Pat Grant's Blue and Australian Identity

Pat Grant's Blue is possibly one of the most intelligent deconstruction of Australian identity and latent bogan racism ever written. It's also a very good comic book that's well produced and drawn instead of being a narrative with a graphic novel tacked onto it. The story of young kids adjusting to adulthood as times change around their fictional isolated country beach town while immigration of blue people from an unnamed nation sets tensions between cultures to a boil explores the uncomfortable and weird subtext of racism in Australia that seems odd because these people are fighting for a way of life that wasn't very culturally enriched to begin with. They fear losing their precious meat pies and sausage rolls while disparaging newly introduced cuisine to their local area that's made by immigrants that don't speak their language, but it's left unsaid whether the noodles in a bowl they make is better than what the yobs had before. In the final panel of Blue the central bogan character is seen eating one of these bowls even as he literally whitewashes the blue alien graffiti off a wall, which is re-claimed by a passing by blue person as he abandons his post. The graphic novel before us could be misinterpreted as a right wing screed against immigration but the author states in the end notes he's not a right wing crank at all, and given Shaun Tan took a look at this thing before he was willing to publish it says a lot about where this Pat Grant guy's intentions lie. He's so successfully captured the mindset of a bogan racist within a fictional universe with blue alien people that he could be mistaken for a racist himself.

But in the endnotes, Genealogy Of The Boofhead: Images, Memory And Australian Surf Comics, included in the back of the graphic novel, Pat Grant's true genius as historian as well as cartoonist emerges.

I knew I wanted to write about localism, racism and the creepy politics that play out in small town supermarkets and surf club car parks, but the ideas I came up with didn't work until I combined them with the story of some spotty kids who walk up the line to see some human wreckage. - Pat Grant

 Yet the disturbing undertones of Australia as a culture of bogans isn't fully appreciated with the text of the Blue graphic novel alone until the themes of this work are further elaborated on in the endnotes:

Today's 12-year-old will never understand what it was like growing up in an isolated Australian coastal town in the 90s. The nearest comic book store was six hours' drive from my home. The internet was five years late and another five had to pass before it was fast enough to be useful. The media we had access to on the north coast of New South Wales was as bland and lacking in sustenance as the white bread in our lunchboxes. To add to this, Australia does not have a wealth of comic art history. In fact, this country has a bad record when it comes to any kind of history. Our way of writing history is to destroy old things pertinent to our landscape and experience, and to import readymade mythologies from overseas. There's not a lot of comic art floating around Australia, in the way that there is in the US, nor is there a culture of collecting it. If we had a silver or golden age of comics, it's unknown to me. And while there are attempts at a publishing industry like that in the States, a truly Australian comics culture has been something of a chimera. That's not to say there weren't or aren't amazing artists or devoted fans, but when it seems you're on the rock farthest from the bright center of the comic-book universe, Tatooine syndrome tends to prevail. Success on the sandy planet isn't much success at all, and there's always another womp rat in a Southern Cross singlet looking to tear you down. - Pat Grant

There is so much in that singular statement that expresses so much of the older, Generation X mentality towards Australian culture that says more than I ever could about how the Australian creative character feels stunted, and no matter how much you wish to create something beautiful and thoughtful  some yob in a Southern Cross singlet will kick down the elaborate and wondrous castle you have built on the sand. The beginning sequence of panels where a newcomer to the beach inquires what his peers are up to, explaining he's from Sydney and he's come to visit the beach. But when the locals who have built what they declare is not a sand castle, but a keep, grow bored with their own creation, they kick down the object of their creativity, leaving the newcomer to gaze upon the ruin of something that he showed interest in. The symbolism of these sequential images is palpable given the above statement, which I haven't entirely finished unpacking. Perhaps Pat Grant is implying that the Australian culture has been neglected and destroyed once the yobs who made it popular are bored with it, and furthermore his statement seems to imply that any Australian attempt at creating any kind of art that wants to compete on a world scale with imported works has to cope with the looming boofheads who will tear down any attempt to create a civilised world in the Land Down Under.

