In last weeks copy of The Bulletin Maxine McKew had lunch with Barry Humphries, the creator of Edna Everage and Sandy Stone. Most of the interview was light hearted:---really about the character of Edna, and it never really got beyond the public mask of the entertainer.
Humphries is back in Australia with a new comedy show. It is a return to the suburban roots of Melbourne, with all its snobbery and moral disapproval, rather than Edna as the international phenomenon who is a parody of celebrity and self-obsession. That Thacherite lady is more a part of British culture and a part of the London West End theatrical institution.
Humphries still sees Australia through the eyes of the 1950s: a divided, sectarian Australia that is still Anglophobic. Not much really. Not even a snippet on the role of comedy as cultural criticism.
In an old copy of the Bulletin=---last weeks----Tim Blair writes about the Victorian Government having a lust for spending ticket revenue. So does the South Australian Government. It also raises tens of millions dollars. Driver safety says the Government without shame.
It is a driving tax. The tax collectors sit in unmarked cars in safe streets eg., Wakefield Street that leads out of the city to the east. It has one a gentle dip-- the car speeds up--and bingo gotcha.
A nice little speed trap. Its equivalent to locating a speed camera at the bottom of a hill. Purely a means of raising revenue.
Meanwhile there are main roads full of blackspots that are just left: eg., the Sturt highway to the Riverland has no passing lanes. There are plenty of accidents on this highway and its all put down to bad driving. Where's the effective life-saving strategy?
I could not bring myself to watch all of the Governor General's farewell speech to the nation last night. I'd had enough of the whole sorry saga of someone who said that he would pursue the people's agenda prior to taking office in 2001.
What I did hear amidst the continuing, though subdued, defiance to public opinion indicated a more contrite and forgiving person. Peter Hollingworth acknowledged that he had got things wrong, said he was sorry and he expressed regret over the way he had handled things. He seemed to have recovered, or made contact with, his long experience of working in social welfare. His penance was to return to working the welfare field.
The confession, for it was a public confession, was a year too late in terms of the public office. However, the man, once so aloof, elitist and desiring of the trappings of office, had been deeply hurt, if not shattered, by the tragedy. Hollingworth was bloodied and beaten.
How did he understand what had happened?
Interestingly, Peter Hollingworth did not seem to understand the gap that existed between the professional ethics of public office of Governor General and his own actions in discharging the duties and responsiblities of that office properly. It was almost as if he did not see the role of Governal General embodying a code of public conduct or professional ethics.
See this for an account of this. David Burchill argues that the clery think in terms of sin and forgiveness (the confession), and not in terms of the professional code of ethics of a public office.
Peter Hollingworth understood the problem in terms of the public controversy making it difficult for him to effectively discharge his official duties to the community----in a political not ethical way. At the political level Hollingworth had become a political carcass that was smelling, due to a failure to see the writing on the wall. Hollingworth was politically blind.
I could not log onto my Movable Type websites this morning. The building in which the servers were housed have been burnt down. Apparently caused by a fire in the building.
How about that? It's like being back on Blogger. Out of action.
I did contemplate going back to Blogger in the short term but as of late morning things seem to be okay.
Now that Hollingworth is a private person one can feel sorry for him as an individual person. HE HAD A BAD RUN. No doubt he is now going through a private hell. The wounds are deep. They will need a lot of licking in a dark space.
Tragic story really.
A tragedy caused by a character flaw is my understanding. It is not about giving a few bad interviews when Governor General as the Prime Minster tried to argue on the ABC 7.30 Report. It goes much deeper than that.
Nor is it just about ambition and the fall from power.
Hollingworth just didn't get the sexual politics in all of this:----it was a bad judgment to both defend pedophiles rather than the victim, and to see his priests seduced by 14 year old Lolitas. he could see that he slipped when he looked back in response to a public outcry, but he kept on expressing the old mindset and digging himself deeper and deeper into the mud. A character flaw.
