Once again, vastly superior and insightful media hipsters have nothing but disdain for the "disconnected" ramblings of ugh, Colonel Neville. "I don't know, Dude. He's like totally not happening for me".
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink”. George Orwell.
As we all know, the Australian media is an impressive powerhouse of creative and maverick talent with impeccable journalistic standards, an analytical thirst for empirical truth, filled to the brim with inspiring and original ideas and well, it’s really an inspiration to all of us here in Plebeland. They only care about us! Er, sadly no.
The Australian media is, outside of a few tiny publications and blogs, mostly a short sequence of family monopolies and cabals and the publicly funded, churning the same excitingly average yet mediocre, clueless, hack infested, unchallenged, untouchable, unaccountable, low-brow to elitist leftist infected corn and canards 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thank God some of it's barely entertaining.
The Australian media is firstly for the Australian media, and not for you Australians. It’s about generating turnover and advertising or tax-pay funded leftist indoctrination and fraud. It’s not a service, a source of insight or a place to be informed per se. That’s more the job of the Net, books, blogs, pundits, the library and amazingly, sometimes on rare occasion's, the work of education. Expect nothing from the local media and you’ll never be disappointed. I never am. It's demanding to tell where the media's natural never changing incompetence blends seamlessly into the out and out lies, fraud and bias.
The media is about peddling influence, by relentlessly pushing their own phony ideologies and control freak obsessions via their cowardly, intellectually bankrupt non-art. For the most part and on every major issue, those in media power want to minimize to about zero, any effective contrast with the superior and exacting. Yes, they do. Of course there's a bad side too.
The chances of the media in Australia ever really changing, improving or reflecting any empirical global reality are about zero. They don’t look for talented individuals as much as look for ways to keep on avoiding them at all costs. Seems like most of the few journos of note have been around for a decade at least.
Thus the media 'round here is almost uniformly dull, predictable and mostly a useless and especially cowardly bore. Well, beyond the utilitarian, such as the classifieds, stocks [often incompetent, unread, dreary group-think hacks wrong about everything], specialist areas [often especially disappointing]and the weather [actually the best of the lot at least short-term] though not always. Hey, some of the same kind of people who can't narrow the variables of tomorrow’s weather are damn sure they know what the earth’s entire weather system will be in fifty years time, [sure they do] constantly promoted by said naff media.
In the wonderful land of Oz, there is no corresponding Mark Steyn and the many publications that eagerly publish him such Orange County Register or even a Melvin Snoad and The Northern Mud Shark Fancier and probably never will be. There’s no substantial place where a better literary or ordinary journalism is encouraged and supported, nor probably a large enough audience to dig it. Quadrant has some fun and often substantial stuff, but it's not funny, never pisses anyone off and is thus largely ignored. The groovy Joann Nova is the closest we have to someone like the great Michelle Malkin.
Much of the stuff that seems substantial here is actually a magic show illusion of unoriginal collage assembled by five advertising cum journolist school hacks in a Sydney broom closet, using agency supplied material often sourced from overseas. As a local percentage, there's so little writing worth a damn that's ever given a media platform. Mostly writing as padding for advertising and lifestyle specialties. If there is something more, where is it exactly?
“The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all”. Richard Weaver, 1962.
So, I sent another of my futile and tentative enquiries, regards the laughable chance of anyone either on or off hard drugs having the nouse, insight, courage and individuality to spot potential talent. Ain’t never gonna happen really. Name three exciting new journalists that have risen to an exciting, fresh and challenging prominence in the last three years? Five years? Since 1998? 1918? Er, the previous are replaced with the same when they eventually do fade away, about three weeks shy of being a pair of eyeballs in a fruit jar on a mantle piece.
Yes, I sent twenty articles or so, and the usual groovy letter and got a two line rejection. What' new? Am I really that bad? Seems so. Er, no. I always note the self imposed Fisking and Quality Control standards of a lot of the mighty blogosphere. And the untrustworthy shabbiness of much of the MSM. We mostly give a damn where it counts, and they mostly don’t.
But then, what do I expect? There is entirely no reason for anyone to be nice or care. Maybe they're wonderful people at Media Dwarfs? What do I know? I'd be bitter and twisted if I could stay awake long enough to care.
“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it”. Pablo Picasso.
The rejection e-mail from some unheard of twit at The Age.
“Hi Paul:
Sorry, mate. I think the disconnect is stronger than the connect. Good luck with the journey. Nick”.