Pat Grant is entirely correct in one assumption. The isolation of a pre-internet Australia will never again exist for my generation and the ones coming after it. Where Pat Grant's generation must have seen apathy, cynicism and painful resignation to the lack of change and caring about our own history, I've seen slowly disappearing, if a bit gradually from the ranks of my own peers. The best and brightest of my peers I hang around with aren't going to risk trusting their future with the yobs who would tear down everything beautiful. There is a deep distrust of politicians currently with people my age, however it is not a cynicism rooted in the idea that nothing will ever change. It's the idea that we know how to run the country better than the boofheads in Parliament, and because we have no Bill Of Rights to call our own because of our archaic Constitution written in a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were considered subhuman and terra nullis was the order of the day, we feel completely powerless to change anything until we can finally take the reigns for ourselves.

The awkward embarrassment young people with intelligent minds feel about Australia isn't just the racism or the misogyny and the lack of a true established culture we haven't imported from elsewhere, it's the result of several generations of Australians living under the dinosaur era isolation mentality that refuses to die in spite of the internet. We feel like our politicians have to die off before the threats to our sanity and our reason expressed to the decaying wreck of bogan rule before anything good or beautiful can exist here. We care little for our history because we're screaming for a future where intelligence is valued and art can prosper to arrive.

I Fell Down A Hole Part III: The Quickening

Last time in the I Fell Down A Hole dramatic miniseries I was beginning to talk about what makes me happy but got bogged down in what I'm still struggling with and what makes me sad about life.

This time let's not do that.

I want to discuss, finally, the things I actually like for once.

A lot of you probably don't know what I'm into at all, from reading this, but not only do I have hobbies, but contrary to what you've probably heard, I actually enjoy them.

I write books as a hobby that might transfer into a living, it's not fanfiction and publishers have taken a peek over this thing over the years. I also like to read a lot of books but you're probably wondering what kind of books I like, so here goes:

Anything where a guy who's either a shut in or a creative person or some kind of wizard/warrior trying to do his bit to save the world is always good. My favourite book of all time is Welcome To The NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto, I think it's one of the greatest works of contemporary literature written in my lifetime. It's getting to the heart of a big problem in Japan where a lot of people feel isolated or become shut ins because they have social anxiety disorders, since I have an anxiety disorder it's really interesting to see a book written by a man who clearly gets the short end of the stick because Japan has an even worse track record of helping out the mentally ill than Australia does, at least Australia has some kind of Medicare to pay for meds at some level, Japan is a place where most drugs like Prozac aren't available so a lot of people there go it alone and Welcome To The NHK is about somebody who's a hikikomori or a shut in because of social anxiety who's right in the middle of this minefield. Part of the reason why I love this book so much isn't just because it deals with things I can relate to with social anxiety, but because I don't think many novels like this capture the essence of anime in the printed word quite like this one, it's like when you read it an anime explodes in word pictures inside your mind. You literally can't imagine it not being an anime because as the light novel format it is, it's heavily inspired by anime but it's a novel, yet it gets to the heart of what anime is capable of without a single illustration, it was adapted into an anime later but it's kinda weird to me that even now, light novels instead of manga are being adapted into anime rather than people having to draw to be a part of that cultural scene at all, it's really fascinating and exciting that something like Welcome To The NHK can be not just a novel that talks about heavy themes and problems of contemporary Japanese society, but it's also this cult classic to anime fans both in Japan and the West because it speaks to both fanbases in a way that some people, like this actually Japanese guy I met on an internet forum once who said something along the lines of "Welcome To The NHK is everything wrong with my country" - I earnestly think this guy completely missed the point of what Welcome To The NHK represents not just as a novelist's story about a shut in who ends up in this zany scheme with his pervert neighbour to make a hentai game which he agrees to because he wants to impress a girl he knows, but the hentai game they end up making is horrible, they fail at making something but their attempt at making something, even if it was terrible and kind of perverted, it was a valiant and noble triumph over the apathy and self loathing they had for themselves before. I think that's the part this Japanese guy I met on a forum didn't get about why Welcome To The NHK doesn't just speak to a Japanese audience, but to a Western one, cause Japan is very hardline on slackers and shut ins, doesn't allow them to thrive, but the Western world has a lot better safety nets for the slackers and shut ins, and as a result I think though we make a lot of jokes about them in our culture we're way more sympathetic to them than Japan as a culture would be, and Welcome To The NHK, like many great novels new or old, gives us empathy to a man's story whom we wouldn't normally listen to, but a lot of people did even outside of Japan because as it turns out, like JD Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye which is partly responsible for Welcome To The NHK existing, white people like to contemplate their problems and talk about them because they feel alienated in society, they always have whether it's justified or not, and that's just fascinating that something written by what was essentially a Japanese shut in who became an author, then a manga and anime franchise, blossomed into something so huge that meant so much to this die hard audience, it's the magic of literature that allows itself to coexist in a multimedia environment, it is a story that is not threatened by being constrained to a book or a comic or an anime, it is a story that escaped and could not be contained even in isolationist Japan, but I think the greatest accomplishment of Welcome To The NHK was that it was created by an unemployed bum loser who was tired of being a massive failure, so he turned his failure into a novel about being a failure, which then turned into a huge multimedia franchise. Truly, an inspiration to us all.