And Hollingworth had such a promising start to public life with all the early work done for for the poor, the under-privileged, or the disadvantaged when in Melbourne with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence. He understood social justice of poverty but not sexual politics.
It is a character flaw that meant no compassion for the vulnerable and innocent in sexual politics. Even if he did shift from liberal social justice type to Conservative in the decade iin Brisbane, he should have retained compassion for the suffering of the vulnerable and the innocent.
And then you read the witch hunting stuff like this or this initiated by all the nasty republicans and feminists who love a good burning. But its really public opinion that is the problem----the emotional, hysterical mob baying for blood.
Its all a bit like reality television. All contrived political froth and bubble. And its on the lefty side as well. Have a look here and here.
What the Crean interview on Lateline shows is the great difficulty the Labor Party has in introducing ethics into politics---saying that Hollingworth is wicked, or that he's behaved in a depraved or shameful way----is way off key. It was unconvincing hence the wrigggling.
Hollingworth more a case of being judged to have dirty hands rather being wicked.
This tries to make sense of the tragedy that has occured. Angela says that the problem lies in Hollingworth:
"....living of a [priestly] vocation that should have precluded him from accepting the office in the first place. That's the real tragedy of the Hollingworth saga."
I don't quite get Angela's account of tragedy myself. If the tragedy is to be sourced in accepting the office of Governor General, then the tragic narrative unfolds due to the tensions between the priestly vocation and the public office of the liberal state. Angela suggests that Hollingworth was judged by the ethical standards of a priest when he was a Governor General, and as the Governor General he did not, and could not, live up up to those standards. He was found wanting by the public---- and righly so says Angela.
Is that it? But what then are the ethical standards of the priestly vocation? And are there no ethcial standards for public office?
Should we feel sorry for men? Or is it boys? Or both? Things are now so difficult for men. And they are so vulnerable too. I
t just wasn't like it used to be when everything was ordered. No one is sure what masculinity is any more.
Things must be pretty bad judging by all the spam I'm getting promising to improve my sexual performance in no time.
This is a very rich imagery. It is by Tim Maguire.
Just beauty? Or beauty and decay? Melancholy perhaps? A fragment charged with meaning? Do they have their roots in the Baroque?
What about this fleshy stuff?All surface and no meaning? Wall decoration for the rich?
And isn't this just so helpful:
"Maguire's career is marked by various distinct styles each of which indicates further exploration into the idea of what painting is, or can be."
And this blurb from here is not much better:
"A painting is much more that just an image. it’s a beautiful day asserts that paintings provide unique material conditions for us to experience reflective relationships between ourselves and the world around us."
Well it was a beautiful day in Victor Harbor---rain, sun and clouds sweeping across the heavens. We sat on the cliffs tops watching the ocean play. We looked for the whales, felt the sea spray sweep across us and watched the sun flicker across the whitecaps of the rolling surf.
The dogs returned fromtehir explorations with a dead penguin a kangaroo thigh bone.
Back to Tim's still lives. The work is more than being decorative and vacuous - a top-dollar art equivalent of impressionist posters. A definite misreading. Those flowers are disturbing.
This is much much closer.
Its a nice business if you can get it. Your private life is your private property and has a market value. So why not sell it and cash in and use the moeny to up the lifestyle a notch?
If only. You have to have a private life that is of market value to the media corporations with deep pockets who are in search of content to spike the circulation figures.
If you have such a life---eg., Bob Hawke's eternal love for Blanche D'Alpuget---- then you hire a media manage/lawyer who plays the media like a violin for 20%.
There is no private/public distinction in a market way of life. There is no boundary between the two.
There were no postings yesterday. It just did not happen.
It started on a high. I got up, had a shower and struggled through my breakfast of muesli and yoghurt. I went upstairs, turned the computer on and sipped my coffee.
It was raining. I sipped more coffee.
I logged onto Tim Blair for my daily surge of energy. It was Tim on the Australian on the ABC for failing to present news and analysis that is accurate, impartial, and balanced. But see this if you want a bit of content.