Nice, eh? Such sparkling wit, charm, grace and flair.
My reply:
"Dear Nick:
Thanks for er, replying, I think. Regards "I think the disconnect is stronger than the connect". What does that even mean? Don't worry. You may connect one day. Your limits are showing. Yes, I've always felt disconnected from the mediocre. Good luck with the "jour...", desk diary quotes.
Colonel Neville".
‘Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night”. Charles M. Schultz.
What I liked is the cheery “Hi Paul” followed by er, an insult. Whatever. So, er, I’m disconnected or he is? And from what, exactly? Oh, I get it. I’m disconnected from having the identical opinions of faux hipsters in a media agency and the Editorial board of ‘The Age' newspaper. Got it. I have to add newspaper, cos’ 'The Age', doesn’t figure at all outside of Australia, does it. Yeah, it’s that good and a respected voice of global influence. No. I went to the Media Giants website, yet it left me unsure what it is that they can do giant-wise or that I could er, aspire to.
“One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience”. Alice James.
So, dear old Same Nick clearly feels I’m not up to his standards by dismissing all I have ever written with his two lines containing not a single original thought or phrase. Yep, it’s the creativity gulf via the big kiss-off that dare not speak its name. Yes, I should be grateful. Quite. Funny that people will say something unpleasant, but still expect almost a kind of credit for it. Er, no. I prefer to respond as much as a tiny non-entity ‘neath the mighty creative genius that is ‘Media Giants’ feebly can.
“There are grammatical errors even in his silence”. Stanislaw J. Lec.
It reminds me of a form letter I got from a microscopic Australian Record Label. Ok, I can dig the pantomime of the “…not really what we’re looking for etc. Do you have anything identical to a thousand others?” Yeah, the creep then amended in biro, “Anyway, I didn’t like the CD”. Ah, nuance. He had to add a little abuse of his position at a bunch of harmless hopefuls. Had to! Hey, yeah. Everyone in the world really cares what A and R men like, and we all follow their leads all the time. Mebbe in the Twilight Zone circa 1976.
It’s funny, innit? The movie cliché of be yourself, be an original and that’s a sure fire winner. Er, fatal mistake there and here, kid. In America there are people who will fight to be the first one to exploit a talent. In Australia, the herd rushes for the exits at the first sign of any originality. In Oz, everyone is eager to be the first to say they knew all along that you had something, as long as everyone else has already said the same identical thing.
And you wonder why not only our tedious local media stinks of boredom, predictability and cheapness, our God awful underwritten and half baked movies barf, the relentlessly mundane and cheap TV shows cringe, and our two and a half genre music industry reeks of the naturally soulless and utterly sexless. Apart from rare things like the film ‘Home Song Stories’, a lot of stuff has the contemporary immediacy and authenticity of a Van Gogh by numbers.
Maybe I’m deluded, (he's deluded!) but er, no. In many creative fields, there is no place in the Oz mainstream or otherwise, for the truly outstanding idea or ability, or even pretty damn good. You’ll die here, thinking that there are opportunities just waitin’ around the corner. Sure, sans any money and er, an actual opportunity.
Thus they leave and always have. Most Oz bands that have made it in the last five years internationally, refused to sign until they got a US deal, and they’re right. It’s as common as sliced white bread, to see an act feted only because someone overseas endorsed them or it reached the tipping point of 90% of industry creeps agreeing that “they’re the next medium-sized thing!”
“If there’s such a thing as a genius, I am one. If there isn’t, I don’t care”. John Lennon.
Now don’t get me wrong. I have no real doubts about what I can do. Or do I? It’s hard to thrive on too much rejection, innit? I wonder, wonder I do, if I and the many other talents I know of, will ever have a solid opportunity to really er, do it. Know what I mean? Probably not here in Oz land unless it's entirely DIY. It just becomes a creepy bore being judged as lacking by those who are perhaps only superior in easy opportunity and inferior in everything else, especially their unoriginal non-ideas.
Luckily the negative waves come mostly from those that I find difficult to admire for anything much. And this means that an infected media will always see the worthwhile and outstanding as er, all wrong. Hmmm. Now I did just renew my passport...
Here's the thing. Not one of my moldy critic's have ever actually said where I'm er, actually wrong. Nope, it's me whose wrong...as a person.
My, my, I do so love the blogosphere and the Net, and as for the MSM and many of the excitingly average people working their free ride within it, there will always be more of a "disconnect than a connect" from empirical truth and reality with them than you and I.
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