Another of my favourite books ever which is like the flipside of the otaku culture Welcome To The NHK comes from, it's much more upbeat and portrays the positive aspects of otaku in Japan rather than the creeper side of it like NHK does.

It's called Train Man or Densha Otoko by Hitori Nakano, it's this romance novel for guys oddly enough that's about this guy who saves a girl on a train from a drunk guy but later he turns to his 2channel forum buddies to help him get the courage to ask out this girl on a date and the plot just blossoms from there. What makes Train Man even better is that it may or may not be a true story. I once watched a video online where some girl was saying that we don't need myths and legends anymore, with this assumption that myths and legends don't happen in modern culture, but Train Man is a prime example of 21st Century folklore from the internet age that I don't think gets enough credit for proving that myth and legend is alive and kicking, I think it's awesome that we live in an era where while it doesn't matter if Train Man was real or a hoax, we have this 21st Century equivalent to Robin Hood of Nottingham or some shit which is another folk hero based on very dubious historical record. Train Man is also the first example of a romance novel for guys that I've ever seen, and it came from a time in Japanese culture where men in Japan were somehow allowed by society to be all romantic to the women they loved rather than like it is in Western culture where hypermasculine whitey culture is all "Being loving and affectionate to your lady is totally gay". Train Man isn't just a romance novel for guys, it broke ground, it challenges what men are willing to read, not to mention how the internet can be incorporated into the 21st Century novel so that it can continue to be a valid art form that young people continue to work in as a medium. Lots of people in say, The Guardian newspaper and other places get all worried about whether literature is dead, or nothing original will ever be committed to the printed page, but I don't think books are dead as an artform at all. Considering the above examples I've listed of my two favourite books, which tell a very similar cultural story from different angles and different ideologies, literature is alive and well but nobody bothered to check the pulse. Literature has barely begun to deal with the kinds of issues young people my age are dealing with. And people say that nothing original will ever be written again - bullshit, you know why there's a sense that nothing original is getting published right, it's not because Fifty Shades Of Grey was a fanfic that became successful, it's because young people haven't been passed the torch to yet and we're still being bombarded with the leftover ideas and cultural memes of the last generation. Ten years from now I guarantee you we'll be seeing a lot less tired Star Trek and Star Wars references in pop culture and we'll be seeing a lot more Jurassic Park, Neon Genesis Evangelion, maybe even a few Dragon Ball Z and Scott Pilgrim Versus The World references here and there, these are things my generation grew up with that were made in our own lifetimes, and they're fresh, new cultural memes that yearn to be run into the ground by young voices yet to be heard.

