eleventyone

In the raw untamed energy of unadulterated live music beats the heart of Australian alternative rock. Tonight at the Corner Hotel in Richmond a handful of bands strummed guitars and beat drums for the Aussie BBQ gig, as if it were the last bastion of live music in Melbourne.

Oh Mercy at the Corner Hotel

Victorian liquor licensing rules recently shut the doors of The Tote in Collingwood, as new rules for live music venues require extra bouncers on hand, which the owners can’t afford. Today over 10,000 SLAM protesters converged on the state library against the new regulations that are poised to destroy Melbourne’s unique live music culture.

Live music supporters were of course bound to end up at the Corner, even on a Tuesday night. The line-up included: Wagons, Crayon Fields, Oh Mercy, Boat People, Paul Dempsey, Summer Cats and Pets With Pets. Melbourne is the first stop for the Aussie BBQ, a gig sponsored by Elwood Clothing and touring internationally.

For me the star of tonight’s show was the mesmerising performance of Oh Mercy that glowed with striking melody and charming self-assurance. The bands proved their unfiltered indie tunes were truly worthy in this den of rough chorus. This gathering of bands epitomised the scene, strumming a powerful cord against the bureaucratic incompetence that would take it away from the bleeding ears of joy.

Six people who have helped correct millions of lines of text online in the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation program were presented with special Australia Day awards.

The award recipients were the top text correctors in the program’s hall of fame: Julie Hempenstall from Victoria, Maurie and Lyn Mulcahy from Queensland, Fay Walker from Queensland, John Hall from Victoria and Ann Manley from NSW.

The newspaper digitisation program holds over 100 newspapers from each state and territory from 1803 to 1955, and includes one million pages and 11 million articles. Newspapers are scanned into National Library computers as images, then converted to searchable text with optical character recognition software. Sometimes the software is not able to convert text correctly and it misinterprets some characters. To solve this problem the NLA opened its system to the public, allowing Australians to correct the text themselves.

The result of the digitisation program is a fully-searchable online database of newspapers from the last two centuries. It includes Australia’s first newspaper the Sydney Gazette, the Argus from 1846-1945, and the first 100 years of the Sydney Morning Herald, with more to be digitised this year.

The top text corrector among the 7,000 registered users is Julie Hempenstall, who corrected over 352,000 lines of text. A stay-at-home Mum with two kids in central Victoria, just south of Bendigo, she didn’t expect the award when volunteering her time, sometimes spending up to eight hours a day correcting text.

After the award presentation in the NLA theatre, recipients viewed treasures from the collection and experienced a demonstration of Trove, the library’s new search engine. Trove provides access to over 47 million resources including books, audiobooks, journals and magazines that have been archived by the library and can be searched simultaneously.

It’s a great weekend for cycling along Melbourne’s Yarra river. Riding up the Yarra, cyclists will discover an exhibition of contemporary art beside the bicycle track under the Monash Freeway, just before Church St, Richmond.

The art displayed by the Contemporary Art Society of Australia is all for sale. The exhibition ‘Art at Burnley Harbour 2009′, runs from Friday 4 to Sunday 5 December. There’s an enormous collection of artworks here from local contemporary artists.

Art at Burnley Harbour

I enjoyed a fantastic ride this Saturday morning along the Yarra from Kooyong to Melbourne and back again. Very few motorists would be aware that under their feet is a bike track suspended under the Monash Freeway, above the river, West from Kooyong. There’s plenty of cycling activity along this track.

The digital age has brought signs to life with colourful, high-definition, animated displays. Sometimes they are useful, providing information such as timetables and maps. But sometimes they can be utterly useless when the operating system fails to boot. Here are some photos I’ve been able take of electronic signs that have failed.

I wish I was able to take a photo of a road sign I noticed the other day that said, ‘Modem Disabled’, but I was driving in the rain at the time. I’ve also noticed database errors on trains, where the sign reads, ‘Change at Camberwell for Unknown Line ID [12] services’, meaning ‘Alamein’ and ‘Change for Unknown Line ID [14] services’, meaning ‘Lilydale’.

