eBay

Purchasing things from eBay has become a common practice for me. Usually my purchases are between twenty and one hundred dollars and usually they are from overseas sellers. Recently I made a significantly more expensive purchase, around $850, from an Australian resident, actually one who lived in the outer suburbs I grew up in.

The item I bought was a quality piece of machinery, manufactured in Italy and retailing brand new for as much as $1800. The item description had the important words: Brand New In Box. Apparently the seller had four of these, all for $850. For those familiar with eBay this was a Buy It Now purchase, for those unfamiliar, basically this is an online purchase and sale, rather than an auction where bidding for an item starts at a reserve price and continues until time runs out and someone has achieved highest bid.

The photograph, though poorly shot, showed exactly the item that I was looking for. I had been prepared to pay up to $750 for a second hand one of these in good condition. For just $100 more I could have the item brand new. This seemed like the buy of the century. So, I conferred with my business partner, we discussed the possibility of this being stolen merchandise, considering its cheap price, its short auction/sale length/its dodgy photograph/its location, but still concluded that it would be foolish of anyone to attempt to sell stolen merchandise on eBay or attempt to sell fake or bogus machinery considering the large scale nature of a site like eBay. (Right?)

So after confirming the sale and paying online with credit card I contacted the seller on his mobile phone as instructed in the auction. We established where the seller lived and I informed him that I was very familiar with the area, having grown up nearby. It is worth mentioning that the seller lived in a fairly low socio-economic suburb. We organised a time to meet and I asked for the seller’s address. He hesitated and suggested we meet in the carpark of McDonalds on the approach to his suburb. This is the kind of carpark where groups of young people meet and hang out in the evenings, where drag races are organised, where brawls take place, where drugs are sold. I hesitated too, but didn’t want to seem alarmed or suspicious, so agreed to the meeting. Before hanging up I concluded with, “…I’ll be driving a silver Nissan Pulsar… and my name is Marc. What’s your name?” Again, he hesitated, before offering, “er… my name is Peter. Just give me a call about 15 minutes before you arrive.”

So I drove out to our arranged meet on a warm Saturday afternoon. As instructed, I called ‘Peter’ fifteen minutes before my arrival. His phone was off and went straight to message bank, with the greeting: “Hi, you’ve called Scott, please leave a message.” Funny, I thought I was calling Peter. So I didn’t leave a message. I waited a minute then called back. This time he answered, “Peter?” I asked, “this is Marc, I’m at the carpark, I’ll just wait for you here?” “Yep, ok… um… I’ve just got to go and get it, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

At this point my heart rate was higher than normal. This guy has given me one name but his phone says another, he has a brand new piece of machinery which he is selling at half of its retail price, that he has to go and collect from another site before meeting me in what is a public yet known dodgy carpark. Alarm bells were ringing.

He arrives in a new gold Ford Falcon XR 8. I record the number plate. He gets out: white, early thirties, medium to heavy build, taller than me, unshaven, sunglasses, trackies. We shake hands and I call him Peter, he doesn’t correct me as to whether it is really Scott. We make small talk about my intended use of the product and he informs me vaguely of his friend in Italy who is able to send them to him cheaply. A believable story, but one that still doesn’t confirm how clean the item is. He removes the item from his car, the box has been opened, to which he explains that he opens and tests them all. No argument there I guess, but being in a carpark with no power outlets around I can’t confirm this. I don’t want to cause any kind of scene here and have already paid for the item anyway, so I check the labels and all seems well with the product so I place it into my car and hope that it is all ok. We shake hands but before I leave he informs me of a friend of his who has some other equipment I might be interested in, this costing around the $5000 mark and he even suggests that the item may be stolen. At this point I just want to get out of there so I say that I will talk it over with my partner and get back to him. Yeah right.

I get home. I unpack the item. Immediately I realise, it’s not the correct model. It is brand new, unused and works fine, but it isn’t the item in the photograph online, nor is it the model I want. I check the labels on the box and they all say exactly what they should but this is an electronic automated version of the product I want. And like other automated products, this is one of those cases where the manual version actually provides greater accuracy and control. My brain goes into a spin. I’ve been ripped off. I’ve been sold something that I don’t want though it has been labelled as exactly what I am after. I call my partner and explain. I call Peter/Scott back and explain. I tell him that I need to return the item as it is not what I am looking for and I inform him that his photograph does not match what is inside the box. After some discussion about the minor differences in the models and brief explanation of the downfalls of this particular model Peter/Scott agrees to my returning of the product, which he wishes to first inspect and then he will refund my money through eBay. He provides me with his home address this time and I ask if he could refund me in cash on the spot, having once inspected the merchandise. Unfortunately not, he says, as he does not carry such amounts of cash on him plus he has to deduct some to pay for the listing of the item.

