Internet Censorship in Australia
Jul 27th
The feature on Internet censorship I wrote for Australian Penthouse has been popped up on the web. It was my first major investigative article for them, and also my first significant experience with having a sub-editor alter sections of my copy to fit layout.
After hitting the inevitable bureucratic walls that hold our Government and it’s friends together, I found myself faxing ACMA, calling secret numbers, isolating quasi-official contradictions and FIGHTING THE WHOLE WORLD, and then suddenly everyone wanted to help me. As my struggle drew to a close, Conroy’s media advisor was very helpful in getting the bigger wigs at ACMA to call me and sort through the contradictory information I’d been given from their various sources. She was getting harpooned from every angle at the time but still did me a massive solid–despite the fact I was somewhat opposed to the whole thing–which was certainly a nice surprise.
Anyway, this piece was in the July edition of AP. Click the quote below to read the article.
Winter Wonderland
Jul 25th
Maybe this is what UBERWENSCH should always have been about: the intersection between ice rinks and jazz. A splash of gin. Some disarming conversation with a stranger. A few too many cigarettes outside in the cold.
Thursday night in Redfern.
Two minutes from my house, at the Carriage Works–the prettied up remnants of the Eveleigh Rail Yards, which have a history dating back to 1880–is an event running through July called Winter Wonderland. It’s a mish mash of markets, live music, cafe culture and ice skating. I wandered down there last week after work and took a few snaps with the old Nikon D40. I was not in the best of spirits; as I said, it was a bit of a gin day. I’d just come back from my parents’ house on the Gold Coast, and was faced with the jarring triad of work, Sydney weather and homesickness. I arrived a little early, before The John Hardaker Direction took the stage to play a hybrid of fatally competent jazz and blues covers.
Traditional jazz, unless its the type of grizzly, raw music you find in backwater pubs around Sydney’s inner west, was ruined for me in the closing weeks of 2008. I know that sounds like absolute bollocks, but after listening to the Alcohotlicks’ interpretation of the genre, the straighter stuff seems all too bland. Even so, I thought some crisp modal noodling might sufficiently distract me from my early-twenties lethargy until bedtime, so I tried to muzzle my pretensions for long enough to enjoy it.
It didn’t work too well at first. I was so bored that I made the mistake of befriending some hysterical Japanese girls who were there with their hipster boyfriends. The conversation meandered and hiccuped its way through their obsession with MySpace photos and J-Pop androgyny until one of them, the shorter one whose name I have forgotten, conspiratorially asked me about pubic hair. It came out of nowhere, and even now I can’t find any thread of tangential thought that could account for it, but it remains the highlight of the night. She was uncertain whether or not Australian women keep a ‘winter shag’ like her friends at home, or whether we have an inclination for ‘all bare, all the time’. I had no answers for her, but we managed to disagree at length nonetheless. My position that your pubic hair should not be defined by a national status quo did not sit well with her position that it definitely should, otherwise “you’ll always be shy about being naked.”
It became apparent that we had very little else to say to one another after our mild disagreement, and so I went outside for another gin and a handful of cigarettes. I was just about to pack it in and go home when the jazz band kicked over to something interesting. It was loud enough to resonate out through the glass doors, but all the textures and the layers blurred into one another during the journey, so it took me a second to realise what I was hearing: Fever. A song I think anyone could cover and get something out of. I flagged my cigarette and slipped in the side door to watch one last song, and I’m glad I did. There’s something about that song that makes you feel infinitely cooler for hearing it. I stood there in my silly pleather jacket, with my indecisive haircut and my bitter drink, and for a few verses I felt good about being where I was. It didn’t last long, but I have always wanted to lean against a bar and listen to jazz and feel slick, and finally I can check that off the list.
FUKNEE
Jul 21st
But after a full night’s sleep and a well-timed Belgian hot chocolate, none of that seems so bad.
A mafia man once said to me, “Keep your eye on the lolly, Meg. Always keep your eye on the lolly, otherwise there ain’t no point.”
