for PR when he chooses to release their records on his label Room40. It isn’t artistic integrity at stake, just that the culture isn’t particularly lit. Music, this year, in the church of Spotify, felt like a flat desert of glass and retina displays and Lightning-to-headphone dongles.
I inadvertently deleted my music collection which is actually kind of working out for me because I’m finally on board the poptimist train. “What is pop music," Mat Dryhurst tweets, "but a promise that you aren’t listening alone?” I’m now listening to a fair bit of adult contemporary, John Farnham, and other musical pleasures indulged by idle might-put-the-boat-in-this-arvo mortgage brokers. I took a singing lesson once and came to terms with being a high alto. I’m also good at piano and am bored of being suspicious of things I’m good at. Last month I played one of the funnest gigs I’ve ever played, a cheesy, sloppy set of adult contemporary and MIDI fusion and Vangelis-lite instrumentals. There were Farnsey samples, a corny Brahms piece at one point, and I read out the wine list on the Dan Murphy’s website. It was so on the nose I suspect everyone in attendance needed a rhinoplasty.
Some excerpts here.
Not sure yet if this is a short-lived project or one I or a pseudonym will continue. (Would Harley Streten be a funny stage name? That’s Flume’s real name.) We’ll see if it goes anywhere!!!!!!!!!! I’m also in a leisurely trio of guitar, double bass, and keys/etc making cute Sunday listening jams stemming from this fortuitous collab last year. There should be a recording available next year. I'm also sort of making some live screencap stuff using macOS Grapher. Other than that, I currently get more out of writing as a creative pursuit than anything else. Everyone slept on my Gumtree ads this year, including the buyers, so I might make more:
And now for personal news items more becoming of a newsletter: Dad’s cancer is in remission, my tentative diagnosis somewhere on the bipolar disorder spectrum makes life difficult a few days a week but it's getting better, I do pushups and go to the beach because 2019–20 is my Hot Girl Summer, I've been buying clothes with prints on them for the first time in years, and I met someone who is constantly inspiring. I'm also planning to leave Perth mid next year. “When you’ve been here for an era,” an ex-supervisor told me, “you’ve been here too long.”
More to come. Thanks for reading, would love to chat. xx
P.S. this isn't my cutie-pie, it's my housemate's, his name is Goose and he brings light and quests to us all.