Hmmm… so he is expecting me to turn up to his house, return the product and then trust that he will refund the sale through eBay. I have no choice to comply but I have no guarantee that he will refund the money. I have no idea how many of his friends could be sitting around a bong table drinking bundy and coke from cans while Eminem plays on the stolen surround sound system when I arrive to return this thing. And I am to leave empty handed? This guy is a scamming genius. He has constructed an elaborate scam, where these products are mispackaged and purchased by opportunists like me only to returned, not refunded and re-sold to the next naïve buyer like myself. I’m fucked.

My business partner and I go through the options. We have no choice. I am preparing myself for the phone call to the police I will have to make in the next couple of days. I have four days to worry about this. I have spoken to Peter/John a couple more times to arrange return of the item. He isn’t enjoying having to deal with me again. I don’t want to deal with him again either. He wants it over and offers me $50 off the price to keep the original item. But it’s not what I want. To him the difference is minor, to me it’s a complete dud.

Meanwhile, my business partner has been following these items on eBay. He sees that our friend still has more for sale, this time clearly marked as manual or electronic. My partner also follows the sale of the same product from other sellers, all going for $1500 or more. He suggests that in any case we still got a good deal. To buy the equipment we have, albeit the incorrect item, would almost cost us double. Furthermore, Peter/John is now advertising the exact item we do want quite clearly marked as such. My partner suggests we keep what we have. And possibly purchase another one, the correct one from the same seller… He’s right, even if we sell the one we have now later on, chances are we will get more than we paid for it, and we can also purchase the correct item from him right now, at the even lower price of $750! It just means I have to call him back to organise this and go back on the mild panic I had displayed a couple of phone calls ago.

So I call him, I blame my partner, saying that he insisted on keeping the original product and that he wants to buy the other correct item from him as well. He doesn’t care, he is happy to take our money! This time we organise to pay in cash to cut out eBay commissions.

So I drive out to the burbs again, with a friend as moral support, to Peter/Scott’s house this time with $750 in cash in my pocket. At this stage I am fairly convinced that while our man may be a little shady about where he obtains these things from he is not in the business of ripping people off through eBay. He is in the business of business. His house is new, in a quiet street, its door answered by his girlfriend: white, late twenties, slim to medium build, blonde, glasses, trackies. She is friendly and welcomes me inside. Peter/Scott appears with the merchandise in box (opened) and offers it to me. This time I insist on testing the equipment as there are power outlets handy. Everything works fine. I hand him the cash. He hands it to his girlfriend and she counts it. Satisfied, we shake hands and smile.

I leave, having lost a few years off my life in the worry over being ripped off. In the end my paranoia spoke louder than reality and I was suspicious when I should not have been. Caution is advised when purchasing anything online but it is worth giving a seller the benefit of the doubt, in this case the product labelling had been misleading and the seller was unfamiliar with the operation of this machinery. My own bad judgement had me assume I was being cleverly ripped off then I actually ended up going back for more. Thanks Peter/Scott.

Text Messenger

It's good to have close friends. The kind you can talk about the serious stuff with. Or not. I love wasting time, energy and money on pointless text messaging. The phone companies love me too.

Text Messenger 1: What are you doing today dr big dick?
Text Messenger 2: Measuring my girth
TM 1: And with the remaining 23 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds of the day?
TM 2: FA
TM 1: I went to Mamak last night. I wouldn’t be waiting an hour to eat there.
TM 2: Me either. I wouldn’t wait a minute to hear any more bullshit from you either.
TM 1: No need to wait. I can stream that shit live
TM 2: Into my domepiece? You’re a codpiece.
TM 1: Your breath is a codpiece. I hit your brother in the head last night. Made a hollow sound.
TM 2: Your face needs a codpiece because it is a cod
TM 1: Nah that smell is just from all the snatch
TM 2: Uh huh
TM 1: What’s stuck in your anus today?
TM 2: Let me give you a list… What are you doing?
TM 1: Finishing my lunch.
TM 1: Go on. Where’s the list?
TM 2: Tyytghgffggggvvcfdsssijjjbvvb
TM 1: Is that an Icelandic volcano?
TM 2: Yep. Stuck in my anus.
TM 1: Sounds like a ring stinger

blogging the drama

I hate starting sentences/paragraphs/essays with the phrase “The problem with…. is….”, more than I hate starting anything with “I hate…”, but, the problem with blogs/blogging is that each post has the life span of about three days in terms of its perceived relevance. Well, my perception of its perceived relevance at least.