Gotta hustle.
Seven Views Of Jerusalem
Jul 20th
There are certain places you’re allowed to be sad. You can cry in a cemetery. You can cry at an airport. You can cry outside a hospital. They’re usually places we are asked to leave something behind, places that signify we had no choice.
I am not generally a crier. Never in public. When I do cry, it is a private ritual undertaken in that darkest morning hour reserved for REM sleep and merciless existential meltdowns. But tonight was too much for me and I’d like to raise a small fist on behalf of the criers.
Because, you know, things can be easy here but they’re rarely kind. We’re always backing away from something. The best we can do is mitigate harm, hope for what’s right and compromise everyone’s first intentions until the model is workable, viable, profitable. They’re all trick questions. Relationships are ending, affairs are on the rise. The system favours the elite, and that’s never us. The difference between misery and resignation is time in the world.
It’s hard not to let the decency bleed out of you. It’s hard not to shrink with every dragging step you take out of the arrivals gate, further and further from the only place all of these things can’t touch you. You’re back out of the nest and amongst the vultures, and – guess what – it’s hard not to cry.
Sometimes, like today, it’s impossible.
I miss my home because I miss being uninitiated to the depths of ruthlessness people will embrace. I miss not having to barter every fucking inch of the way. I miss not being part of the open slaughter of adulthood. I miss knowing the difference between misery and resignation.
In short, I miss not being a crier. And I don’t know why there are contexts we’ve deemed as sad-appropriate. Why limit the designation when the whole deal is so grim? We’ve all come too far. We have no choice. We’re leaving little breadcrumbs of ourselves everywhere we go, every time we mitigate harm, hope for what’s right and compromise those intentions. We need to open up the contexts to reflect the truth: Sadness at a cafe is not an aberration. Sadness on the street is not an aberration. You could cry every time you craned your neck and by my estimations it would feel right.
So do your thing, heartbreak. This whole planet is fractured and I’ll goddam cry wherever I want.
Public Service Announcement
Jul 18th
Be advised that this blog is currently enduring the ham-fisted ministrations of yours truly and will be all over the place for at least the next few hours (likely more than a day or so).
It will be fun!
WOT
Jul 4th
RIPPING AT LIFE
So, look, I understand that I abandoned the shit out of you all. I’m about to crawl back to your forgiving internet bosom.
I was bumped up to five days a week at work so I could do more stuff on the website, and somehow that one day addition was the difference between doing nerdy shit like playing MUDs and keeping a blog, and.. not doing those things.
So I’m back on four days, for now anyway.
To those who have returned, again and again, and been greeted with nothing: I’m sorry.
I will find you and kiss your little, sweaty hands and you will say, “It is alright, Meg White, don’t worry about it.”
SLIPSHOD ANSWERS ABOUT JOURNALISM
May 5th
There’s recently been a lot of discussion surrounding jobs in journalism, and the disillusionment many people feel about their chances at getting one.
Because I walked out of uni – prior to receiving my degree (It’s okay, I have it now. God bless RPL) – and straight in to a full-time job at an (inter-)national glossy magazine, quite a few questions have been directed my way.
Primarily the question being asked is: What did you do? How do I do it?
Peripheral questions have been concerned with the fact I am a female… Did I have a problem in this ‘male-dominated’ culture, have I experienced difficulties since imposing myself on that culture, et cetera.
First off, I don’t know how you will get a job in the ranks of our ‘crumbling’ media empire, but I am happy to shed some light on what I know, what I did and how I’ve found the experience.
To begin with the last point, I’ve never had a problem in any ‘male-dominated’ culture. Not when it was journalism, not when it was music, not as a student and not as a professional. I don’t mean to betray the sisters here, I really don’t. I’m not even saying the problems I’ve heard about don’t exist – they’ve just never existed for me. As to why, perhaps I’ve been lucky. Perhaps I’ve been blessed with evolved male peers. Or perhaps I just never pre-empted my male ‘opponents’, so they had nothing to prove.
