I wrote an article on the Occupy Melbourne eviction on Friday 25 October 2011 for The Conversation. A different version of the article was published on the Right Now website.

In the days following the eviction I spoke to a lot of people about the police violence and the Occupy movement generally. I think most people genuinely agree that something is not quite right with the system with live in. Not just that things aren’t being done very well, but that there are fundamental problems with global capitalism. The thing is, no one, Occupier or not, can really articulate the problems. What I’ve found interesting has been that a lot of people at Occupy were using the old language of the sixties – or worse, the language of Marx from the 1860s – to talk about an economic system which has no precedent, and no popular critical language. If you speak the language of global economics, you’re extremely likely to agree with it. Any problems you have with the global order are likely to be cosmetic. On the other hand, if you seek structural changes, you end up falling back on broad place-holder terms – you start talking about democratic processes which, on their own, are precisely that; processes and procedures that are empty of content – and the authorities can pretend that you’re a senseless rabble.

Well, it’s been eleven months since my last post. In the mean-time I’ve finished my law degree, started an Honours thesis and kept on going with the human rights journal I edit. I got and then left a job in insurance law. I had a summer lover. Then I started going out with my best friend, and moved in with her two weeks later. I read David Foster Wallace’s last uncompleted novel, The Pale King. I went to the bush and listened to solar flares hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. I stopped writing, and wondered if I’d ever write again.

But here I am, and it feels good to be back.

["A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people ... okay -- the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night." Andrew Marr, BBC.

Not so much angry, as angsty. And thankfully not in my mother's basement. But ok, I'll cop to late night drunken ranting...]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about being comfortable in my own skin. A kind of side-effect of the various upheavals of a fairly critical theory heavy undergraduate degree was the tendency to problematise everything, even, and especially, my own sense of self. But I am coming to realise that at some point, if only for my own mental health, the deconstructing has to give way to something positive. The process of questioning every aspect of my life must be followed by a process of reclaiming those aspects that are redeemable.

Listening to Gary Foley, Nazeem Hussain and Hoa Pham talking on the Token Effnik panel at TiNA about ethnic representations on television, I was struck by how often they referred to their own ‘community’. In their cases, the communities to which they belonged first were the Indigenous, Islamic and Vietnamese communities, respectively. That sense of an ethnic identity is something I’ve not been comfortable with ever since I become aware of myself as ethnically different from my friends. Ever since dropping out of Viet school after less than a year during which I failed to make any Vietnamese friends, I’ve consciously shunned specifically Vietnamese or Asian social circles. Instead my circle of friends has always been overwhelmingly white. Indeed, the things I tend to be interested in – literature, sound art, critical theory – have tended to be dominated by whites. Somewhere along the way I began enjoying my point of difference, neither white nor yellow, but somewhere in the excluded middle – variously described as the ‘hip’, ‘cool’ or just ‘whitey’ Asian guy.

But that point of difference also leaves me isolated in ways that I didn’t think those panelists would feel. For the first time, I began to see a way around a kind of self-imposed ethnic segregation – which was always how I saw the ‘Asian group’ at school – to a healthy sense of ethnic identity which is not only something to be proud of in and of itself, but which opens up an artistically fruitful heritage I’d been reticent to glean up til now.

That was probably reflected in my attitude to ‘ethnic literature’, and my not-so-ironic deprecation of Asian-Australian authorship. But the truth is, seeing and reading people like Benjamin Law, Alice Pung and Nam Le offers me a model of being ethnic, of being Asian, in what I had always instinctively felt was a white middle class environment.

A rather different problem presented itself when I began to think about ‘reclaiming’ – or more accurately, being comfortable with – my masculinity. And in the interests of being frank, let’s be clear that it is a middle-class, every-opportunity-in-life-has-been-presented-to-me kind of masculinity. How do you speak from a position of privilege? What’s becoming clear is that silence is not a solution – neither ethically nor for my own mental health. But weighing in on topics such as feminism or Indigenous rights as an inner city, middle-class male can seem, at worst, like nothing more than a sort of intellectual imperialism – I’m effectively gagging those I purportedly speak for. And whilst I know that positioning myself as an ally to oppressed and marginalised groups is important and useful it can be very difficult to shake off the nagging question, why me? Why my middle-class male voice amongst a sea of other, identical voices?