I am under pressure to write this. It has been a month since my last post and already my blog is showing the signs of an author with less content than he had originally made out. This blog began with the intention of being an experiment into how long my attention would be held by this medium. The virtue of the blog is that it gives a person like me the forum to voice my bias and jaded opinions to my minions. The blog provides the illusion of publishing. That I can capture my thoughts (yes, my very own) and blog them out into the webosphere to be read by the many folk who take interest in my challenging and confronting opinions, take pity on my miguidedness or actually give a shit about my life. Admittedly, when I began I was suspicious that no-one would read this. I had recently read that a new blog was created every second and this was going to be my test to see if the blog world was just a whole lot of publishing going on with very little reading going on.

Three months and one week into App OD and I couldn’t be further from the truth. I have five followers (all close friends). I have received a total of zero comments and an equal zero correspondence through my blog. It’s been marvellous really. In fact my life has changed dramatically. And here I am stretching it to come up with a subject as I can feel the deadline for a new post breathing down my neck. Before App OD becomes just another school project, just another wedding blog or holiday blog, where the enthusiasm for writing the blog dies with the expiration of the event, I am struggling to engage my audience, now desperate for my next post, so accustomed to more regular bloggers they are.

But, back to the problem with blogs. Who is responsible for this fleeting relevance? Why do I feel this need to punch out another post, quickly? Is it teenagers, with their short attention span? I think that young web loggers may be partly to blame but not entirely. I think excessive blogging is more to blame. Some people blog once a day or even more. Usually, I find these blogs annoying. I also think writing which is overly diarisitic is a problem. I am usually uninterested by blogs that are fairly raw unedited accounts of the blogger’s current state. If you want to update your status, use Facebook or Twitter.

But this is not a rant about how to or how not to write a blog. What the fuck would I know right? Having been only in this game since June 2010. I am questioning the longevity of blogs and the perceived relevance of specific posts and how quickly that relevance declines with time. There we are: subject. Blogs may be used as source material for essays and papers. Therefore, the URL of said blog should appear in the references of these essays and papers. So long as the blog stays active online, these sources remain to be investigated by anyone seeking out more information or confirmation of source material. In turn, the reputation of the author of these sources is determined by the nature of their particular blog. The blog of a large real estate firm may seem more credible and therefore more stable and in turn possibly able to maintain a greater longevity than a personal blog such as this one.

Assume, for one horrible second, that I stop writing, but don’t take this blog down. Assume that Blogspot never goes bankrupt or dies or whatever, and assume that some poor soul at some point has quoted me in their PhD/Year 12 essay. Further, assume that some cheeky wannabe detective decides to look up this Apparent Overdose blog years down the track, years after my last post (coming up in October when I really have exhausted this stupid idea): The blog will still be here. Apparent Overdose will look as it was last left, with its content more or less relevant depending. But it can be verified, read and even liked.

Assume now that the aforementioned real estate firm enters financial difficulty and closes, thus deconstructing and removing its website and blog. And similarly assume that someone has quoted something from that blog in their paper and some dorky cunt has decided to investigate the real estate firm only to find server cannot find requested URL. Does this make the real estate firm or me less credible? Which blog is more relevant? Who cares?

Ok, so there are a load of other things to consider in terms of measuring credibility. But is this blog more relevant simply because it still exists, if only because I was too lazy to remove it? No. Do the posts hold any relevance one year, five years or twenty years later? Yes. They are historical documents in the same way that sketchbooks, magazines and essays are. If a blog’s author becomes famous, their teenage school art project blog suddenly becomes a valuable insight into the apparent genius of a new star basking in their fifteen minutes. I am overstating the relativity here and nominating a vacuous example. Perhaps I could have said historians will value the fickle blogs of fools like myself as documents of ages past. Myself, unlikely to bask in that fifteen minutes, will unlikely have my blog drooled over by fans. But does that make my content less important? No. Importance of content is relevant to audience, but also to audience size. My audience (of five followers and at least two other known readers) is much smaller than say Miley Cyrus’, but my content by comparison may be far more relevant to my audience. I am guessing here, I don’t even know who Miley Cyrus is or even if she has a blog... [Googles Miley Cyrus… ].