If it eases your apprehensions though, lady friends, most of the people I deal with at the top of the communications chain are women. Government media advisors, big five music label PR executives, the big movie PR executives; they’re all women.
Question two: What did I do?
I gained whatever experience I thought was meaningful. Anything that caught my interest was usually a good bet. I ignored every piece of advice given to me about Best Practices and Recommended Pathways and I guided my hand with two precepts: Practice your craft and stay curious.
Number one is the main game. It is the aspect you need to best understand. Firstly, journalism is not writing. They’re best friends, but they’re going different ways. Journalism is a question, a uni-directional enquiry that never quite ends. Writing is a one-way answer that leaves its victim wholly satiated and preserved. Some people will switch those two out and say that journalism is the answer, but at the end of the day those people will be making the same point as me: There are two parts.
I had never practiced the journalism part all that much, but the writing part is something I’ve co-habited with since a precociously young age.
I’m not telling you this just because I like pronouns. You need a context for my choices.
You will hear often that you need to get as many by-lines as you can, that you need to blog and pimp your shit from day one if you have any hope of surviving in media. Twitter and network, and then Twitter your network the tinyurl of your work, far-flung and hanging in every corner of the blogosphere 2.0 socio-webverse. OR FAIL.
I did not. I started Twittering in earnest AFTER I got my job. I didn’t send links out, I didn’t pitch anyone, I didn’t serial-ize my blog, or capital-ize it or ..update it. Because I hadn’t practiced one part of my chosen craft to a point where I could happily defend its quality.
THAT’S RIGHT, I got my job with maybe a handful of by-lines, some of which lived in the musty archives of STREET PRESS. I had no Twitter presence and my blog contained mostly swears.
Go collect the broken bits of your mind, unibots. They’ve been blown, I get it.
For me, practice is mostly observation and analysis. Long-time readers of this blog will know that there was a point at which I developed an interest in journalism quality. I spent my time devouring all kinds of publications, identifying what I liked, what floored me, what best illustrated the story and also what I thought was cheap, paltry and uninteresting. Eventually I developed a profile of what I thought was good journalism. I stick to it, so I now feel comfortable defending the quality of what I write. But it wasn’t until I reached that point that I contacted anyone with samples of my work and a link to my blog.
Enter Penthouse.
I contacted Penthouse in the hopes of interning with them as part of my degree. They said yes. I flew to Sydney for a week to spend some time in their office. I was invited back to cover the staff writer while she was on holiday. I flew to Sydney again. Then I was offered a job.
That’s it.
I thought about journalism for awhile, contacted one person, did an unpaid internship, did a paid week, accepted a job.
Summary: I am heavy on research and heavier on longform considerations of ideals and principles (ie: wanker). A big part of that is discussion – throwing questions at people I think will have the answers and the right amount of lube to slip them my way. And a big part of THAT is disproving and discarding whichever part of the answer doesn’t sound right to me.
I recommend this approach completely. While it meant I spent two years enduring the BURDEN of my incompetent lecturers’ disapproval, I have never pitched or submitted something that has been turned down and I have no shameful by-lines that are floating around the ether simply for the sake of floating around the ether.
My second consideration: stay curious. I have engaged only in what interests me, and I have gone against all advice several times to make that so. This is where most people fuck it all up for themselves, I think. Ignoring this is how you end up in a staid small business writing memos and pamphlets about 3-ply toilet paper.
My university record shows a “less than 10%” attendance rate in my final year. I turned down and avoided internships at broadsheet and Government publications so that I could intern at places like 4ZZZ and Penthouse. I bowed out of a semester-long internship with one of the biggest companies in the world so that I could do PR for Brisbane label Mere Noise Records.