Alas when it came to writing my own weblog I could not write. The creative spark was there: ----a big knock-out post on the aesthetic and consevatives. It would be a gift to my new readers about their heart.
I could not do it. I could not think. I had forgotten how to think.
I sat staring at the screen. I looked out the window. I banged my head against the computer. Nothing.
How can you think when you don't know how to think. How can you forget how to think?
Oh I know the obvious quip from cynical lefties. It's what happens to you when read Tim Blair.
A judgement of the quip was beyond me.
All I could do was link. Even a sardonic witticism was beyond me.
Then I thought I spotted Kant walking down the street looking for Mill with a copy of the Daily Howler under his arm to talk about the ideology of aesthetics.
I went back to bed.
It was still raining.
That is why I did not post yesterday.
In case you don't know today's entries are all for the readers of Tim Blair's weblog.
Just thought I'd remind my half a dozen or so readers. Todays entries are constructed for someone else's readership.
I am trying to be as boring as I can.
Its hard to be boring.
So here is an interlude----just for the Tim crowd; especially those who are in search for the restless ghost of desire. You know the ones whose minds are drowning in dark, sexual secrets, prohibitions and prudence and their bodies are ensnarred by the world of utility.
I love bodies. I do.
This weblog ain't about sexual liberation with its lefty ethos of guilt-free sexuality and freedom from all the abolition of taboos and ignorance. Nor sir.
On the contrary, our sexuality is constructed from our taboos and to abolish taboos is to abolish desire.
In a world where the porno industry is everywhere we have guilt-free sexuality built on the ever-increasing fading of desire.
That is the interlude.
I had my one big thought today today.
I was sitting in the late autumn sun near a creekbed in the Adelaide parklands.
The dogs were playing.
Death. That was my thought. To understand life you have to know death.
I felt happy.
Then sad. Someone else would have thought that too. And written a book about it.
I was doomed to be a copy.
The flow of the erotic things that terrify me was interrupted by the chiming sound of the intercom security system. It was a young male artist. He wanted to take a digital photo of our groovey glass staircase he had built. He needed it for his c.v.
He left. I washed the stairs by hand in a mechanical way. I was hungry.
I walked to the Central Market. I thought I saw someone I knew. I called out. It was a model that looked like a women and was dressed as a man.
Everybody looked at me.
I saw the headlines of the City Messenger Press. Harbison wins Adelaide City Council election for Mayor. Another said: "Harbison: the way to go for Adelaide is to have lots more car parks."
Did I just want to be a tabloid headline?
I saw a book on Bataille in the secondhand bookstall at the Couger Street entrance of the market. Bataille says philosophy is at fault for being divorced from life. Life refers to sexual activity.
I buy the food. I walk home. I write my excursion up. I had found the flow.
It was not utility.
Inspired by reading the witticisms of one Tim Blair I typed in my first word. Sex. Then another. Eroticism. Then a third. Bodies.
I searched for a link. I could not find one. Google was not working. I reread Tim Blair.
I came back to the weblog. Some words formed on the screen. I am filled with the most astounding impulses. I am not sure that my unacknowledged impulses are really me.
The door bell rang. I got up.
After breakfast I sat at my computer. I stared at the stars on the screen. The sun bounced off the creambrick wall of the factory into my study. It was warm. I was cosy.
The sky was blue. The homeless street kids who roamed the city streets at night had gone. Radio National droned in the background. I could not write.
I stared at the screen. No inspiration. I drank more coffee. I felt depressed. I would never achieve my vision of becoming that big time journalist by 2004. I wanted to be read across the nation by all those movers and shakers, as they drank their morning coffee in their favourite inner city cafe whilst fielding the calls on their mobiles.
I logged onto the internet. I read Tim Blair's weblog. I was alive. My day as a human being had begun.
The moral of the story is? There is none.
I got up this morning. It was 5.30 am. It was dark. I had a headache. My throat was sore. It had stopped raining.