I need to record the rants I make in the wee hours and re-blog them, this is often when I am most passionate, lucid and uninhibited. App OD is rant. My not so humble opinion. Written to endure for days, weeks even, it’s relevance relative to my closely related audience. I have plenty more to say, trust me…

Montreal 2072

"Why Video Art Sucks In 2010"

This rant was going to be titled, “Why Video Art Sucks In 2010”, but after finally attending the 17th Biennale of Sydney just three days before it ended, I can’t truthfully write a piece supporting that argument.

I’m not against art that is made using video in the same way that I’m not against art that is made from wool, clay, concrete or paint on canvas. But I have a few problems with the proliferation of video art and often with its technical qualities and sometimes with its presentation. I had been forewarned about the Cockatoo Island part of the Biennale and how much 4D work was featured. There was a lot of video art. Probably more than half of the pieces featured screens or projections of some kind. But I was surprised by how much patience I had for a medium that often I find revels in its own tedium. There were some stunning pieces, some confronting, some humourous and most of a polished production quality more akin at least to television if not more to indy cinema.

In the past I have often been uninterested by video pieces for very basic technical reasons. We are exposed to all forms of video entertainment, all of the time. We see commercials that have been made with huge budgets for huge companies all of the time. We are treated to incredible effects, graphics and production values regularly in our own home with little effort on our part. Investing our time in a gallery we might walk into a grainy, shaky, dark and repetitive visual that is supposed to be contemplative and meditative but is actually just boring and poorly made. Well that has often been my experience.

Cockatoo Island is a fantastic venue for exhibiting art. To stumble into dark rooms, walls decaying, rooves dripping and see pieces like Regina Jose Calindo’s ‘Confesion’, where a brutish man drags a young woman into a room not dissimilar to your surroundings then proceeds to repeatedly dunk the girl’s head into a drum full of water, before tossing her rag-doll like to the floor, the viewer cannot help but be shocked. Sure, this could be a scene from The Sopranos, but it’s a little more threatening simply because of the small dark room the viewer is both watching and watching from. And there is nothing more to this piece, it is brutally uncomplicated and doesn’t waste 20 minutes of an audience’s precious time in self indulgence.

Something less Horror and more Hollywood perhaps? Russian artists AES + F present a huge piece, installed in a large circular room, made up of nine projections, projecting three synchronised images around the room. The imagery is a fantastic animation of over 75,000 photographs and creates an epic re-telling of Petronius’ Satyricon, using Hollywood style gloss and bling with themes like beauty, shopping and consumerism, golf and leisure (La Coste included), opulence and excess, all set to a dramatic orchestral score. It is a technical masterpiece as well as a beautiful piece, it has a dark humour about it, is provocative and is just plain entertaining/fun to watch.



But let’s get back to some of the reasons ‘Why Video Art Sucks In 2010’. One problem with video art is the experience of viewing it. The viewer always walks into the middle of the piece. Why do these works always run continuously? Why are there not timed screenings so that we can all view the piece from start to end. At least on busy days and at least for the more significant works. Rather than walking into the middle of a piece with no understanding of what is happening, attempting to make sense and judge whether the work is interesting enough to devote time to, still being confused and devoting more time anyway in an attempt to make a more informed decision as to whether the piece is interesting enough to devote more time to, before it ends and was either not interesting enough to have devoted more than thirty seconds to, or was interesting enough that now you have to watch it again from the beginning.

Video art is directly comparative to film. Artists, art critics and intellectuals may argue this, but to the audience, not necessarily artists, art critics or intellectuals, comparison is inevitable, and justified. While art is art and film is film, film has explored most of the technical aspects of production such as camera operation, lighting and editing, as well as interpretive qualities such as narrative, storytelling and plot rigorously throughout its history, usually bound only by technology and the available funds for particular projects. Often video art seems completely ignorant of this well established history. Now, before you think, ‘But video art isn’t film or cinema, it’s Art!’, consider what film makers think when they are confronted with some video pieces. Some amateur film makers, film students and cinema critics are staggered by what passes for successful video art. From their perspective, the same nonsense would lose them their reputation.

Take Mark Wallinger, for example, an artist lucky enough to have two pieces in the Biennale. The first depicts a man on a hill inhaling from a helium filled balloon and ranting incoherently in the helium effected voice. Entering this midway into piece, I wish I hadn’t taken more than the suggested dosage of thirty seconds. Wallinger’s other work is a little more entertaining, because it has five separate television sized screens, displayed next to one another on plinths. It seemed to have no sound and showed slow motion clips of recreational activities such as para-sailing, flying foxes and kite flying. The clips have the quality of poorly made home videos, out of focus, shaky and poorly lit. The work attempts a cynical look at human behaviour but is just a series of poor footage of uninteresting subjects. Television continually provides us with this anyway, with more humour and better imagery.