Timetable error at Richmond Station

Timetable error at Richmond Station—Windows not booting

Highpoint Shopping Centre directory screen—corrupt Windows system file error

My first Myki error, in August 2009

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki launched his new book Never Mind the Bullocks Here’s the Science on Friday at Collins Place, Melbourne. Dr Karl has been everyone’s favourite science guy at Triple J for many years. He can be heard every Thursday at 11am on Triple J answering questions using his scientific knowledge and busting myths that have no scientific basis (www.abc.net.au/science/drkarl). At the book launch I brought along one of his old books for signing.

Dr Karl holding two of his books and I looking serious

A worried-looking Dr Karl and I doing bunny-ears

Dr Karl and I pondering that thing over there

Federal Minister Stephen Conroy became the saviour of community television today, explaining the new digital licence for Channel 31 at a community forum in Melbourne.

The Federal Government has finally come through on its promise to bring community television into the digital age, by granting C31 a digital licence, plus government funding.

Stephen Conroy

An unused piece of the digital spectrum known as Channel A will be temporarily allocated to C31 in Melbourne, TVS in Sydney, QCTV in Brisbane and Channel 31 in Adelaide. A community station in Perth will also begin broadcasts next year.

Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, said since 2001 commercial television stations have been reaping the benefits of digital while ‘community television has been left marooned in analogue’ loosing audiences and advertising revenue. He said this will ‘fix the mistake of the previous government’.

The government will provide $2.6 million in funding to be shared among the stations, to purchase digital transmission equipment and devices to interface with the digital broadcasting network. C31 is expected to begin simulcasting in both analogue and digital early 2010, before analogue broadcasting is switched off in 2013.

C31 Digital Forum

This is only a temporary licence and before community stations in capital cities make a permanent switch to digital they ‘must become sustainable viable businesses’. Conroy said stations ‘can’t rely on government funding’ and that C31 will be ‘at its most successful when it has true independence from the government’.

‘The Rudd government values community television’ said Conroy, who is not ruling out any rural and regional community broadcasters and prepared to look at any serious offers of viable businesses.

C31 will be included in the Freeview package when its digital box rolled-out over Christmas, which Conroy believes is ‘very, very exciting’.

Today is the 60th anniversary of Chairman Mao Zedong’s unification of China under the red flag of Communism. It’s also my birthday. What better birthday present could I have than seeing Mao’s Last Dancer on opening night and hearing Li Cunxin talk about the movie based on his life, at Cinema Nova in Carlton.

Me and Li Cunxin

Li Cunxin finished writing his biography Mao’s Last Dancer, in 2003. (These are spoilers, if you intend to watch the movie.) His story is of a Chinese peasant boy, living in poverty, who is chosen to join Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy to learn ballet. Through hard work he becomes one of the best in China and is invited to study ballet in America. After six weeks in Houston, he learns what ballet really means and also discovers freedom, but has to return to China. Li really wants to return, so after campaigning many politicians he’s able to go back to America. He falls in love with a girl called Elizabeth and after a year must again return to China. After some legal advice he decided to marry Elizabeth and remain in America. The Chinese Consular General wants to talk to Li about his decision and is held hostage in the Consulate. His lawyer eventual gets a judge’s mandate to allow Li to stay. After his defection he can no longer go back to China and see his family, which takes its toll emotionally and breaks down his marriage. While visiting Barbara Bush, he mentions that he can’t see his family and during a performance they are brought from China to see him. Some years later he is able to go back to his villiage and see the rest of his family. The recent release of his book adds three more chapters to his story.

The film adaptation puts this 500 page novel into two hours, so some things are lost and some events changed, but it stays very, very close to the truth of the story. For example, in the movie Li only makes one trip to America and some of his dancer instructors at the academy are merged into the one character, otherwise the audience would be confused. Some small events are moved to other places in the story.

