My new show ‘Concrete Pigs’ is officially on Sale! I’m coming to Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane - so if you live in any of these places please buy tickets for you and everyone you know so I can perform it to real living people. I’m sure you’ve seen the official art, so here is a picture of lipstick on a concrete pig that I generated with DALL-E.
Cute, no? Sure there is no discernable concrete element but maybe it’s my fault that I’m not nailing the prompts yet. It turns out that learning how to produce digital art is quite a taxing process and you probably are better off just paying a creative person to make an actual picture for you. Probably.
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The America of it All
I’m wrestling at the moment with how much I can talk about America as an Australian comedian doing a show about Australian cities. It’s hard to know what makes you more or less relevant to the world of comedy these days… and what I’ll cringe at in a year when I’m trying to write yet another show. For now, I believe the next section has been largely cut from the show but is still something worth talking about. Can the America of the past predict the Australia of the future?
After watching 20th Century Woman, and fighting the urge to add a classic Mike Mills multi-media collage to my work, I became obsessed with the 1979 Jimmy Carter ‘Malaise’ speech. Interestingly the speech had no mention of the word malaise, but I guess it’s the vibe that makes history.
In the speech, shortly before he failed to get re-elected, Jimmy Carter spoke about a crisis of confidence in America. A lack of confidence in the very notion of Government and what they were achieving. He asked for a shared sacrifice for a common good. He said that it had become clear, that ‘the buying of things’ and ‘the consuming of things’ does not satisfy the human longing for meaning. This feels equally true today - though I still hold onto a partial belief that if I had the funds for unlimited Ganni I might know true happiness.
Carter goes on to identify that:
The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
It seems that this gap has been given nothing except fuel to grow. Even when the speech laid out the choice between two paths, one a path of self-interest in the name of freedom and the other a path towards collective care and community-based thinking.
And over and over again the easier path is the one that was picked, even if it was the route to certain failure. It was quicker! It was familiar! It was well-lit and felt safe! The data showed only how it had worked so far, and minimised where it had failed.
I stole the title of this newsletter from Invisible Women, a great book on data (who knew?) that talks about the way cities are designed for a default man, with design for women or anyone with a different need in our spaces still being ‘niche’. I’ve certainly sat through my fair share of meetings on Universal Design and been talked over by all the businessmen who are sure things are fine and working great.
But to change things, to select the other path or even a third path, it would be good to know if that was possible at all.
Links
I’m in a Bloomsbury Group phase at the moment (probably because it’s on trend).
I’m obsessed with One Ear Brand at the moment and want this bandana. I did buy one from here recently as the bandana is now my signature look, but it was too big so I am psyching myself up to go again.
Ooo this idea for ‘Reading Rythyms’ is a total Concrete Pig. I’m not leaving my house to read in a room that’s less comfortable surrounded by strangers and a soundtrack I am not intimately familiar with. Community can NOT be the answer.
Well I hope you enjoyed this one, and hopefully, you are keen to get more snippets of the thoughts I have been working through before my new show is ready.
I don’t know how after completing 8 years of uni and getting a PhD, structuring a meaningful essay is still something completely beyond me. I probably should have got an arts degree, instead of the town planning degree that has made me a real bummer about the absolute STATE our cities have been left in.