I can't remember if I clarified this already... but I succumbed to an unyielding dose of kissing disease at the beginning of this year and the thesis has been on indefinite hiatus ever since.
I am 'apparently' back in the game... though I still cough up bile weekly, my ears bleed (seriously), and every time I book a gig I end up canceling it two days later due to illness.
Life.
I've 6000 words due tomorrow. I have no words on my computer-screen. Unless you count a convoluted couple pages of scrappily typed out dotpoints in notepad and an awkward msn conversation.
The drive and love for this thing got lost along the way. Somewhere between the puking and the drugs and the coughing up bile. BUT I'm slowly getting back on track. At the behest of my supervisor I am in the process of simply writing out my key concepts: youth. music. community.
(Look, it's harder than it sounds!)
Just procrastinating of course. Have nothing of value to say, whatsoever.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Them's got ears let them hear
In The Age on the weekend...
Ok so this is nothing new. Policies and strategies belonging to a past government are being scrapped left right and centre under Rudd regime. BUT, check this out:
The tuition vouchers scheme provides not only support for kids struggling at school but also incentives for schools to do something to help said kids, instead of just shoving them under the carpet and hoping some genius twelve-year-old's GPA or the blessed bell-curve will save us all.
Naturally, all this went down shortly before the federal election - so of course, everyone's forgotten about it because... **INTEREST RATES!! INTEREST RATES!!**
Oh my god, people. Breathe. At least a backwards economy makes for a housing price drop. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN??
Look it doesn't even stop there,
So whilst scrapping all of the above implementation, she plans to spend 1 billion of the budget on giving grade 9s-12s computers. Which is really necessary. Which won't encourage kids to spend their classes on msn instead of making charts on excel AT ALL. Which is a dumb program anyway and it's actually easier to just draw one yourself. Which, look, I've already lost my train of thought and I blame it all on computers so THEREFORE..... don't give the kids computers they'll just find new ways to fill their short attention-spans with useless crap. Like blogging.
One more thing, the other thing they plan to do that is so much better than helping children with learning disabilities or trying to train better teachers, is chuck another $2.5 billion into trades training. So that no-one actually needs to go to school or learn anything academic, they can just pick up a hammer and REALLY contribute to society. --Not that I am saying tradies are not 100% necessary and valid and uber-important... but Australia is kinda full of them already and it's still a big deal when a kid gets to 15 and actually stays in school instead of going off to work on a farm. It's those ones that might actually get the education needed to become ministers less retarded than Julia Gillard and maybe we can stop throwing billions of EDUCATION dollars into the TRADE industry (anyone see the discrepancy?) and actually give them to the students.
In their hands. Literally. That would be really awesome.
Julia Gillard: "Here, Jess, here is 1 million dollars to contribute to your 5 billion dollar HECS-debt."
Jess Shulman: "OMG thanks heaps Minister for Education! You're doing a real bang-up job. Now I don't have to leave the country after I finish university so as to avoid being bankrupted by my university debts which would thus render my qualifications redundant for you and your industry because I'll be contributing to someone else's much richer, much better economy and I won't be under-valued as an academic who chose to study politics instead of shearing sheep... but yeah as I said, now that you've actually made it a little less impossible for a young adult to study and be able to afford to eat at the same time, I'll totally stick around!"
JG: "Look if you wanted to shear sheep I could probably push that 1 million up to two."
JS: "...."
"Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard has refused to guarantee the future of a body set up by the Howard Government to improve teaching. ... The former government allocated $30 million until 2009 to fund the institute, but Ms Gillard refused to comment on its future at a private meeting with principals' groups earlier this year."
Ok so this is nothing new. Policies and strategies belonging to a past government are being scrapped left right and centre under Rudd regime. BUT, check this out:
"Ms Gillard has hinted the Government could scrap a tuition vouchers scheme for young pupils who failed literacy and numeracy tests."
The tuition vouchers scheme provides not only support for kids struggling at school but also incentives for schools to do something to help said kids, instead of just shoving them under the carpet and hoping some genius twelve-year-old's GPA or the blessed bell-curve will save us all.