As for films I like, I'm really struggling to come up with a top ten list of my favourite films ever, since I grew up in a house with a film school grad brother and I watched a lot of films with him. I don't play video games much because I'm terrible at them so in order to reach out to my brother I'd find myself subjecting him to weird movies I'd heard about online and managed to hunt down in some backwater JB Hi-Fi where these kind of oddball films are still in print within my region code. I've made it obvious that TGWTG and other internet reviewers were responsible for encouraging me to try new cinematic delights but I don't think people who know me in real life realise this, there was this one time I was on the bus from a street party in Newtown and my sassy gay friend Terry was astounded as to why I knew about all these awesome films he'd never heard of, I ended up telling him that the reality was I wasn't a cool tastemaker at all, and that I just found out about them from TGWTG and such places, he was kind of shocked because he previously thought I was a cool dude as far as high functioning autistics went, the man clearly doesn't understand that nerds talking about obscure things on the internet is to autistics what reality television is to gay people of his kinda circle. My point being is I ended up revealing the secret to my underground arts success and he was floored that I was a nerd all along. I get mistaken for being a hipster a lot because I go to an art school, but don't be fooled by my awareness of surrealist filmmakers and artists, the nerd roots run deep to the extent that after a long period of horrifying depression I tried going back to my nerd roots and started watching anime and weird movies that appeal to nerds again.

Like I remember I found out about Ralph Bakshi through hearing about this movie called Heavy Traffic, which was about this shut in cartoonist who made art in his basement essentially while living with his mixed race parents in New York City, and he ends up dating this sassy black woman bartender and it's the best film about how racism actually happens in real life rather than stuff like The Help which try to hammer in the racism is bad angle so hard it misses the mark, Heavy Traffic is one of my favourite movies ever though, if you had to pin me down and force me to put at least one movie on my top ten list it would be on there, in the higher rankings too. I discovered round about the same time I was looking for similar subject matter to Welcome To The NHK, I really dig stories about creative shut ins who try to make something of themselves, most movies you see about young people now have slacker characters like a Scott Pilgrim or a Judd Apatow archetype, who people my age are supposed to relate to but I don't think any of the modern slacker characters outside of Satou Tatsuhiro from Welcome To The NHK have come close to remotely being as relatable as Michael from Heavy Traffic, both of them share similar qualities in that they're considered failures by society's weird standards but there's more going on in their heads than people actually see and give them credit for.

I guess you could call Satou and Michael something along the lines of "creeper with a heart of gold", since they're kinda creepers sometimes and they have serious flaws but they have such fascinating inner lives and struggles that you stop caring that they're kinda sexist or racist since right from the get go you understand that the reason they're like that is their environment versus their actual morality most of the time. I really love Michael as a character because he represents a reality of the 70s you don't often see, Hollywood depicts the 70s in most mainstream movies as this safe, watered down counter culture where civil rights and everything happened, but he was a twenty two year old virgin in an era before the internet and back then we didn't have webcomics that Michael probably would have been in the business of if he existed now, or in some kinda remake. I look at Michael and I feel kinda sad for him because it makes me realise how I was born at kind of a perfect time in history where you could reach out to complete strangers on the internet, and you can just outright post your creative work online. I also admire the shit out of him because when I was about twenty two like he is in this movie, I was a virgin (still am) whose only real outlet was his creative work since I didn't get invited to many parties, sure Michael's a cartoonist and I realise to young people that's a way cooler profession than just being a writer who writes novels, short stories and blogs, but I think despite my being jealous of Michael's ability to draw I relate to his ability to resist the dreary awfulness of his lonely urban lifestyle where he has to go to the movies by himself, his only outlet is drawing stuff late at night, he's probably not sleeping too well either, but his passion for his creative work keeps him feeling imaginative and alive and that meant the world to me when I was just starting out in University. So many slacker characters in fiction get depicted as being too lazy or afraid to take a chance and make something of themselves, but not only does Michael know what he wants to do with he's life, he's already doing it, right now, presumably because he knows if he doesn't he won't have anything else to help him bear the burden of his lonely life. He might not be published in the newspaper comic strip yet but right here, right now, he's exactly where he wants, nay, needs to be in his life. He's well on his way to being somebody. And we need more young people characters like that. Because not all of us are listless bums wandering the Earth being shouted at by our parents. Some of us actually like our parents. Because they support us.