What I thought should have been emphasised more was the absolute poverty that his family lived in. There’s a scene where the family are eating dried yams. These are what the family ate most of the year, because they were the easiest things to grow and after being dried and stored are tasteless mush. It was a luxury for them to eat rice and might maybe once a month get a piece of meat in their food, or eat dumplings. Any piece of meat and drop of oil was precious. In one of the movie scenes Li, talking to his Houston sponsor Ben, says ‘My father works hard and earns $50 in one year and you spend $500 in one day’. These stark differences were apparent to me when I lived and studied in Shanghai a few years ago. My Austudy income from Centrelink was twice the money that a professional graduate worker in Shanghai would earn in a month. I asked Li Cunxin, ‘Are you still shocked when you see Westerners throwing their money away?’ Li responded with, ‘Yes… Looking back and seeing how we lived on absolutely nothing is just mind-boggling’.

It was wonderful to see his movie come to life. It gave me a solid image of the China that he grew up in. The Chinese people of the 1960s through to the 1980s wore the blue and grey Mao-era style tunics with red Mao pins. When I first visited China in 1994, it was the cusp of a fashion change where people were starting to wear colourful Western clothes, but still half wore the depressing Communist blue/grey.

The politics of the nation at the time was an important part of Li’s story. Li talks to a friend about their president and upon hearing that the American hates his president, Li tells him to be quiet. In the book Li goes further to say they would be killed for saying something like that. One of Li’s teachers is shown to be taken away by police as a counter-revolutionary. In the book he tells the reason for this was the man’s homosexuality. Americans were seen as dirty Capitalists living in poverty (who all carried guns, killed people for no reason and treated coloured people as slaves. Hmmm… ), but in comparison were quite wealthy. Li talks about the Chinese people’s faith in Mao and Communism after the cultural revolution that stripped all old traditions, and the economic changes that Deng Xiaoping brought in to move away from the state-managed market, that gave the people a better standard of living. The oppression under Communism in China and the Freedom of Capitalist America were clearly spelled out in both.

It is not story just about his ballet, the real focus is his journey and Li being separated from his family and being reunited again. His love for his family is incredibly important and choosing ballet and freedom in America over going back to his family in China was a big decision that he regretted and took an emotional toll.

It’s a great movie. It’s set out in such a way that there’s Chinese language and subtitles through only half the movie, so you don’t have to read all the way through. Chi Cao, who plays Li Cunxin in the movie is very cute. He was the son of one of Li’s teachers mentioned in the book. Li says he had to choose an actor very proficient in ballet who could match his style and having someone so handsome to play himself was also a great advantage.

Mao’s Last Dancer is a must see. Five stars!

McSweeny’s launched edition 32 at the Toff in Town last Saturday night 29 August 2009, as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The event officially called McSweeney’s (Futuristic) Antipodean Adventure!, like the book, had its theme being the world of the year 2042, where the future has become a little absurd.

The night started off quite horribly in a bar that was quite stuffy, oxygenless and extremely crowded in this small space. I entered fashionably late when the performances where already happening, and heard about a steampunk future. Then there was the experimental music, that got much of the audience angry, having hybrid electronic instruments, they created random sounds without any melody or pattern of any kind to their sound, that went on far too long. To a book crowd, who live off a daily serving of narrative text, this in book terms would not even be considered the simplest form of poetry, the metaphor would be cutting out random words from the dictionary and angrily throwing them in your face.

The second half however ended on a very positive note, with total extreme awesomeness (my excitement was so intense that it can’t be described without this use of bogan-tounge). A third of the crowd had already left in disappointment, so it we weren’t tinned sardines anymore. Heidi Julavits gave a brilliant reading of her story in McSweeny’s and she read with incredible humour. The final act was just hilarious, it was a local comedy act called the Suitcase Royale. Their comedy was very Melbourne and very Boosh-inspired. They made fun of my old hometown Traralgon, funny because it was so true. I love these guys and I will follow them like a stalker. It’s one of those random comedy groups that might show up on Youtube, they’re very funny, but the video quality from iPhone filming is so bad that it gives them a bad name, so I’m glad no-one was phone-filming. After that we danced the night away and came home very late, an indication of a good night out. Our ticket price included the McSweeny’s book, which looks much more valuable than what we paid.

