Walking West

Friday, April 27, 2001

The 2001 Webby Nominees are up, and looking at the Personal category, you gotta wonder. Their definition of 'personal site' is:

Sites about individuals. These personal sites are created by you about you, by you about someone else, or by someone else about you. These do not include sites that are constructed to market your portfolio or your personal business.

Blogger isn't a personal site; it's a commercial web application with aspects of a community site. Dancing Paul is made by a single person and mighty entertaining, but it doesn't tell us much about Paul apart from his booty-shakin', gettin'-jiggy-with-it tendencies. douglaspearce.com ver15 looks like it once contained more about Douglas himself, but right now it's a photo gallery. The mighty Fray isn't a personal site, it's a community site (and is even nominated as such, for crying out loud). The only one that really fits their definition of a personal site is The Boar. It's a good site, but it would have been so much better to see it up against a few similar broad-ranging efforts.

Other anomalies: craigslist as one of the best community sites? Sure, it's useful for Bay area apartment-hunters, but let's remember what the first 'w' stands for in 'www'. Plastic under 'Print & Zines'? A community site, surely? And where the hell is MetaFilter?

So much for 'the only awards show for Internet sites that matters'.

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Ed Champion has posted some thoughts on one of my heroes, George Orwell. I've been thinking about this comment of his:

How many unabashedly liberal columnists (myself included) would actually step outside of their comfortable lives and willingly subject themselves to squalor?

It seems to me that the main game for squalor-seeking Western journalists has shifted today from domestic stories to foreign affairs. Slumming it in Wigan for a while doesn't have the same impact or cachet as heading to Bosnia or Somalia. And unlike in Orwell's day, getting to those far-flung squalid or war-torn locales doesn't mean six weeks on a ship, but more like six hours on a plane, giving reporters more bang for their buck.

Nice peopleWhich makes me think that the real difference between Orwell and today's journalists is the willingness to spend very long periods (by today's standards) immersed in a specific situation for one's art. Yes, there are foreign correspondents who end up living in their subject country for years, but they report on a wide range of stories over that time. And there are journalists who are willing to get down and dirty for a while to report a particular tale of squalor; but in this faster age, it's hard to justify spending too long on any one story. Is that just the fault of journalists—or editors, publishers, the reading public?

Ed also suggests that 'it's the obligation of someone within the pool of established writers to make up the difference without holding back'. Maybe, but the 'obligation of someone' is all too easily construed as the 'obligation of someone else'. Who can blame any particular journalist for not wanting to be that someone eating dirt and camping under rail-bridges for the good of Journalism?

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Wednesday, April 25, 2001

Anzac Day

I read my uncle's memoirs last week. He's been writing them off and on over the past several years, and has now written over eighty thousand words. They start with his childhood in the Sydney of the 1920s and '30s, a vastly different place to the metropolis of today: his suburb of Earlwood had unsealed roads and no footpaths; Botany Bay was surrounded by dunes; Mascot had no Kingsford-Smith Airport, but if you were lucky you could get a glimpse of Kingsford-Smith himself. John's father had a respectable job, but the family had no car or phone; they would rent a horse and dray to go on holidays to the Royal National Park.

In 1942 John Lucas enlisted in the AIF. Soon he was on the Kokoda track, fighting the Japanese and malaria, which laid him low for weeks at a time. He acted as a scout on the New Guinea coast, at one point camping for weeks on an island in a palm-filled swamp, until one day while he and his fellow soldiers were out on patrol the US air force bombed the area and left a palm-strewn crater where the island had been.

In the Ramu valley, his camp was strafed by American fighter planes whose rookie pilots had mistaken the Salvation Army flag flying over the recreation hut for the Japanese rising sun. John was caught out in the open and faced a fighter head-on, bullets spraying around him; he was only spared because the plane was so close and flying at him so directly that its wing-mounted machineguns fired wide of him on either side. Others in the camp weren't so lucky.

At the end of the war he was in Borneo, where his squadron suffered its heaviest casualties. After Japan's surrender he took shorthand for the War Crimes Tribunal Officer as he interviewed Japanese officers in their POW camps, collecting evidence about the Sandakan death march. John still has the notes somewhere.

It wasn't the worst of wartime experiences, I suppose—he was never captured—but I can only guess how it must have felt to look death in the face so constantly. To do so between the ages of 19 and 23, as he did, is about as far from the cloistered university life that I and so many have enjoyed at that age as you can get.

The Second World War brought so many changes in its wake—to the world, to different countries, different cities, families, individuals—that the years before it seem like another world, and the survivors like immigrants to our own. Now that they're getting old it's easy for the young to dismiss them as relics of a simpler age: no Internet then; no MP3 or DVD or FTP; no globalisation, no complication.

But carrying the silver scars from wild sugar-cane cuts criss-crossed across your chest, from the day you ran from the Kittyhawks... that is more sobering and awe-inspiring than a high score on Quake any day.

John was never part of the RSL brigade; he never dwelled on his wartime experiences in conversation when I was growing up. But by recording them in his seventies he has left a wonderful gift to his descendants, who will feel lucky indeed to be able to share such incredible memories, just as I have these past few days of reading them. I can only hope to leave a mark as vivid.

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Tuesday, April 24, 2001

How could I miss this in my latest link round-up? (Shame on you, cowboy.) Tim Ferguson on Jedi-worship and censuses. (Censes. Censi. Censen... When 900 years old you reach, remember plural suffixes you will not, hmmm?)

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Apologies for the lack of deep and meaningful entries lately.* I've been flat out writing job applications. Must... Get... Work.