I couldn't remember why I had got up. I tuned the computer on and went and had a shower. But I could not remember my reason for living. So I watched a big download from Microsoft Windows whirring away.
Thats everyday life in the provinces. It's so boring it addles the brain.
I think that our dear Janet has a thing about sex as well as intellectuals and tolerance junkies.
She reads this and has a rave about unrestrained liberation, self-indulgence, nonstop self-gratification all around her. The 1968ers are in her sights as are the Sex and the City generation of women whose sexual encounters are numerous and guilt-free. It will play well with the conservatives across the nation. A very different reading can be found here The response by Ken Parish is here
Well, you can say one thing about Janet. She ain't no liberal. Since she has nothing but scorn for the "intellectual hucksters of laissez-faire sex" she would have no time for the Marquis de Sade. Still, judging by the fuss, acts of sexual transgression still have the power to subvert. This review by Guy Rundle in the Sydney Morning Herald locates Millett's text in the libertine tradition of the Marquis de Sade the Story of O and Bataille
Its just sex Janet. Just the memoirs of someone who enjoys a lot of penetrative sex and desires to satisfy her intellectual and professional curiosity written by someone who is a member of the intelligentsia---- an intelligent art critic----a hedonist and a sexual adventurer?
An extract of The Sexual Life of Catherine M can be found here. A list of reviews can be found here
I came across this. The following paragraph caught my eye:
"International Islamic terrorism is like a notorious man-eating shark flailing on the deck of a fishing boat: you still wouldn't put your arm near its mouth, but it's safer to go back in the water."
So why the orange alert on the fishing boat? Have all the fish have been fished out and the shark has nothing to eat?
James is a managing editor of this magazine. According to the mag's blub James is:
"...a freelance writer and journalist. He has written for a wide variety of news and general interest publications, including US News & World Report, MSNBC.com, Reason, National Review Online, Ironminds.com and The Australian."
Another neo-con gracing our shores?
I was in the Adelaide parklands this morning walking the dogs. I saw a man who walked like a terrorist. Maybe we could develop software so that satellites in the sky could identify terrorists by the way they walk.
This is courtesy of Tim Blair. Its a great read. A sample:
"Earlier on I heard something that I wanted to remember. I found a pen and wrote it down on a piece of paper. If I need to be reminded of the information at any point I will find the piece of paper and read it."
Check it out.
When I was out walking the dogs in the stormy and wet winter weather this evening I suddenly realized what was lacking from life. Social hope. I had none. Maybe I could learn to imagine it.
Love is not enough. Nor is cuddling up to the environment. Life is really about money. And we have work so hard to get it--- all that responsibility and sturdy independence stuff---that we harden ourselves against intimacy and tenderness.
Maybe I could gain some social hope by becoming a press secretary who uses the press gallery to gain an advantage for a big time politician who's keen on preserving the dignity and traditions of the office (say a Nick Minchin or a Tony Abbott) I would then generally spend my days hosing down everything in sight.
A spin doctor. There you have it. I would then see social hope everywhere.
I was happy. I saw the sun's rays playing across the black sky and caressing the top of the trees. The dogs were playing chasey and it had stopped raining.
Just love this photolog from Brisbane by Neil Cook. This is a great shot. I just love the Brisbane architecture
And it has this wonderful photolog by Melanie Cook as well. One of my favourites And another.
Great work. Great Design. Have an explore. Its great work.
Suzanne arrived back from Broome at 6am on Virgin Blue this morning. It was raining, windy and cool in Adelaide ----a huge contrast to the t shirt and shorts weather in Broome.
We had a chat about her adventures over a cup of coffee, looked at the presents and purchases and history tours Was she relaxed? Well she felt disorientated, fell into bed and went straight to sleep.