Digital publishing is the new big thing, the future of the book, the change coming, and also the big scary storm cloud in the distance for many publishers. Today I spent the day at the Melbourne Writers Festival following the digital publishing program. Unfortunately I missed the first session on The State of Digital Publishing with Bob Stein, Victoria Nash and Elizabeth Weiss, because it was sold-out before I had money in my bank account. From what I heard people loved and wanted more Bob Stein, who they did see at the final keynote address.

The Eco Reader

My first session E-reader: Show and Tell, gave me a first-hand look at e-reader devices. As an electronic replacement of the paper book they serve their function quite well. The e-paper technology gives a page that looks like a book and makes it easy to read, because it doesn’t use a backlight like a computer screen or an iPhone. Once the page it set on the screen, the text will remain on the page, until the page is turned. For these reasons the battery life is phenomenal. Richard Siegersma tells us that this will provide 7,000 turns of a page. The audience were intrigued by the devices, until someone asked ‘Does it come in colour?’ and the response of ‘No’ caused the audience to sigh will a big ‘Owwww’. After mentioning the price tag for one of the ebooks was over one grand, they again let out a disheartened sigh. The e-readers are currently marketed toward readers of fiction and travellers, as 16 levels of grey doesn’t really work for picture books or educational books. Siegersma presented his company’s own ebook reader, the Eco Reader, without the session turning into an infomercial. He hopes this device will become the standard e-reader for Australians.

In the Digital Workflow session, Victoria Nash from MacMillian discusses electronic publishing, comparing it to the production of printed books. She says publishers are still scared by e-publishing. On e-readers Nash says they are still new, in their infancy and asks ‘Who buys the first thing? I don’t’. The publishing process changes in one major aspect when moving to an electronic model, the Typesetter and Printer of the printed book is replaced by the Conversion House. The conversion of books is ‘the boring part’ that publishers don’t have to really know about, but one main standard that they are being converted to is the open standard ePub available with Adobe DE. The XML metadata is also a boring and tedious part of the process, but critical for publishers. Another aspect publishers have to look at is DRM. Nash says many authors demand DRM and she usually uses restrictions that prevent the ebook from being copied or printed. After the session I feed my stomach, but miss a session by education publishers.

The marketing panel

Onto Marketing in The Info Age, with Brett Osmand, Adam Noonan and Jessa Crispin, who tell us about connecting with consumers, or rather reader communities. Osmand says people are 3 times more likely to be influenced by their peers than any other form of review. Some of his marketing strategies at Random House include a Brisingr community and the James Patterson Airbourne collaboration. He says they ‘are not creating communities, merely tapping into them’. Noonan mentions the Fear of Google (FOG) that publishers are experiencing and talks about search engine optimisation (SEO) as an important part of marketing. His strategies at Lonely Planet involve building communities, such as the Thorntree travellers community and the BlogSherpa site that aggregates external blogs. Noonan says incubate your own community or tap into an existing community. Lastly Crispin talks about the Bookslut webzine, which she considers to be a community among its own writers, but doesn’t really open itself up to external communities. She says publishers have tried to use Bookslut as a marketing tool, but publicity people can be annoying and bloggers are often too personality driven and sceptical to deal with those people. An hour was not long enough for this session.

Matthew Cashmore

I don’t really care much about iPhones, but Matthew Cashmore’s session on iPhone Apps: The Future’s Here got me interested. Lonely Planet have put many of their phrase books and city guides on the iPhone and Cashmore shows a simple demonstration that does show that this is the future. The Lonely Planet phrase books and guides are not just books transferred to an electronic format, they are full-blown applications. The main difference from the printed version is the capabilities of search and GPS — ‘they know where you are’. The phrase books have spoken audio of phrases and a text search function. The city guides have Lonely Planet maps that link to the iPhone’s  GPS to show you the important features of the city and how far you are located from them. The narrative is still important to the guide, words are linked and phone numbers are linked, which mean that you can call local hotels or restaurant with a simple touch. Cashmore is a funny guy and his session was quite enjoyable.