I made these choices because I had already paid my dues in terms of doing what looks good but feels pointless – I did that during my superfluous private school education, where wearing the uniform well in public was more important than not using Class A drugs, and then again when I studied PR at Griffith, where leather binding was more important than EVEN THE SMALLEST SEMBLANCE of content. Every person I encountered told me the choices I was making all led to one place: ultimate and insurmountable failure. I couldn’t bring myself to believe them, because I still have faith in the romantic idea that knowing your shit and being MVP on the figurative team means you will get paid somehow.
How YOU go about this stuff is entirely up to you: that’s the point. Tailor your own education, and deliver it to yourself. Don’t rep anything that doesn’t tear new arseholes every time it drops, and don’t take any advice on board that doesn’t fit. Talent gets paid.
My lunch break is over, so you’re going to have to tune in later for my thoughts on RELEVANT JOURNALISM SKILLS and some other loose, barely-lucid thoughts I just had when I pressed publish.
Quick Update
May 4th
I’ve got big gobs of time looming on the horizon tonight and tomorrow night, so I will be back on the soap box soon.
In the interim, the team behind Dovetail have done a really great job, and their site has gone live today so I want to steer some traffic their way.
I have a page or two at the back of the e-magazine, if you’re interested.
Love,
Meg White.
GONZO
Apr 18th
Forgive the daze, I am soaked to the gills in painkillers this afternoon. I’m still in my pyjamas, unwashed and unbothered, drinking coke from the bottle and smoking cigarettes on my housemate’s balcony. The sad thing is, these nicotine stains are indelible, which appalls and thrills me in equal measure.
The street outside my house is rife with the usual suspects. Short pants on skateboards and wayward old men who look homeless, but you can never tell for sure.
I just subjected them all to Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson.
The last four years of my adolescence were spent pretending to be a writer. I was all gonzo, all beat poetics and hyper sentences. The problem with adoring a style is that you miss the whole point of it. Style is not getting in the way of the story; however you need to do that, that’s your style. You can’t be contrived about it.
But my affection for that sort of thing still lingers, despite the learning and growing I’ve obviously done since I sat spell-bound and stymied by all those fantastic words.
Dr Gonzo was no small part of my teenage fanaticism. To this day, I still want a gonzo fist tattooed on my arm. In 2008, on the morning I capriciously changed my Journalism major to politics, I had just finished re-reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail for the first time in three years. Hunter’s copy in Rolling Stone was my gateway drug to loving long-form journalism as a mode of writing.
So this Gonzo film didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, it didn’t blow me away and, to be honest, it didn’t do much else. But his first wife did say something in her interview that caught my attention. She was talking about his suicide, and how it was the preservation of a legacy but she thought there was a lot more work he could, and should, have done instead. He was in a position to change things in America.
He’d had a hand in Senator George McGovern’s brief chance at the Presidency and he’d played his part for Jimmy Carter too. He had a knack for dipping his toe in to something and changing the tide. So why didn’t he stay around and do it again?
I’ve heard this question a lot. When Hunter shot himself in 2005, I sat on the internet in my school library reading all the news stories and impromptu eulogies I could find. The jackal librarian thought it was quite funny, and would lumber over between sandwiches to ask questions like, “Going to make an altar to him in your locker?” Haw haw.
Sadly, she’s now dead.
I thought then, as I think now, that it’s quite obvious why Hunter turned his head in to a crater. And the answer is in that question.
He’d drunk and smoked and addled himself to a point where he couldn’t be Hunter S. Thompson anymore. Dr Gonzo was dead, yet the responsibility to speak and the rabid expectation that he’d start saving the world was still there. He was a casualty of his own myth, having been consumed by it. And if he’d stuck around and failed to inject his poison into the US behemoth, people would have figured that out on a very global scale. The myth would have died. And if you don’t have the man, and you don’t have the myth, what do you have?
For someone like Thompson, who spent his whole life aiming for mythology, the answer’s pretty simple. Get out of the way, and in doing so, ratify the legend.
Not that anyone cares what I think. Even I don’t care. But you’ve gotta blog about something on a daze-y Sunday afternoon, don’t you?