She mentioned the Dinosaur prints at Gantheaume Point; the graveyard for Japanese pearlers; (which I'd remembered visiting); checked out the pearl luggers and the Staircase to the Moon; missed the Bird Observatory but learned about this and Japanese Internment
Since her sister is a jeweller Suzanne spent lots of time looking at the latest designs in pearls and diamonds at Linneys and bought back their 2002 catalogue (a slow load even for high speed broadband); hung out at pearlers row Gallery and mentioned that it was a photographer's delight
Lots of ideas to explore the Kimberlys.
I have just read that Australia is producing some of the finest architecture in the world. Its interesting and exciting and everybody wants to come here and check it out.
Pets plus environmentally sound is a promising start. But the building looks like modernism+colour to me.
Is Sydney going all nostalgic for modernism? This suggests so-retro modernism.
Well, if its all happening in Sydney it ain't happening in Adelaide. From what I can see from walking around the city there is nothing interesting and exciting being produced in Adelaidey way of a regional architecture.
The pressure from advertisers to acquire the latest techno toys (eg., the adverts for mobile phones that take groovey photos) is very strong. Its a part of being cool, fashionable, free or postmodern. So this is quite salutory.
You recall those stories that have been circulating the national media recently courtesy of Virginia Haussegger, about women getting themselves a house and a career only to discover they'd missed out on the motherhood bit? See here
The conservative women, if you recall, loved it. In they came with their stories about the joys of full-time motherhood, feminism denying women a child and freminism making middle class women selfish etc etc.
Well, shift the focus to dating with its ethos of flirting, seduction and romance. What's going on there? Equality? Women asking men out? Men asking women out? Now that everybody is relaxed and comfortable with the blurring of gender difference I guess everyone is gaily single and having great fun managing their love life with panache.
Or is it a case of can't find a man or a women? Elspeth Probyn says no worries. "Go online, have fun text-flirting." She recommends it. She has great success with pragmatic love in a virtual new world.
Interesting article folks.
Need a bit of time to read and reflect though. Lots of theory wrapped around oral sex.
I thought that I would broaden my perspective on aesthetics from the personal in provincal Adelaide to the public spaces in the global city of Australia.
You can give Seidler's old modernist Australia Square the flick though. He has a funky website though.
Looking back I guess his institutionalized modernism was a response to fascism and Stalinism. Was the austerity and elitism a response aesthetic consumer culture of capitalism with its fetish of style, surface and hedonism? This was a time when the desiring body was harnessed to the imperatives of making a buck.
This sort of stuff keeps surfacing despite all the attempts to put a lid on it on cover it up, and play it down. It is more than larrikanism. or boys behaving badly. This is corporate sport. What wil the sponsors think?
More comments here at this classywebsite and here
I'm glad the West Indians won the Antigua Test.
I will sit on the balconny tonight with my now beautifully groomed dogs (they have to be don't they?) and drink a toast to the West Indians. I will not celebrate Australia winning the test series.
I have now realised that I will be living my life under the aesthetic sign of Vogue Living. My life is now shaped and governed by style and taste and I will have to continually struggle to be in vogue. Even the pot plants on the balcony will need to signify taste---and the plants will need to have graceful or geometric shapes.
The aesthetic was about the body, rebellion and protest in the old philosophy texts. It once spoke out-----screamed----against the very social order with which it was complicit. It was that very complicity which spurred the aesthetic into protest; even if that protest was agonized and largely ineffectual under late modernism
Oh I see that a gay and colour building protests against the ugly commercial buildings around and the derelict house that the homeless kids use to squat. Ugliness is bad the aesthetic says.
There is no sign of protest in living in vogue. Not even a gesture of protest about a life of such suffering, fruitless toil, carnage and misery that many of those living it would be better of dead. What has happened?
Aah, beautiful living has traditionally been confined to a tiny minority who have the money to afford taste. The rest of us have endeavoured to live under the bloodless sign of utility, self-interest and an analytic, instrumental reason of Bentham that ditches the aesthetic. That unlovely utilitarianism that crunched the numbers and consequences of desire was never able to generate the styles and forms which could weave its crude power into the aesthetic and cultural fabric of everyday life. It remained the philosophy of business and government.