The digital rights management panel

Digital Rights Management is something that usually makes me want to yell ‘Let the words be free, yo!’, but it wasn’t like that. DRM in this case doesn’t refer to the electronic tool that locks up devices, but to authors rights in the digital domain. Sophie Hamley, Elizabeth Weiss and Zoe Rodriquez talk about digital rights in the publishing world. Hamley says authors often know more about digital rights than publishers and may go to different companies like Amazon. Often contracts are not designed for digital rights. Weiss says contracts should be separated along the distinction of ebook and electronic rights. She says authors are often receiving 15-25% of the net receipt of what the publishers receive from the sale of an ebook. Publishers must insist on ebook rights, otherwise the industry continues to think they are not worth bothering about. Rodriquez says that Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) has been given the responsibility of disseminating the outcome of the Google settlement to Australian publishers and writers. Works created before 9 January 2009 that have been scanned by Google are included in the settlement. While the Berne Convention gives global copyright, the settlement is conducted in American courts, so this means it may effect  only rights within America.

Bob Stein

The Future of the Book is discussed in Bob Stein’s keynote address. He talks about the book as user-driven media, a narrative that the reader controls. He was experimenting with New Media way back in the eighties, with what we are familiar with today. His experiments with narratives and commenting  alongside change the reader experience by bringing the author and reader together. Stein’s collaborations work within classrooms, small groups and when an author is present. He says reading has become a social experience. The World of Warcraft can be seen be seen as a new book form with the gamers writing their own narrative in a world created by an author, with its rules and character options written by the author. The future of the book is a collaboration between the author and readers, and is not a fixed printed edition, after edition, but seen as a flowing river of narrative. Most of his discussion can be read from an article in The Age. In criticism, his presentation was his own history of thinking about new ways of thinking about the future of the book and much of the social media technologies that now exist may override this thinking. It follows a linear chronological narrative, so I wonder if he is overlooking the tree-structured paths that hyperlnking take, which I believe would take a large part in the future of the book. Also, the idea of the social collaborative element, is not valid for those who don’t want to participate and remain in isolation with a single narrative.

Today’s panels were wonderfully hosted by Kate Eltham. It was an excellent day at the Melbourne Writers Festival. I’m attending a festival party on Saturday that should be very interesting. That’s all from me, over and out.

I’ve been working out at my local gym every second day for the past four months and I’m feeling pretty fit, after four years of no real exercise. I’ve gained some muscle and lost a few kilos. I’m the lightest I’ve been in a very long time. I was actually quite a big fellow in high school. I was the fat kid and at most weighed in at around 120kg. I’m now at 74kg, which is near to losing half my body weight.

This may be becoming a fitness commercial, but how did I do it? Well, the first time I lost weight was one of those final-straw decisions. For three months I walked for one hour every day and lost 30kg. I joined my first gym five years ago to convert man-boobs to muscles and didn’t stay long. But now I have returned. My continued weight loss is a bit unfortunate since I’m trying to gain muscles and muscle weight is four times heavier than the weight of fat.

Gyms are interesting places. My first gym was out in country Gippsland run by the local council and my current gym is a commercial city gym. Without causing a deformation suit, I’ll talk about my current gym. Being a commercial gym they try to fit as many people as possible into the gym and have a constant membership drive. They keep pestering me to invite my friends, so they can have a free fortnight of gym access, or more likely pester them into becoming members. People avoid talking to each other, but I like hiding in the crowd when I’m exercising anyway.