I used to listen to nothing but Andrew Lloyd Webber until the internet rescued me from the Phantom's clutches. I still like the Phantom Of The Opera musical, it's just that I'm now aware of music that doesn't come from film soundtracks or musicals now. I listen to a lot of hip hop, pop and some rock and metal in equal measure, I'm very eclectic because as a guy who writes books I'm always looking for the appropriate background music for the right moment and tone. It's funny because since a lot of the pieces of music I allude to in my novels are instrumentals from film scores I may not have to pay royalties to the publishers of the lyrics due to there not being any to reproduce in my prose.

I really like Kanye West and The Beastie Boys in terms of rap, but I'm also the proud owner of Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme album and two NWA CDs of their most influential work, I have Eazy-Duz-It by Eazy-E as well, but before I get rambly about that I want to point out why I find the work of The Beastie Boys so interesting, it's because The Beastie Boys appear to be the definitive example of cross cultural influences that get co-opted by white people right. I've noticed Ralph Bakshi in his animation work has a shitload of African American characters in them, regardless of how integral to the plot they are, well The Beastie Boys succeed because they're also Jewish artists who were influenced by black culture and the music that comes with it, but they did it in a way which wasn't annoying or irritating to actual black people, kind of how many black people adore Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin despite it being made by a white, Jewish guy. The Beastie Boys aren't just important because of their vast body of work, they're also important because they prove that white people actually can be cool, and be inspired by the artforms of other cultures than their own without degrading or debasing those cultures by respecting the material they draw from that. Another band I like is Oingo Boingo, I only have one of their albums, Only A Lad, but I listen to that thing again and again, it's shorter than a lot of albums can get in rap sometimes, very digestible in ways but eerily sinister in others, like there's this song by them you've probably heard in AMVs on Youtube called Little Girls which is about pedophilia. And they close out the album with a song about masturbation. And the sinister subject matter is contrasted with cartoonish pop Caribbean influences and 80s beats. Yeah... I adore this album for being both brazen and quite a work of art in its own right as far as pop music goes.

I also really like animation, both Western and anime if you haven't guessed, but that's for another day.

This is getting a bit long so I'll end it here, part four will wrap this up.

I Fell Down A Hole Part II: Fall Harder

Read this first, as it was the beginning of my trying to grapple with this. It explains some of what I've been going through, not all of it.

As you may be aware, for the past five years I've been trying to complete my University degree whilst struggling through a fog of depression. This isn't easy because my mood swings so often that you could be forgiven for thinking, if you only saw me for about three hours that day on a Friday when I only have one class, that I was happy as a clam this whole time. Not the case, since as soon as I got home usually when it got dark and cold as it does in April in the Australian climate my mood goes haywire and my brain gets sad and I start hating myself.

This was usually what happened, every April, like clockwork until this year when after I got into somewhat of a decent sleeping pattern my moods swung less erratically and for once this time of year I was a lot happier. And scared, because I didn't know when my mood was gonna swing back into Sad Land at any moment. I didn't trust it, I thought I'd wake up in The Matrix and find out I was in Sad Land the whole time.

But after three days being happy as a clam... my mood didn't swing back to unhappy and crazy.

I have a few theories as to why this must have happened.

For one thing I stopped troll rolling on message boards trying to reach out to people who didn't want to deal with me, and I didn't want to burden with my crazy mood swings. This resulted with me going to bed at semi-appropriate times instead of falling asleep at 3am in the morning at best. And because I got better sleep I got more sunlight and my brain got happier I guess.

I've also wanted to get back into my usual hobbies I had before I fell into this hole of academia and depression, but it also seemed like it felt that getting a University degree was the thing preventing me from achieving my true potential trying to get published instead of rotting away undiscussed while trapped in an academic situation where I was forced to analyse stuff rather than create it, since I'm at that part of my Uni degree where you're doing theory subjects instead of practical work, and too much theory lumped in there makes you feel very uncreative sometimes unless you put your mind to it and start making it fun. I had to use gamification to improve my outlook on academia, despite my lifetime of negative, stressful experiences trying to play actual video games which put me off the medium of video games for life.