Heres a thought. Aesthetic taste becomes a weapon in the hands of political reaction: the aesthetic becomes the homeland of conservatism.
One of the fields that you stumble into when surfing the net for material on 'bodies' is porn. Most of the porn sites are American and the industry parade itself as once being the dark side of sexuality due to the traditional oppression of erotica that has now come into the light of the day. The porn sites are all about entering, membership low rates, new images and meeting the customers needs. Some even say they are free. The sites are ranked for the customer's convenience.
In Australia people tip toe around porn whilst the public debate splutters on around censorship and liberty as what was once seen as a perversion of the erotic comes to be accepted as a part of everyday life. Erotica has always been a part of European literary and artistic culture and is often seen as a part of the sacred. Some things are still closed whilst others talk in terms of sex education
Now academics are researching the everyday world of porn. They are finding that the attitudes of those for whom porn is a part of their everyday life is quite different from the way the public debate has been structured in a utilitarian culture:---porn does or does not do harm. It is little more than dipping a toe into the dark waters. Things will have shifted when the writings of the Marquis de Sade have entered the university curriculm, and are discussed in philosophy departments as an integral part of the liberal Enlightenment.
One day on my own in the new townhouse. Lots of space. The business pages of the newspaper says that house prices are falling and the house affordability index is rising.
The alarm goes off when I don't want it to; the automatic lights stay on when I want them to go off; I cannot figure out the digitial Swedish washing machine; the sleek Italian fridge emits sounds that tell me I've left the door open too long; and I stare at the groovy, German dishwasher whilst I hand wash the dishes. I can work the trendy Australian gas stove but it requires lots of cleaning to keep it looking beautiful. And the polished hardwood floors mean that all shoes must be left at the door.
We bought a package of beautiful living. None of it is very green. No rain water tank; no recycling; no solar energy; everything airconditioned. I sat outside on the balcony this morning in the rain having breakfast in protest at the lack of green technology.
Why not green and beautiful?
I've suddenly realised that living in the high tech apartment/townhouse is living under the law of the aesthetic----the beautiful. We have aesthetized our private lives----everything must look beautiful including ourselves. It is designer living. All that is old and tacky has to go------to the holiday house in Victor Harbor. Nothing can get dirty. Nothing can be left lying around in the of so compact townhouse. The aesthetic even rules our play. Are we not fully human only when we play?
Ye gods. What have we got ourselves into? Romantic excess? Where is the dream of the living the beautiful life going to led?
We have a designer home with an outrageous mortagage and the stress of keeping up the payments. We cannot afford to live the beautiful life----we are staring to drink and clean obssessively. Will our relationship break down? Will we crash the car? Will our immunne system be break down because we are so stressed out from tying to incorporate the beautiful into our lives. Will the place be repossessed because of the tyranny of the aesthetic?
If we sold now we would end up owing lots of money! It is a trap. And I've been here before. The wheel just goes round.
Its wet and grey in Victor Harbor today. Not much of a picture postcard day for cultural tourists attracted by glossy packaged scenery sold as pure gold tourist experience.
We drove back to Adelaide late this afternoon so that Suzanne could catch a cheap Virgin Blue getaway flight to a picture postcard Broome this evening for another weeks holiday at Palm Grove Holiday Resort. The tourist marketing of Broome is about promises of a holiday of surf and sand and relaxing on Cable Beach with a classic Indian Ocean sunset. If she can find a space away from the weddings that is. My memory of Broome is one of mangroves
The afternoon has been spent with Suzanne is sorting the clothes we bought down to Victor Harbor. Most of mine are going to be recycled because they no longer fit. I've spent the afternoon sorting out images from Venus Bay on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula and Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island to have printed and framed for the walls of the new townhouse.
Whilst Suzanne is in Broome I am on my own. Tis time away from Suzanne. Gianna understands that people in intimate relationships need time away from another to gather their thoughts and emotions.