As claw71 suggests about interpretive artists versus actors:
“The secret to a quality bird flip is the emotion behind it. If only those interpretive art students took a few method acting courses.” Likewise, if only video artists took a few editing courses. Most video art could benefit from a little bit of editing, at least I thought. Again, the Biennale challenged my expectations, with many of the video pieces being less than ten minutes long. In another macabre piece, in a coldly lit room, two men sweat with concentration as they play table tennis with a naked woman as a net. The scene is futuristic and gloomy, the woman is sexualised, with faint lipstick kisses over parts of her body. The piece, around three minutes long, titled ‘Ping Pong’, by Abel Abidin, is edited with cuts between slow motion and extreme close-up as well as longer shots of the game taking place. It is a haunting work, well acted, neatly shot, deftly edited. A work both ambiguous and suggestive, while also succinct and direct. Again, this work benefits directly from its installation, inside an abandoned and run down dock shed.



So, I have few conclusions to make. I wanted to finish writing this with a clear point but am struggling to reach one. Video art especially lends itself to being exhibited in alternate spaces to art galleries. Cockatoo Island provides a perfect exhibition space and suggests that more unused city spaces such as laneways, carparks and inner city parks could provide more suitable homes for video pieces than The White Cube. The same goes for sound pieces. While the gallery provides us with a destination to contemplate art, these other unused spaces seem somehow more appropriate for viewing the types of 4D pieces we often encounter. It also suits the looped nature of the presentational format so favoured by these mediums.

This post was intended as a kind of unfair deconstruction of video art in 2010 using fairly loaded, one-sided examples. I was suitably impressed on my last trip to Cockatoo Island in 2008 that my expectations may have been higher this time around. Video art certainly seemed to take centre stage on the island, a fact I don’t greet with boundless enthusiasm. However, my experience has dictated that this post has become a supporting argument for 4D work, particularly in alternate exhibition destinations. The overall quality of most of the pieces of the 17th Biennale of Sydney has had me argue against myself, asserting the fact that video art certainly does not suck in 2010.

Reykjavík 2091

but now its a wasteland
our days of reckless fun are through

Adolescents

Banning the Burqa Chat

Controversy rages around this one and I’m not about to get too involved, except to say I get a bit hot under the collar when I hear other people getting all worked up over one or the other stance, particularly in the context of idle chit chat around the workplace or in the viciously uncomplicated letters of MX magazine.

To me there are two opposing positions, both with some merit but both problematic. The first is that the burqa is a religious garment and as such, sacred. Therefore it is not anyone else’s right to tell a person of a faith what they can and can’t wear as part of that faith. The other is that forcing women to wear this kind of restrictive dress is barbaric and that any religion that imposes such on its followers in 2010 is cruel. Unfortunately I agree with some points on both sides of the debate.

What shits me is my work colleagues getting into a discussion about what is right and wrong here, when none of them (I’m guessing) know anyone who wears this particular headdress, nor are any of them religious, nor do any of them experience any kind of pressure to dress in any particular way, aside from the uniforms they wear at work. Similarly, the conservative media is all but too eager to jump into the debate, using this as another topic to make generalisations about Muslims and their behaviour and lifestyle.

Again, I’m not about to get involved in a religious debate here, personally I am equally sceptical of all religions, but I am most interested by the passion that this debate draws, especially from those who are fairly uninvolved, aside from having to share a bus, or a bank with a woman in the traditional dress. I think the debate breaks down into two sides: Those for the banning of the burqa, who generally feel that such a garment has no place in western society, especially countries like Australia, where people are expected to assimilate, and those against the banning, who believe that we live in a free democracy where people’s beliefs and right to choice should be respected.

A problem with this debate is that these two sides are internally split by conflicting arguments around the rationale for their respective positions. Those for the banning are from two distinct camps. The first see this garment as a kind of threat. They want the burqa (and quite possibly Islam) banned primarily because it is not a part of their culture. On the other hand, some want the burqa banned because they believe it is an oppressive garment that is forced upon women to wear and is a symbol of sexist control, not one of choice.

Conversely, the two voices that support wearing the burqa, seem opposed by their very natures. The first are Muslims who consider this garment sacred and insist upon continuing to wear it as part of their faith. The other are those that feel that people have the right to wear what they please living in a democracy and other people should respect that choice. The problem with these two camps is that the former may be men, who wish to continue to enjoy a fairly sexist control over the women forced to wear the burqa and the latter may be from the political left, the kind who see sexual discrimination as oppression and who bitterly cling to feminist ideals. The two sides agree, but hate one another.