Naturally, all this went down shortly before the federal election - so of course, everyone's forgotten about it because... **INTEREST RATES!! INTEREST RATES!!**
Oh my god, people. Breathe. At least a backwards economy makes for a housing price drop. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN??
Look it doesn't even stop there,
"And the Rudd Government is also likely to ditch a contentious $101 million summer school program for teachers, which was slated to continue until 2011.Although a $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund for university infrastructure was the centrepiece of last year's budget, sources have told The Age there is unlikely to be a windfall for universities next month."
So whilst scrapping all of the above implementation, she plans to spend 1 billion of the budget on giving grade 9s-12s computers. Which is really necessary. Which won't encourage kids to spend their classes on msn instead of making charts on excel AT ALL. Which is a dumb program anyway and it's actually easier to just draw one yourself. Which, look, I've already lost my train of thought and I blame it all on computers so THEREFORE..... don't give the kids computers they'll just find new ways to fill their short attention-spans with useless crap. Like blogging.
One more thing, the other thing they plan to do that is so much better than helping children with learning disabilities or trying to train better teachers, is chuck another $2.5 billion into trades training. So that no-one actually needs to go to school or learn anything academic, they can just pick up a hammer and REALLY contribute to society. --Not that I am saying tradies are not 100% necessary and valid and uber-important... but Australia is kinda full of them already and it's still a big deal when a kid gets to 15 and actually stays in school instead of going off to work on a farm. It's those ones that might actually get the education needed to become ministers less retarded than Julia Gillard and maybe we can stop throwing billions of EDUCATION dollars into the TRADE industry (anyone see the discrepancy?) and actually give them to the students.
In their hands. Literally. That would be really awesome.
Julia Gillard: "Here, Jess, here is 1 million dollars to contribute to your 5 billion dollar HECS-debt."
Jess Shulman: "OMG thanks heaps Minister for Education! You're doing a real bang-up job. Now I don't have to leave the country after I finish university so as to avoid being bankrupted by my university debts which would thus render my qualifications redundant for you and your industry because I'll be contributing to someone else's much richer, much better economy and I won't be under-valued as an academic who chose to study politics instead of shearing sheep... but yeah as I said, now that you've actually made it a little less impossible for a young adult to study and be able to afford to eat at the same time, I'll totally stick around!"
JG: "Look if you wanted to shear sheep I could probably push that 1 million up to two."
JS: "...."
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Welcome to Art Class. Kids should learn less and think more.
It begins.
Taken from the Sydney Morning Herald, January 26 2005:
“Australia must find new ways to get young people interested in politics or risk alienating them, Governor-General Michael Jeffery said today.”
Oh, awesome!!! 2005 - three years ago and I see absolutely no change in the government's strategic attempts to reach our youth; see election 07. Ok now seriously. What. The hell. Did anyone under the age of 40 even know the election was happening until they got a fine three days later for forgetting to vote? What happened to politicians visiting schools? Or appearing on youth networks to at least let some kids know who their candidates were?
Anyway. That's beside the point. I don't actually believe any white paper bullshit is going to grab the attention of disinterested youth. They deserve more credit than we give them anyway. The way the average adult connects with their outside world is usually through traditional media: the news on tv, radio, newspapers. As a teenager there wasn't a lot that interested me in any of those. What did, however interest me in a political sense were the following things (and to this day I consider them my personal political wake-up call):
1. Sleater-Kinney and the discovery of Riot Grrrl, LadyFests, Gender Politics and giving a shit about things
2. The local arts/music scene I grew up with in Brisbane, Australia. Being surrounded by so many socially-aware and super-intelligent people. People involved in creating their own forms of culture and counter-culture in a relatively conservative environment and struggling against all sort of legislative restrictions.
3. Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty. Certainly not because of one ex-Dean, who tended to mess the whole concept up. But I'm definitely a fan of their employing young and artistically involved people - the kind of people who might actually manage to inspire their students to learn something worthwhile.