As well as using the time on my own to work more creatively I can begin to redesign my wardrobe to update my image in terms of urban street wear inspired by Australian Fashion Week. We men don't have much to work with in Fashion Week-----ericaamerica's work from last year was not me. Clearly Designer casual is the look that I need to cultivate to look fashionable instead of ganster chic.
But I could toss outhe leopskin tights from yesteryear go with gangster chic and suprise Suzanne with my urban cool when she returns from Broome suitably rejuvenated.
Its been a quick trip through the Fleurieu Peninsula down to Victor Harbor to take the clothes down to the holiday house that cannot fit in the high tech townhouse in Adelaide. Since Suzanne is still on holidays we had a quick lunch in McLaren Vale. It was lunch since it just was not possible to drop into Russell's Pizza Cottage in Willunga on Friday night----bookings are required weeks in advance for this place. We fantasized about buying things for the townhouse even though the mortgage took all the money.
It was gorgeous autumn weather---still, sunny and warm. Not a hint of the winter chill and rain coming in from the Adelaide Hills. The vines in McLaren Vale glistened in the summer sun. There were signs signifying the odd Sea and Vines festival, which is centred around chilled white wine and crisp seafood dishes in the middle of June. Its all about quality where the sea meets the vines ----thats the marketing slogan for the region. Its not much of a tourist marketing hook.
McLaren Vale is a wine region in search of a regional identity. Unlike the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale still lacks a clear, unified identity beyond the current focus on quality, freshness and casual. The search for identity focuses on the food not the art of local artists. They have yet to understand that cultural tourism is more than food and wine and wooden boats.
A shower of rain had just passed over the coast. The air was fresh. Squalls of rain were on the horizon. Upon arrival at the holiday house I turned the computer I discovered emails asking me to do lots of work. There goes our weekend and visit to Second Valley.
Suzanne went shopping for food. I took the dogs for a walk along the cliff tops to their favourite beach west of the Bluff and Petrel Cove.
Such is life in a tourist world. Its part of our identity now.
I have been trying to get connected to Broadband today without any luck. I signed up because I lusted for the speed. Speed speed speed. Its the new order of things for inner city urbanites in the networked, knowledge economy.
Connecting to Broadband was marketed as a hassle-free connection in three essay steps but it has been full of hassles. Things will not work--- I cannot get connected--because the high tech household is connected up to the communication centre of a security firm and so we need some special equipment called a splitter that cuts out all the interference. But the security firm has no technicians on call outside normal office hours.
So we are stuck. Frustrated. This is a test run to see if I can post under the old dial up system until the security firm's technician comes out and installs the splitter. I do not want to deny myself the pleasure of receiving my daily dose of junk (spam) about penile erectibility, making millions by working at home and sending money to help unfortunate executives and politiicians in Nigeria to get the booty that is rightfully theirs.
Broadband enables you to drop in and connect with exciting and vital people as well as free market kids and so it helps you feel comfortable being a part of the future. Technology is central to our lives.
We arrived back in Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road in southern Victoria late last night.
We had started out from Torquay, where we had stayed over night, travelled all day and got progressively sickier from junk motorway food. Upon arrival in the high-tech townhouse the hot water system was no longer working. We stepped around all the boxes waiting to be unpacked from the move, fed the dogs and fell into bed to the sounds of the city. It was work for me tomorrow though not Suzanne.
I had been planning to write about the trip to Mallacoota on this weblog, but I had trouble finding internet access and, then when I did find it I had trouble accessing this weblog whilst in Mallacoota. I had even taken extensive notes during the first couple of days across the Wimmera country and then along the Great Alpine Road.
In the end I gave it up trying to stay connected to the virtual world. I was on holiday in the magnificent Croajingolong National Park. Nothing else mattered. I was surrounded by, and living within wilderness. It was a place that embodied, and preserved, the value of wilderness
But its back on deck from this morning.