Maybe it comes back to that idea of community – who am I writing for anyway? Sometimes a particular story will be pitched at a male audience, or a middle-class audience, and maybe that’s ok. These are, for better or for worse, tags that will always follow me around – and lately, they’d begun to feel suffocating. I started second guessing every sentence, every sentiment – writing and perhaps even living in a kind of bland zone of exclusion, shying away from my Vietnamese-ness, my masculinity, my middle-class roots, but unable to fully appropriate or embrace whiteness or femininity or the working class. Not that I want to move towards some kind of reductionist ‘revival’ or originalism – but hopefully by recognising and accepting that those tags are in some valid way descriptive of me, but not definitive, then I can start to open up that zone of exclusion and play around a bit. Somewhere in there, between yellowness and whiteness, between masculine and feminine, between my middle-class intellectualism and my honest appreciation of certain working class values – is a space from which I can begin to write again.

So that last post was hijacked by some festival silliness. To be fair I was sitting in a pub watching the grand final with a crowd of surprisingly vocal artists and writers.

Anyway, after drinking some questionable home brew at the commune – which was an old bowling green converted by a collective of local artists – I discovered that Taffy had been stolen. So, i trudged home, cold, drunk and embittered about my loss. Only to find Taffy lying discarded at the entrance to Tent City.

An anecdote fairly representative of my experience at TiNA thus far, now that I think about it. It’s been a weekend of unexpectedly finding things I thought I’d lost. Not least amongst them a sense of belonging to an incredibly diverse and supportive artistic community. The number of fellow writers and artists I’ve met up here has been astounding, especially chance re-encounters the following morning or afternoon that might not occur back home for months, if at all. And the conversations we’ve been having have helped me re-find something else too – a sincerity or earnestness about art and writing that irony and academia had deprived me of. That is, being able to talk without scare quotes or raised eyebrows about stuff that you deeply care about – projects and ambitions and inspirations. And being listened to, and listening yourself, because invariably both of you have interesting things to say – something that is all too rare back home.

The final thing I’ve rediscovered is my capacity to be surprised. I’ve walked in on random panels and performances thinking of staying for five minutes and not left after an hour or, in one case, three. My expectations and cynicism keep getting confounded – I saw a paper today presented in large part through dance – and I was riveted for the whole thing.

The key now is whether or not this all can be carried on after the festival. I suspect not – a lot of these rediscoveries have come about thanks to the unique situation we find ourselves in, a decaying industrial city whose empty warehouses and snooker halls are filled for a weekend with a travelling circus of creatives.

Spotted: Derrida, the wire and Wallace Stevens all in the same panel. I found myself in art wanker heaven last night, funnily enough at the Newcastle gun club. Surrounded by pictures and artifacts of British imperialism, and safely ensconced in enormous leather chesterfields, eight poets talked bout their favourite philosophers and how obscure critical theory can inform their poetry.

So agamben was all like, poets don’t know what they’re talking about and philosophers can’t say what they know. And Plato was like, poets are totes corrupting and he like kb’d them from the republic. Schoponhauer sort of sat in the corner and was totes emo. And adorno told everyone to shut up and stop writing poetry cos some really bsd stuff happened and we should like, show some respect.

Then I rolled down to the last Tuesday society and miles rabies like totally stripped to britney and it was a bit gross when she cut open her colostomy bag but she’s like totes hot so I was like whatever. And then godzilla and mummy complex performed an ode to ecstasy, which was really touching cos I could totally relate, especially when the pill made her vomit on stage and come down and hate all her friends. It was just so real, you know?