So what was I if I wasn't a gamer? Did I suck because I sucked at video games, alienating me from a lot of men I grew up around who loved video games? I hated video games growing up because my autism comes with this thing called a motor skills deficiency which means everything the movie The Wizard told you about autistic people pwning at video games is a hollow lie. The game controllers intended to immerse me into these digital worlds were ironically the thing that cripples me from being able to enjoy those imaginative digital worlds at all. And yet young people were playing video games in droves. Hardly anyone apart from me who I knew were reading books. I loved reading books. I loved writing them too. It's all I really had, considering I enrolled in an art school degree out of a fear that an Arts Literature or Creative Writing degree would be the same recycled shit I learned in high school about postmodernism. I hated that, I'm not surprised a lot of kids my age hate reading because I had to fight tooth and nail to retain my love of it through an education system that failed to imagine things, or for that matter imagine a future of kids who loved to read because they were allowed to think their own thoughts about what they read, and read for fun even.

Reading and writing were my true passion. I'd been doing it since I was twelve years old, I think anyway. They gave me an award for Interest In Library back in Primary School, I wish I could find it in the pile of boxes we had after my family moved. It's all I knew how to do. My brother, he was way more into film growing up than me. He didn't just want to watch films and be entertained like I did, he wanted to make them. Me, I read books not just because I wanted to read them, I wanted to write some of my own too. When I read a book, I thought to myself that this was a form of expression I could totally do myself, it's a low budget medium with minimal stress compared to film which would have overwhelmed me with a career of one panic attack after another once the smallest thing went wrong.

Literature on the other hand allows itself to be taken in slowly. It's what I like about it. You go at your own pace and you can deal with the emotions it throws at you in your own time.

And a few days ago that got me thinking about other things, not just books, that I used to love before I got all depressed, lonely and miserable. Things that got me through the day since I didn't have a girlfriend like the other boys sometimes had to motivate me to get out of bed in the morning. I had my book writing and book reading to do, but I had to compensate for the whole being terrible at video games thing. So I looked out for things that gave me the same beautifully imagined creative worlds of video games but presented in a format I could actually enjoy.

I started looking up videos on the internet, somewhere on TVTropes I came across ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com and I found something there. To this day that website is the reason why I'd rather watch nerds in their basement talk about a movie or cartoons on the internet instead of reality television. Fuck Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I wanted to figure out what The Cinema Snob was gonna drag out of the dustbin of history this week. Fuck Honey Boo Boo, I was watching Nostalgia Chick and Todd In The Shadows introduce me to the joys of pop music and incredibly girly media I wouldn't have touched back in high school for fear of being persecuted more than I was. Before I watched Brows Held High for the first time the only arthouse films I was familiar with were the ones I walked in on my mother watching on SBS, and she'd tell me to scram because these movies often had nudity, or violence. There was one Friday night my mother was proven right in her assertion that SBS wasn't a kid's channel because that fateful late evening they were showing Perfect Blue, and if you know what Perfect Blue is you'd realise why a twelve year old boy would be scared shitless by it.

I was twelve years old, man. I didn't even know what rape was. I was so innocent that if I were a character in the Dragon Ball Z universe I'd still be eligible to ride the Nimbus Cloud. That's how green I was then. Depressing to think that the kid who once was horrified by Perfect Blue at age twelve barely raised an eyebrow at Cannibal Holocaust because Brad Jones, The Cinema Snob warned him in advance what he was getting himself into. And I think that's why I was willing to expand my horizons a bit more. Spoilers are generally avoided by some, but if I know something horrifying is about to happen in a movie, and your spoiler saves me from being traumatised, you've done a service to my poor anxiety disorder that thanks you for the heads up.