Richard Branson

There are a range of noticeable characters in my gym. There’s one man who unfortunately wears a full-body lycra suit. There’s a man who talks on his mobile the entire time he’s at the gym, he speaks loudly on handsfree, looking like he’s talking to himself. There’s the guy who always walks way too close on the treadmill and squeaks his foot really loudly on the metal edge. There’s one guy who looks like Richard Branson, who’s an outgoing kind of guy so it could be him. There are also those people who grunt when pulling heavy weights and make the funniest faces ever.

At every gym there are big intimidating muscle-men, who have big muscles and want bigger muscles for some reason. They are not just bogans, but overtly masculine acting muscle-freaks with too much testosterone, called ‘heroes’. One local gym advertised ‘no mirrors, no heroes’, because they like to look at themselves in the mirror. I can see why women would go to women-only gyms with these guys around. My current gym places them all up the far end where I don’t have to interact with them. Of course there are plenty of hotties (muscley bodies can get pretty hot) and pretending not to perve is a choice skill (not wanting to be perved at is another reason to stay away from the gym).

I use what would be considered the beginners machines. They are nice and simple machines to work the main muscle areas. There are slightly more sophisticated machines after that, then we have the heroes hanging out amongst the dumbbells, benchpresses and advanced machines. The object of using these is to lift or pull weights that are challenging for you, not light ones which are easy and not really hard ones that you have to strain quite hard to move. Straining on these weights will end up hurting your muscles and they’ll be sore for a whole week after coming out of the gym, this is not what we want. If you’re able to do a dozen or whatever number of repetitions you do and still find it challenging without hurting yourself, then that is the right weight. I keep imagining someone straining so hard that they rip their arm right off, with blood coming out everywhere and plenty of screaming, and I imagine this when pulling really heavy weights, then I end up in gigglefits, causing me to lose my weights with a loud bang.

I use the treadmills and bikes, making up several kilometres worth of virtual travel each time, where earlier this year I would be panting while walking up a hill. I find it interesting when watching people run, where they all start to synchronise. I do the same thing and the running pace is like a metronome that help keep me going. The treadmills and bikes all have LCD televisions screens attached, which I don’t use because I’m not that interested in television, but I must admit I do sometimes put Millionaire on to answer the questions. Other people have to watch the television, just to be entertained while doing the laborious task of walking, running or cycling. To listen to it they must plug in their earphones to the screen. Amusingly, I’ve seen some people have their earphones yanked out from their ears, because of short cords and intense running. It does hurt.

The odd thing I find about these gym machines, is not that just when you get off the treadmill real fast and you feel like you’re still moving, no the odd thing is the wasted-energy factor. There’s heaps of wasted electricity from all those damn tv screens, but also if you put a physicist in there he’d freak out, because the energy we exert onto these machines are wasted. The energy we put into the bicycle is party converted to electricity to light the little display screen, but the vast majority is converted to heat. Ok so the treadmill needs electricity to run, unless it was on a really high angle, but the rowing machine, bicycles and stepping machines could easily capture a lot of energy. Weight machines could also do the same if someone actually through about it.

The potentially energy lost as heat at the gym is enormous, plus there’s the electricity from the air conditioning system trying to lower that heat. So not only is there wasted electricity from tv screens, there’s energy that could’ve been turned into electricity and countered this loss, but is instead being wasted as heat, which again wastes more electricity to remove the heat. And all this comes with a fortnightly fee. Although they do open the door sometimes to let in the winter air.

I suppose if you really want to be green you wouldn’t go to the gym in the first place, but instead walk and run outside, ride bicycles outside (there are some great bicycle tracks in Boroondara) and use weights such as dumbbells at home, which can be used to work every muscle just as a machine can. Or else find a natural methods of weight lifting, like carrying groceries all the way home from the shopping centre. One idea for a natural, green, organic-certified, cheap, weightlifting technique, taken from my years as a perpetual uni student, is borrowing textbooks from the university. Then carry them all day, until the weight of the textbook and weight of guilt of not doing any study outweighs the joy of procrastination. It might be useful to borrow physics book and learn how to construct green gyms.