So anyway, this festival is pretty fun and stuff. Some guys didn’t really like my purple bmx but I was just like whatever, and went to this commune and got like totally wasted.

xoxo, gossip peach

Despite my fears, we managed to make it to Newcastle in one piece. Although we did almost run out of petrol somewhere near Gosford. And the Gaffatape Gimp managed to break the CD player a half hour into our 12 hour trip – meaning that we spent most of the drive listening to a combination of static, Christian radio and Nickelback. Still, we managed to pitch our tent (in the middle of the Newcastle Sports Ground) and wandered around a very dead Newcastle getting our bearings. A (relatively) early night’s sleep followed, as I had to get up this morning for my first panel, Ethical Magazine Making. I was a little nervous (both because I’ve grown to hate public speaking of any sort and because I was riding to the panel on a knee-high, pink BMX named Taffy [which, if you’re familiar with the local culture of Newcastle isn’t exactly how you ‘fit in’]), but eager to get my festival kickstarted after 12 hours cooped up in a car. As it turned out, the panel was more of a roundtable-style event and much less formal and daunting then I’d feared. We skimmed through a whole host of ethical dilemmas facing magazine makers – most interestingly the appropriation of race/culture and the politics of representation in the selection of content. I also managed to tell an anecdote about someone who later turned out to be in the room – a contributor whom I’d never met in person, but who approached me afterwards and mentioned the anecdote. At which point I started stressing out about my fidelity to the truth! Fittingly, the next panel I went along to was about environmental journalism. The panellists raised the issue of false objectivism in journalism – the tendency to go for ‘balance’ in a story no matter what the circumstances. So that an interview with a climate change expert ends up being ‘balanced’ out with an a interview with a climate change sceptic – no matter if the sceptic represents a tiny, tiny percentage of scientific opinion. I then ended up being caught by the next panel – called Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji. It focussed on a project by big hHart, about Indigenous language maintenance/revival. Despite technical problems (it was actually supposed to be a screening), the impromptu discussion ended up being one of the more interesting things I’ve come across at TiNA. It delved into bilingual education and the imminent death of Indigenous languages in this country – the reduction of some 500 languages to 120 languages now in use will be complete within 50 years, when no Indigenous languages will be spoken in this country. Unless, of course, we really begin to do something about it now – something like the amazing work being done by the panellists I saw speak today. More on this in the future – either through this blog or through Right Now – but I can’t do it justice whilst sitting in this dodgy pub in Newcastle milching off their wireless. It was the kind of panel that makes me feel simultaneously energized and overwhelmed – indeed, the day so far has seen me oscillating between that thrill of excitement at prospects and projects to be started, completed, discussed – and this kind of terrible tiredness at the thought of so much work to be embarked on. Ultimately, listening to these sort of people talk so passionately about what they do leaves me immensely conflicted. I know I can participate in these discussions and these projects – but I’m almost incapacitated by my own self-reflexivity or self-awareness. I end up second guessing my motives, my abilities, my effectiveness – and then end up second guessing my reasons for second guessing – and so on until I end up as a puddle of indecisive academic theory. Still, panels like this at TiNA might be my way out of this sort of over-thought muddle – a way of doing something without forsaking thinking and reflecting and engaging in the wider world beyond the closed loop of my indecision.

In a few short hours I’ll be setting off to the This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle. I’ll be up there as part of the National Young Writers’ Festival to talk about column writing and ethical magazine making. I’m driving up with some old comrades from the Spill Collective – you know, that weird art group you probably know better for throwing those ridiculous warehouse parties – including the guy who suspended himself from the ceiling of a basement whilst wearing a gimp suit made of gaffa tape…fingers crossed I get up there in one piece.

Anyway, I’ll be live blogging NYWF while I’m up there, so the folks playing along at home can keep up with festival goings-on (and more importantly, the progress of my friend the Gaffa Gimp) right here. So while normally I’m lucky if I’m posting something once a fortnight, for the next few days you can expect daily (at least!) updates from your peachy correspondent.

xoxo, Peach.

The Ocean and the Sky are the same deep deep blue, the colour of dreams. A sliver of moon only gives fine white highlights to the crests of the swells. The wind swirls around me invisibly and I’m terribly afraid. My little boat, a tiny black rectangle in this great expanse, drifts, a long thin rope reaching up into the sea blue sky and attached to a balloon that I cannot see. Golden streamers streaming off the balloon catch the moonlight and I can guess at the direction of the wind, but not of land.