So in fact, there are four positions on the banning of the burqa: the xenophobic, bigoted outsider who can’t stand the sight of it; the radical, submissive, progressive insider who thinks its probably time it went; the radical, extremist insider who sees it as sacred and absolutely not up for discussion; and the do-gooder outsider who supports freedom of choice but opposes sexism.

Looking at all of them, I don’t like any of them. Which is why, when the conversation came up as idle chit chat at work recently between two staff members I quickly cut in with something like, “Guys, can we please not have this conversation here, now.” They both looked at me a little shocked that I should tell them to cease their conversation, but I knew I was about to hear the do-gooder outsider chime in with some patronising position like, “We have no right to tell them…” and the bigoted outsider retort with something like, “If they come to this society they have to…”.

Why do I care? Why am I writing this? I am more interested in people’s reactions to these types of topic. I’m not especially concerned in the banning of the burqa itself. Regarding this conversation at work: both positions seem patronising and both parties seemed ready to preach their opinions about a group of people that they actually have little contact with. And preach them with the arrogance that no-one would possibly disagree with them, so obvious was their analysis. What was most offensive was the casual off-hand nature of the conversation, regarding what is a very sensitive subject, especially to those who actually wear a burqa. I immediately thought such a conversation was inappropriate in the workplace where other people could overhear and I felt that both parties were far too eager to get their opinions out and weigh into what is a very complex debate in a very throw away conversation in a semi-public environment. So, I interrupted.

I don’t want to be seen as holding some moral high ground here, nor as any kind of student of Islamic representation within western society, I just get the shits when non-Islamic folk like to think that they can make decisions for an entire religious group while standing around the workplace. Mainly, because their next conversation will likely be as trivial as how bad the referees have been in the World Cup, or whether the remake of Karate Kid was as good as the original. All conversations have merit, some more than others, but timing and sensitivity are key. Don’t talk shit.

Skatepark killed the skate scene

I am a user of social networking site Facebook. Today on Facebook, one of my friends passed on a post from one of her friends:


There's a council meeting 7am next Tuesday
at Leichhardt Town Hall (Norton St, Leichhardt) to get gather support
for a skatepark in Balmain. Should also be a good opportunity to get
some initial design ideas across. If anyone is free, the more support
the better!


This post came following an extended conversation I had had last night with one of my oldest friends and long time skateboard pals about the effects that building skateparks has had on skateboarding culture and on youth culture in general. While I think the writer of the Facebook post meant to say 7pm and to use either the word get or gather and not both, I was excited that such a comment had come following what had seemed like quite a personal conversation.

The conversation last night began with a drive past some teenage skate haunts, leading into some stories of other spots, until we arrived at the fortress like nature of schools, places that almost always provide the teenage skater some useful terrain. We reminisced about times spent arguing with security guards and being continually kicked out of skate spots but agreed that it was great fun and very much a part of the thrill of skateboarding.

Conversation turned to the building of a huge skatepark in our suburb. About five years after we left high school our council came together and made plans to build this park. By that time we had been skating in the area for years and knew many of the other skaters. We were all excited about it and my friend along with others who had achieved some kind of ‘olde skool’ respect were actively involved with the design and planning of the skatepark.

At the time it seemed like a dream had come true. For years skateboarding had been a renegade pastime, a dangerous, risk-taker’s, trespasser’s pursuit. Now the council was spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars building us a tailor made spot, designed by us? Fucken gnarly! Up until that point our town had always had a decent skate scene. The boom of the 1980s had convinced an earlier council to build a very inadequate, but often frequented, ‘Mexican Hat’ style bowl around 1989. Of course this bowl was not built by experienced labourers and was not designed by skaters. The huge new park, opened in 2000, was a drastic improvement in design and execution, as well as a milestone in the ability of local skaters and the council and legal bodies to communicate effectively, to plan and negotiate and achieve a result that everyone was totally fully stoked on.

Fast forward, or maybe skip to 2010 and there is no skate scene in our town anymore. None, says may friend. Maybe a lone rider on a beaten up Santa Cruz from the 80s riding barefoot to get the milk. Maybe one kid standing tentatively at the side of the skatepark, while scooters and BMX riders take full advantage of what was designed and created by skateboarders for skateboarders. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not bitter that scooters are using a skatepark, I’m glad its being used at all, because it’s certainly not being used by skaters.