There are innumerable identifiable ‘problems’ with the youth of today. Many of which can be attributed to the infamous Generation Y syndrome of disaffectation. Yet Generation Y exists in a media-flooded age unprecedented. How, then, with all these new technologies at our (and their) fingertips, are we still failing to tap into the socio-political psyche of the youth of today?
The argument I propose to frame with my thesis (as yet completely unformed...) is that one medium does seem to be reaching young people on a level which others tend to bypass. A medium that, as countless psychological analyses have shown, creates one of the most direct connections between the cognitive, the emotional, the sensory and the outside world. The medium is music. In particular, politically slanted/alternative to mainstream music.
Let us first clarify the margins of the key proponents of this research. Youth, for argument’s sake, will encompass those that fall under the ‘Generation Y’ banner, i.e those born between the years of (roughly) 1980 to 1994, making them between the ages of 14 – 28. The primary focus demographic of the conducted research will revolve around youths in their late teens/20s.
The music of political/social significance is rarely that which is heard on the top 40 charts. Though the aim here is certainly not to showcase a plethora of obscure underground bands, it is these collectives and the institutions and cultures they generate that are a point of interest not to be ignored. The prerequisite for the music to be discussed is simply that which is not born purely out of commercial interest or produced for mass consumption. It should be understood that music can be ‘political’ without being overtly politicized. It is not just the raw media that is considered, but rather the culture or subculture surrounding it.
Think ANARCHO-PUNK. Think Subculture. Think 'Indie' before it became a catch-phrase for 'cool'. Think about how exciting it was to hear the uprising over Against Me!'s major label signing. An uproar. Youth don't roar about anything these days. How exciting. They cared.
I think they cared mostly because bands like Against Me! spoke to their unbridled senses of insecurity, obscurity, and isolation, in a way that mainstream media never could. (Ok start whingeing if you now want to call Against Me! 'mainstream'.)
I'm gonna speak to these kids that care and find out why they do. And it's gonna be awesome.
Taken from the Sydney Morning Herald, January 26 2005:
“Australia must find new ways to get young people interested in politics or risk alienating them, Governor-General Michael Jeffery said today.”
Oh, awesome!!! 2005 - three years ago and I see absolutely no change in the government's strategic attempts to reach our youth; see election 07. Ok now seriously. What. The hell. Did anyone under the age of 40 even know the election was happening until they got a fine three days later for forgetting to vote? What happened to politicians visiting schools? Or appearing on youth networks to at least let some kids know who their candidates were?
Anyway. That's beside the point. I don't actually believe any white paper bullshit is going to grab the attention of disinterested youth. They deserve more credit than we give them anyway. The way the average adult connects with their outside world is usually through traditional media: the news on tv, radio, newspapers. As a teenager there wasn't a lot that interested me in any of those. What did, however interest me in a political sense were the following things (and to this day I consider them my personal political wake-up call):
1. Sleater-Kinney and the discovery of Riot Grrrl, LadyFests, Gender Politics and giving a shit about things
2. The local arts/music scene I grew up with in Brisbane, Australia. Being surrounded by so many socially-aware and super-intelligent people. People involved in creating their own forms of culture and counter-culture in a relatively conservative environment and struggling against all sort of legislative restrictions.
3. Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty. Certainly not because of one ex-Dean, who tended to mess the whole concept up. But I'm definitely a fan of their employing young and artistically involved people - the kind of people who might actually manage to inspire their students to learn something worthwhile.
There are innumerable identifiable ‘problems’ with the youth of today. Many of which can be attributed to the infamous Generation Y syndrome of disaffectation. Yet Generation Y exists in a media-flooded age unprecedented. How, then, with all these new technologies at our (and their) fingertips, are we still failing to tap into the socio-political psyche of the youth of today?
The argument I propose to frame with my thesis (as yet completely unformed...) is that one medium does seem to be reaching young people on a level which others tend to bypass. A medium that, as countless psychological analyses have shown, creates one of the most direct connections between the cognitive, the emotional, the sensory and the outside world. The medium is music. In particular, politically slanted/alternative to mainstream music.