The problem is not simply overcoming psychological repressions, our Freudian level phobias and childhood traumas, à la Anaïs Nin, something that can be solved by seeing an analyst, by talking through our feelings. The barrier now between wild desire, the thing that stops us from burning feverishly through life is a new prudery, which has nothing to do with Victorian-era covering up but precisely the opposite – a prudery and a cynicism born of the fact that everything is laid open, that we’ve seen it all before. The excitement of the new, the thrill of breaking a taboo, feels second-hand, as if viewed through successive distorting glass frames. All the postures, the orgies and the delights have been prefigured – we read about it, saw it, heard it, long before we reached the point of doing it for ourselves. As Umberto Eco said, every lover’s ‘I love you’ is a quotation, an echo of a film or a book or a song. So the sensual pleasures of Paris are viewed at a distance, out of fear of appearing outdated, of showing a naïve, old-fashioned sort of abandon which just isn’t ‘cool’ anymore, but clichéd.

Long horsey faces and sagging breasts, skin lined and leathery from over-tanning, hair a fake plastic blonde. Real smoker’s voice, you can hear the holes in her larynx every time she speaks.

I guess I half grew up here, in my head. I’m fiercely loyal to it, even when I agree with certain criticisms of it. Paris is a mythic city, so it requires some imagination to get it – its beauty and charm are at once sensual and cerebral – for it is constantly evoking things – past glories and fashions and grandeur – it is an evocative city full of contradictions. A city of grey and beige and sooty black. But for all that, colourful, vibrant and living. There’s no denying that there’s a pulse here, though it can be hard to find. But there’s a rhythm to Paris’ public places that you only get in the truly great cities, an anarchic beat but a rhythm all the same. It’s a city where you can still be a flaneur, where a derive is still likely to shock you. Maybe because at first glance everything looks the same. People watching is a national past-time here – and they often make it worth your while. The French tend to be more animated, as if their voices are just more comfortable with a wider range of octaves than ours, their hands more prone to gesturing. And then there is the constant flow of tourists, an endless stream of wheely overnight bags and cumbersome rucksacks, a real smorgasbord of humanity. It’s a constant motion which doesn’t force you to join in – instead there seems to be an unspoken agreement, a balance of movers and watchers so that the spectacle never plays to an empty audience and nor does the audience have to sit through regular intervals. The whole thing is a big show, and even if you retreat behind cynicism it’s still there as a pure visceral treat – something soaks into you, like learning through osmosis.

My day has been all couples and children. How depressing. And elderly tourists. And strutting pigeons. The azure blue sky. Perfectly cloudless. The park is shadowdappled, leafmottled and bird song chirping, children playing. Out here on days like this, I have all too rare presentiments of content. Life seems distilled into its basic functions and then all the rest is slow, idle pleasure. This makes me happy. The weight has been lifted – I have no responsibilities at the moment save my own well-being. But how long could this last for? How long could I be alone before something cracks? After days spent in my own head the intrusion of others throws me off balance. I am happy to observe for the moment, but to interact, to descend again into the sweaty mass of human relationships seems to me too dangerous, too onerous. But I am writing a lot, and that’s the important thing.

[Final night in Paris, already nostalgic and more than a little drunk, I climb up a construction crane for one last look.]

And the moon sat atop a far skyscraper like a half eaten egg yolk. A terrible sense of vertigo – that constant desire to hurl myself from the crane. The wind is biting up here. The plastic sheet flaps about anxiously. People’s voices drift up from the lonely streets far below. There is always a slow trickle of traffic. I am content, surrounded by a never-ending city full of people but also utterly alone, safe in my scaffold tower. The moon has nearly set now. And distant metal creaks alarmingly. The vista is perfect. The Eiffel Tower is that ideal distance away that is it is in postcard proportion. I could do that thing with my fingers where I pinch the top of the tower, but I don’t. The constant flash of the air warning light above provides a steady but silent beat. A rhythm of controlled fear and exhilaration. And now for the descent.

A couple of things I came across at the elles@centrepompidou exhibition:

Is a computer a vagina to fuck into? Datasperm? – Valie Export

The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples. – Valerie Solanas, SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto

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