And I think that's where the pieces started to fit together. I was raised in a family where somehow, by some twist of fate, the act of tricking one's elders into letting you see The Godfather is a rite of passage that for unknown reasons was passed down to my generation, after my own mother tricked her mother into letting her see it in cinemas on its release. Truly the watching of highly age inappropriate material that changes your life is a time honoured tradition in my household, as smut and ultraviolence is passed down through the ages to the younger generations. This is the tradition I hope to pass down to the children I hope to have the privilege of conceiving, considering that my lack of luck in love or romance compared to my peers of the same age made me shun the entire rom-com genre for its making me feel miserable and lonely when I compare my life to everyone else's.

It's a flawed, borderline crazy reason to hate rom-coms, but you can see how a twenty three year old lifetime with no reciprocation in romance can make a man hate such a genre and its tropes rather than using that genre to live out fantasies that will become reality maybe one day when the stars are right. Instead my depression ridden sadness brain was offended by the rom-com genre due to its believing I, and my brain, were being lied to by Hollywood.

Things started to change for the better more recently, not from the charms and embraces of a woman's love, but instead an intellectual love of new ideas and concepts found in cinema, books and various other places I'd run into at Books Kinokuniya and JB Hi-Fi where entire worlds could be found inside a graphic novel or a DVD that was sold in either of these places.

I'll tell you about that stuff in Part 3, where I come to grips with what it is I actually enjoy in life rather than hate about it.

I Fell Down A Hole

Soooooo...

I ended up being swamped with academic demands for most of April, which for me is an awful time to be not in a coma because my brain goes haywire when it gets cold. It happens to me every year, without fail. April sucks. It is my least favourite month, of all months. My mood swings get out of control when this month rolls around and I'm glad it's nearly over. It's a month that's awful for a number of reasons I could name, financial woes, getting sick, seasonal affective disorder, depression, the works.

And then by the end of the month when my cash flow started getting better I began to think about the kind of hobbies I used to really love but ended up neglecting because of academic or depressive reasons. The things that make me feel alive again, or more alive than angry I guess.

I watched End Of Evangelion today, for the first time since I first watched it along with the rest of Neon Genesis Evangelion with my brother and he punched me in the stomach over the ending and he autotuned my yelps of pain with his I-Am-T-Pain iPhone app for the lulz. I will never forget that night I watched End Of Eva with my brother not in a grudge holding sort of way but in a "That was the summer of Evangelion" sort of way when I think back and really remember what it was that used to make me happy before the first rounds of horrible, horrible depression sank in.

I'm not sure if most people are aware but I was a Pathways student who did my final high school year over a number of years so my high functioning autistic brain could cope with the workload. I was emotionally abandoned by three separate year groups of students who just plain forgot about me the minute they graduated, so as a result I'm really nervous a lot of the time that the people I go to University with will forget about me and never talk to me again just like they did. I'm awful at making long term connections with people. Never had a girlfriend, all I have is my novel writing and because I've been so busy with art school work doing a Photomedia degree I no longer believe will lead me to what I want to do with my life, my blogging here's taken a bit of a back seat to the madness that's been going on at home. Not exactly newsworthy madness, but definitely a neurotic madness that leads one to wonder about things of minuscule importance at 3am because I can't sleep properly.

I guess what started happening as to why my brain seems to be resisting the winter blues more than usual is because I've had to get up earlier in the morning than usual for a number of reasons, one is that I'm back at University. I have theoretically, somewhere I need to be instead of being a self employed novelist bum who sits around at home reading books and watching cartoons of both the Western and Japanese variety.

I'm putting this up here so that I don't look like I've been squatting on this blog URL making nothing, but new stuff is coming.

Roger Ebert Dead, Criticism Lives

My brother woke me up this morning and told me Roger Ebert died, I was barely awake. The hours passed and my brain couldn't quite process it. As a Taoist I believe the afterlife has a lot of options, not so much that one not believing in one faith bars you from an afterlife but rather that an afterlife believes in you. This sense of metaphysics is probably how I took the death of my surrogate grandfather who was the granddad in place of the two granddads I never knew so well.

But Roger Ebert believed in more than just what any old person believed in, he believed in something that is very difficult to have faith in even beyond the struggles of man and religion. He believed in cinema, even as he saw the worst of what Hollywood had become in later years he never gave into the hateful critic mould and retained his humanity to the very end.