*Note that this is not one of those annoying posts apologising for the lack of posting. I'm still posting, as you can see below. But I don't have time right now to crank out 1319-word essays.**

**List of rates for 1319-word essays available on request.

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Saw Best in Show last night, the latest mock-documentary (oh all right, 'mockumentary', sigh) by This is Spinal Tap co-writer and star Christopher Guest. Brilliant. Great one-liners, funny without being hammy or goofy; Guest captures the spirit of Tap exceedingly well. Somehow I've missed his previous movie, Waiting for Guffman. I will now correct that oversight as soon as humanly possible.

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Do your plates shout 'false teeth'?Yeehar, pardners—it's another link round-up, dagnabbit! Mosey on over to The Age to ponder the future of the Melbourne Comedy Festival and Richard Flanagan's thoughts on being lost and found (prompted by the case of a bushwalker who emerged from Tasmania's southwest after being given up for dead three weeks ago). Rustle up Joel's thoughts on architecture astronauts. Lasso yourself a Wombat File. And if you're planning to conquer the web with your bold new personal or community site, read this MeFi thread on scaling issues (source of the Nosepilot story linked below).

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So, the winner of The Age Critics' Award and the Barry Award for best show out of over 200 in the 2001 Melbourne Comedy Festival was Brian Munich and Friends. I had no inkling of this until the final weekend of the festival, so missed it; but they've extended their run, so I might get to see it after all.

For any creative types out there struggling to maintain their enthusiasm in the face of minuscule audiences, consider this: this award-winning show averaged 20-percent-capacity crowds for its first few weeks, and on one night had an audience of seven. Which should give encouragement to undiscovered geniuses everywhere.

Unfortunately, word of mouth doesn't help much when so few mouths are involved; and taking perverse satisfaction in low audience numbers doesn't pay the rent. Still, if you're talking web audiences, there are some kinds of success you don't want.

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Monday, April 23, 2001

No, no, no. Being sick means three-word posts, not 1319-word posts. Like 'I am sick' or 'I feel crap' or 'Must... vomit... bleaarrggghh!'—not amusing essays on mosquitos with one-liners about gold miners who smell like great auntie Jean!

Action of the Body MusclesSigh. Even when she's down for the count she's showing us all up. Get well soon, Meg, so we can at least kid ourselves that we're being beaten by a blogger at the peak of her physical fitness.

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Now that the Comedy Festival is over I assume that The Age won't be running any more of their Funny Story competition entries, which leaves me free to post mine here. Take a look, then, at Coin Reform! (which won't mean much to non-Australians) and 2001: An Advertising Odyssey. Both are too short for my liking because of the competition's 500-word limit—as opposed to my weblog entries, which are too short because I can't be stuffed writing anything longer. They also aren't Stories as such (or—cough—all that Funny), which may have been a tactical error.

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Sunday, April 22, 2001

Ladies and gentlemen, Walking West proudly brings you the Adrian Mole Weblog!

Archives: 21/4/01 | 14/4/01 | 7/4/01 | 24/3/01 | 17/3/01 | 24/2/01 | 17/2/01 | 10/2/01 | 3/2/01 | 27/1/01 | 20/1/01 | 13/1/01 | 6/1/01 | 30/12/00 | 23/12/00 | 16/12/00 | 9/12/00 | 2/12/00 | 25/11/00 | 18/11/00 | 11/11/00 | 4/11/00 | 28/10/00 | 21/10/00 | 14/10/00 | 7/10/00 | 30/9/00 | 23/9/00 | 16/9/00 | 9/9/00 | 2/9/00 | 26/8/00 | 19/8/00 | 29/7/00 | 22/7/00 | 15/7/00 | 8/7/00 | 1/7/00 | 17/6/00 | 10/6/00 | 3/6/00 | 27/5/00 | 20/5/00 | 13/5/00 | 6/5/00 | 29/4/00 | 22/4/00 | 15/4/00 | 8/4/00 | 1/4/00 | 25/3/00 | 18/3/00 | 11/3/00 | 4/3/00 | 26/2/00 | 19/2/00 | 5/2/00 | 4/12/99

(Crumbs. Adrian has been blogging longer than I have.)

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You know how I said that new instalments of Adrian Mole should be in blog form? They almost are. Sue Townsend's latest entries are now running in the Guardian; the Guardian stories are appearing online; one more conceptual link and they're there. [Via LMG.]

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Just bought the new album by Jodi Phillis, former member of legendary '90s Oz indie band the Clouds. I was aghast to see the cover, which looks like a cheap-label quickie. It's a prime example of my theory about the dead hand of Photoshop—once you know how to handle a few filters yourself, you start seeing them everywhere.

Jane observed that once I get to know the music the cover won't matter any more, and of course she's right; three listens in and even that horrible font doesn't faze me. For the fact is, In Dreams I Live is a fine outing from a fine singer-songwriter. I never cared much for the Dearhunters, her last band—not enough Phillis, basically—but I liked Lounge-o-Sound, her first solo outing, and this new one captures much of its effect. More laid-back and mellow than the Clouds; more acoustic, more harmonies. And what's wrong with harmonies, eh? You young people of today and your noisy bleep-bleep music, I don't know. (Draws hasty veil over large collection of Prodigy and Propellerheads CDs, ahem.)

So, hooray for Jodi Phillis. Now all we need is an album from Trish Young, who was the McCartney to Jodi's Lennon, or something like that; okay, it's a cliché; erm... damn, can't think of a better line... look over there! [sound of feet running from room].

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