What happened to all the skateboarders? Did tricks become so difficult that there is little chance of ever rising above the level of amateur without doing oneself many serious injuries? Is it that there are almost no new tricks left to be invented? My friend suggested something more challenging. That the skatepark had killed skating. No longer did teenagers have to climb fences, or explore drains, or quickly take a run at a flight of stairs before the security guard came chasing after them, instead, all they had to do was to go to the skatepark for all the thrills and spills of skateboarding, without the thrills and spills of being a teenage larrikin at the same time.

We talked this out for a while and agreed that an essential part of our experience was that we were often getting into trouble, or were in places we weren’t allowed to be, often in places that no other person would even want to spend their leisure time in. There was an element of adolescent mischief, of defying authority, of exploring new places that was as much a part of the experience as was personal development and enjoyment of the sport. The idea of finding a new but secret spot was what drove us to continually search out vacant buildings, carparks, schools and other urban spaces.

At that time, the mid 1990s, the skateboard ‘culture’ was in its second puberty. In its first puberty, in the mid 1980s, skateboarding had become hugely popular in the United States and had infiltrated nearly every home with a TV set in some form like Stacey Peralta in Charlie’s Angels or The Bones Brigade in Police Academy. After this boom, skateboarding styles changed from ramp to street skating and the culture also changed. The sport experienced a slump in popularity, followed by a steady regrowth that seemed to peak in the mid 90s. It was this period, this second puberty, which saw ‘skater’ culture become defined as a distinct subculture, with an identity quite different to the skater of the 80s and unique from the other ravers, b-boys and punks who overlapped in fashion sometimes. Being a part of that culture as it evolved, seeing the demise of Powell Peralta and Vision and the birth of World Industries and Girl, seeing an entire new fashion evolve out of the death of another: Skateboarding had died and boomed again but for us there was nowhere legal to skate except for the old bowl, which was awful at its worst and extremely limited at its best.

In 2010, with skateboarding being regularly seen in ugly forms like the X Games it is much more visible, much more corporate and feels like another Sunday afternoon sports program for dads. It is presented in similar competitive formats to other sports with huge amounts of sponsorship, branding and endorsements, all watering down the individuality of the sport and at the same time watering down any teenage rebellious appeal. The X Games looks safe and controlled, organised and boring. As adolescents, skateboarding provided us the thrill of doing something prohibited and dangerous but also made us feel part of something new, or at least a new part of the evolution of a subculture steadily defining itself through history, industry, technique, equipment, technology, fashion, media and popularity.

Without the associated dangers that unlawful street skating provides, the skatepark functions only as a training ground to learn tricks. Tricks that usually become more impressive when performed in raw or less perfect street situations. While the obstacles in skateparks can be more or less difficult, larger or smaller, rougher or smoother, or identical replicas of street spots, they are in one way inadequate in the satisfaction they can provide. Like the legalised graffiti mural, immediately impotent because of its deliberation and its sanction, the teenage graffiti artist will never be satisfied with only legal walls. What excited myself and my old mate Frogger to ride skateboards was more than just learning tricks or riding a piece of concrete or a flight of stairs, it was an entire adolescent mythology.

So maybe the skatepark killed the skater. Or at least killed the skate scene. Making skateboarding too accessible, made it completely unappealing. Removing the danger, removed the fun. Sponsored by Boost Mobile? Rad, dude. I don’t think I will be attending the meeting at Leichhardt Town Hall next Tuesday, I think skaters have quite enough parks at the moment. Rarely, do I see anyone skating them anymore. Is it a shame? I don’t think so. Hopefully just the beginnings of a new movement, call it a third puberty.

Athens 2065

Can you dribble a grenade to save your life?

Dead Prez

Riyadh 2050

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Aldous Huxley

NOW, this page is determined.

Sometime around autumn, 1996, in the early stages of my second year at art school, I grappled with the significance of the image. What constitutes an image? How can text function as an image, or a painting, or a work of art. This text comes from my sketch book, pictured left.


NOW, this page is determined. Its path is chosen. It is contaminated. “They say, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ Why not just tell him to fuck off?” That was just a passing thought and in obvious fact unrelated to the fate of this piece of paper, however, simply because of its existence it has helped shape the outcome of this piece of paper as a work of art. However, this is not to say that this text is an artwork, merely it is a study in existence. Though such a text may seem artistically inclined the text itself is not artistic in intent. To the contrary the text is a medium to exercise the visual effect of text itself. Therefore what you are reading is a pile of crap. But a test to see if you will read, or how much you will read of a text with the visual effect of this. The test is both conceptual and individual to the reader.
As an artwork the visual effect left by an activity such as erasing a word and changing it, as done several times previously in this text, has an effect on the outcome of this piece of paper. Each mark effects its outcome, and in turn effects the impact of this piece of paper on a person viewing it or reading it. This is the crucial point: the page in front of you can be viewed or read. Indeed the two acts seem similar, however to read this text is to take in the words which have been written on the page, while to view it is to see it as a visual image as a whole – that being a page full of words. In most instances the two acts become one, or one follows the other. In the same way the ‘intent’ of the artwork and the ‘intent’ of the text become one, because one depends on the other to exist. And now, if not by luck, this art work is resolved because the subject of the text is exhausted and has also reached the end of the page.