A lot of people are weighing in on this. I'm not as familiar with Siskel and Ebert as say, American Gen X-ers are or 80s kids in the USA are. I grew up with something called David And Margaret At The Movies, which was on SBS weekly and ran by the same formula but had some kind of Australian flavour to it that's hard to explain to somebody who didn't grow up here. But Roger Ebert I think retains a level of dignity as a critic beyond nostalgia goggles.

Roger Ebert was to me, in my early University days, the last bastion of giving a damn about the artform you devoted your life to. Ebert never phoned it in, never faked out an opinion to please others. A sellout he was not. He was the emblem of caring about what wonders human creativity could bring rather than giving into the depression and misery life can sometimes throw at you.

Last night I was even peeking at Kindle previews of some of Roger Ebert's books, thinking he'd be around to write many more of them. When I woke up the next morning I found out something that made me realise how wrong I was about that.

As a mildly disabled, high functioning autistic man, Roger Ebert is up there with Christopher Reeve with disabled icons who inspire even the most handicapped of humanity to achieve, despite these great challenges. The man was a movie critic who lost his ability to speak, yet was enabled by technology to continue reviewing films. We live in a world where a Youtube channel called The Blind Film Critic exists, and finally all of a sudden nobody laughs at this idea. People will always look at what they think is silly with disdain at first, but if it offers something of great value, they will take note.

Roger Ebert was a vanguard against haterade in an encroaching digital future. We may not be able to replace Roger Ebert, but be aware: there are films that Roger Ebert will never be able to review. Some good, some bad, some ugly or beautiful. And there will come a time when people have to appraise these works of cinema that the coming generations have made. Because these films have not yet been committed to cinema. Otherwise Roger Ebert would have tried his hardest to give his opinion.

The Guardian Of Outdated Australian Stereotypes

I haven't blogged for about a week, but today I saw something in the Guardian.co.uk online news section for Australia where I was forced to comment via my corner of the web.

First some context, the Australia section of The Guardian's online newspaper site was recently opened up to provide more credible journalism than the mainstream news sources Australia has which have gone to the dogs, but articles like this just fill me with dread as to the accuracy of the picture this well meaning newspaper section is painting about my country.

Some of the commentary is dead on, a lot of racism and sexism is still around, the Aborigines are treated even worse, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. At least it seems that way. To say Australians don't like change is somewhat misleading. They don't like bad change, is a more apt description of what we like or don't like about this country. Change is slow down here, but it's happening more rapidly than most people who don't have the internet probably realise. We live in an age where the average twenty something in Australia knows more about the internet than the government figures supposedly meant to represent them and govern how everything is to be run.

This is notable in that a recent case where customs confiscated manga that a local Australian collector imported ended with the customs agency forced to return the manga/smut/erotica/art (which warms my heart, don't get me wrong, I relish every second of embarrassment the moral guardians in this country have dished out to them) to the person who ordered this stuff online. Oh, we have culture, we might have to import it sometimes but it's there.

We also have a culture, a time honoured tradition, of bringing embarrassment to politicians and moral guardians who question our way of life, for good or ill. Sure, we get situations where hate speech is played on the radio, but we also get situations where the attempts for a national internet filter were so poorly put together by overly nanny state-ish OFLC and telecommunications boards that it was defeated with much applause from the nerds of this country, whose tireless efforts to keep the Prime Minister's mitts out of our personal lives is in need of some kind of medal, considering how many flame wars our local internet has had to go through to remain uncensored like a lot of our movies and video games have been in the past fifty years.

Because of the incompetent attempts to nanny state the people too young to care about what the old stick in the muds of censorship have to say about us, and too old to be bothered fighting these annoyances directly rather than just ordering things online from overseas when nobody's looking, that right there is the Australian character, writ large.

We do have a culture, it's not built in stone or cement as much as it's built upon years of fighting in silence until now against irrelevant cultural dinosaurs that need to go extinct. There are people who are changing things in this country, they're just not as loud as the rugby and soccer fans drunk on Victoria Bitter about it.