Let us first clarify the margins of the key proponents of this research. Youth, for argument’s sake, will encompass those that fall under the ‘Generation Y’ banner, i.e those born between the years of (roughly) 1980 to 1994, making them between the ages of 14 – 28. The primary focus demographic of the conducted research will revolve around youths in their late teens/20s.
The music of political/social significance is rarely that which is heard on the top 40 charts. Though the aim here is certainly not to showcase a plethora of obscure underground bands, it is these collectives and the institutions and cultures they generate that are a point of interest not to be ignored. The prerequisite for the music to be discussed is simply that which is not born purely out of commercial interest or produced for mass consumption. It should be understood that music can be ‘political’ without being overtly politicized. It is not just the raw media that is considered, but rather the culture or subculture surrounding it.
Think ANARCHO-PUNK. Think Subculture. Think 'Indie' before it became a catch-phrase for 'cool'. Think about how exciting it was to hear the uprising over Against Me!'s major label signing. An uproar. Youth don't roar about anything these days. How exciting. They cared.
I think they cared mostly because bands like Against Me! spoke to their unbridled senses of insecurity, obscurity, and isolation, in a way that mainstream media never could. (Ok start whingeing if you now want to call Against Me! 'mainstream'.)
I'm gonna speak to these kids that care and find out why they do. And it's gonna be awesome.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Bandits
This is not what the archetypal first post on the 'academic' blog should be. This is probably - nay, entirely - because I have done no homework this year whatsoever and have nothing interesting to reflect upon thesis-wise, or otherwise. Still, I wrote this song today and I felt it was kind of relevant. Music. Politics. Stuff. In fact, I wrote it after a miserable encounter with centrelink left me re-assessing my dismally pathetic financial positioning in life, and subsequently my academic career (the cause for my dismally pathetic financial positioning in life), and why in God's name my government is not helping me to sustain it.
[sic] GODFORSAKEN GOVERNMENT QUEUES:
Show me the parking meter
Show me a fair call
I will succumb to neither
I will subscribe to all
I'm only twenty-one short-lived years
My only interests are drugs and beers
You're supposed to be my eyes you're supposed to be my ears
You're supposed to be honest you're supposed to be sincere
But you keep packing it
pushing it
gacking it
And they keep fucking it
killing it
crashing it
I just want a backyard with some cold hard cash in it
When I only want to learn
I don't want to have to earn
Send me away
That's something I'd pay for
People don't you know
You can always overthrow
If you're brave enough or
Oh so bored with the complicated clause
That sets you back while the big boys score
I'm at the fire, where are you?
Still standing in the godforsaken government queue
I'm at the fire - where are you.
Still standing for the government of nothing with a fuck you.
So there you have it. I think all kids should be angry with the government about something or other. Anger makes for action. (Except that I am doing nothing about my centrelink nightmare. That's beside the point. Crying yourself to sleep at night wondering where your next meal is going to come from or how you will afford the train trip to university tomorrow is action enough.)
[sic] GODFORSAKEN GOVERNMENT QUEUES:
Show me the parking meter
Show me a fair call
I will succumb to neither
I will subscribe to all
I'm only twenty-one short-lived years
My only interests are drugs and beers
You're supposed to be my eyes you're supposed to be my ears
You're supposed to be honest you're supposed to be sincere
But you keep packing it
pushing it
gacking it
And they keep fucking it
killing it
crashing it
I just want a backyard with some cold hard cash in it
When I only want to learn
I don't want to have to earn
Send me away
That's something I'd pay for
People don't you know
You can always overthrow
If you're brave enough or
Oh so bored with the complicated clause
That sets you back while the big boys score
I'm at the fire, where are you?
Still standing in the godforsaken government queue
I'm at the fire - where are you.
Still standing for the government of nothing with a fuck you.
So there you have it. I think all kids should be angry with the government about something or other. Anger makes for action. (Except that I am doing nothing about my centrelink nightmare. That's beside the point. Crying yourself to sleep at night wondering where your next meal is going to come from or how you will afford the train trip to university tomorrow is action enough.)
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