app OD

Apple’s monopoly on personal devices shows no sign of relenting, with the iPad released earlier this year. What does this device do exactly? Is it a phone, a laptop, neither or both? Well I personally have little idea, having yet to actually see one in the flesh. I’m not going to review the device (what do you mean, no USB inputs?), but I would like to talk about Apple for a bit.

Fifteen years ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that Apple would have the market share it enjoys in 2010. Twenty-five years ago it might have been more believable. While its desktop and laptop sales have risen dramatically, it is the market domination of iTunes, iPods, the iPhone and possibly now the iPad, that have launched this once small, specialised, education focused computer company into a juggernaut, saturating the western market with its products.

This web log is being created on a MacBook Pro, whilst music is listened to from iTunes via an iPod. And while I have resisted the urge to purchase the iPhone yet, there is little doubt that when my current phone expires it will be replaced with one. While I love their products, what bugs me is the total, all over acceptance of this brand into our lives. Should we all just give in and get ourselves tattooed? Is this the beginning of a new world order, a single system or language that our daily lives are so plugged into that if we disconnect from our Apple we are unable to function?

The only dissonance seems to be coming from the technically minded, the folks who like to build and drive their machines in their own direction to interesting destinations, rather than the majority of the consumer market who are happy buying a Toyota Prius that can only go as fast as 60km/h and will only drive on streets covered in Apple’s iMap.
“The iPad, much like the iPhone, is completely locked down. The user has no control over what she installs on the hardware, short of accepting exactly what Apple has approved for it.” Lifehacker

“Apple has taken operating system control to a new extreme: Not only does the company insist on approving each and every iPhone and iPad app, it now wants to control exactly how those apps are written.” Gawker

Should we fear this kind of market control? In other industries the resounding yes to this question is deafening. Imagine the only restaurant was McDonalds and the only things you could buy at supermarkets were McDonalds products that could only be used in strictly defined McDonalds ways. Think a step further and it begins to sound like, “What if we only had one bank for everyone, that didn’t require cash or cards because everyone had a microchip under their skin that holds all of their account information?” Even better would be, “What if we had one government for the whole world that controlled the one bank that had all of our money?” Pretty soon things would start to feel like an extremist socialist dictatorship.

The market most inclined to recognize the danger in the kind of control Apple seems to seek have been seduced by the beauty of the Apple. This group were the sceptics of the 1990s who saw Apple as a specialised but unaffordable design tool that they would love to have if it could do all the things their PC could do at the same price. The ones who despised Bill Gates and bought the doomed first generation of bubblegum iMacs when they hit the shelves (exclusively in Apple stores). This generation, now with kids and mortgages, are happy to blindly accept the brilliance of Apple. After all, they are so intuitive!

The generation they call Generation Y seem less inclined to care about these sorts of issues. They haven’t quite been seduced by the beauty of the Apple, for them it has always been the most obvious, the most dominant, and (in some cases) the only brand. “What’s an MP3 player? I just have an iPod.”

Tim Marshall seems to recognize the irony:
Apple seem to be moving more into this way of thinking which is odd when Microsoft after years of doing this have now realised it’s stupid to do so and have relented! Could be an interesting few years to see how things play out with Apple….

Agreed Tim. Lets hope some healthy competition surfaces to keep Apple on their toes. And lets also hope that Apple is not too big for the consumer watchdogs to shut down what might be called an unfair market share.

The first breath into a despicably large bag full of other limp and tepid exhalations. Choosing this medium, this outlet, this forum at this time is questionable at best. In a nauseating room full of cacophonic, non-objective rants APPARENT OVERDOSE will probably be little different to its peers. No doubt it will suffer the same self indulgence, self importance and self absorption suffered by other web based media.

Recently I heard there was a new blog created every second. Well here’s another one. There are enough different ideas to warrant several concise web logs, however at this embryonic stage such organization, clarity and sensibility seems counter intuitive and counter productive. So expect some messy mixing of genre, style, process and production.