this is insane! excerpt:
The Classification Review Board yesterday refused to classify the game, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, meaning it cannot be sold, demonstrated, hired or imported.
The decision was endorsed last night by the Federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, who had asked the board to review of the game’s MA15+ classification after local councils and state governments voiced concerns that the game would promote graffiti.
Australia is the only country in the world to ban the game.
A change of plan. If you read this in time, please consider sending an email as per the info below:
Hi everyone – you are all legends. I thought I’d be getting a few responses from random friends. But I have over 200 emails in my Inbox!
Although one submission by 200+ people via email is valid, I have spoken to a LAWYER and due to the MASSIVE response, we believe this movement will be far more effective if YOU email the letter DIRECT to the Department of Gaming and Racing by CLOSE OF BUSINESS ON FRIDAY 10th February. (sorry for doing this to you at such late notice, but I don’t really do this for a living!!!)
SEND IT TO: liquorbill@dgr.nsw.gov.au
It is the act of an individual sending a submission which has the most effect… so COPY, PASTE, feel free to add your own comments and SEND….. and THANK YOU!!!
For more info you can go to the Dept of Gaming and Racing website www.dgr.nsw.gov.au and click on What’s New.
Here goes (I have changed the letter to first person!), and if you speak to friends who forwarded this to you make sure they get to their email ASAP!!!
I am writing in support of changes to the Liquor Act outlined in the current draft which will benefit the support and prosperity of live music in NSW. Live music in all forms provides the backbone to our developing cultural identity. Music is the lifeblood of so many people’s lives, and the lack of live music and venues particularly in Sydney is a really depressing situation for music lovers and musicians across NSW. As a group we represent a diverse community of musicians, music lovers and music supporters across Sydney.
Compare Sydney to Melbourne where there are more live music venues and where there is a clear cultural commitment to live music from councils, communities and government bodies. People from Melbourne are proud of their live music culture. That pride in Sydney belongs to a relatively small community who support existing venues. So much of Sydney’s artistic culture exists hidden away in warehouses and ‘illegal’ venues where a desire for live music and entertainment exists, but where the infrastructure to support them does not. Where is the Government support for the creative people who can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Licence but who have the ability and the know how to create a live music culture in NSW? In Melbourne it takes a relatively small amount of money to open a venue where the service of alcohol is ancillary to the main purpose of business which, culturally speaking is musical/artistic performance. Please, make it easier for the music community in Sydney and NSW to prosper by supporting laws which make putting on live music simple and straightforward. We want to live in a city that is proud of its musical culture, which supports venues in communities, which has its own live music precincts where venues are protected, and where opening a venue for the purpose of live entertainment is a cheaper and less complex option than under current law.
1. Amendments to noise complaints process:
I support changes which take into considerations a venue’s ‘first rights’ in the noise complaints process. So many venues in Sydney have closed due to complaints from residents who HAVE MOVED TO THE AREA knowing there is a live music venue nearby. Live music particularly thrives in inner-city areas. These areas are also the home of a growing number of residents who move there to be close to the city and then complain about the noise. If these residents continue to complain and close down venues, where will our live music go? This law is the ONLY protection that venues have in this sort of situation.
2. Restaurant Licences:
I also support the new On-Premises Licence which has the potential to support live music, a ‘purpose of business’ which is ancillary to the sale of alcohol. For acoustic music and jazz in particular, this sort of Licence would bring live music to people of all ages in all sorts of communities. It would also provide musicians with more work opportunities.
3. I also support the Special Events Licence and the All-Ages Licence. Both will bring all sorts of music to all sorts of lives, and will also help musicians to reach a wider audience with greater work opportunities. The success of music festivals in NSW is a good example of how people flock to events which support live music: the Blues and Roots Festival and Splendour in the Grass Festival in Byron Bay; the Big Day Out; the LOUD Festival in Newcastle; Homebake Festival and last year’s Cockatoo Island Festival are just a few. There is a huge community of music lovers of all ages in NSW. They need more community events and more under-age events. They deserve it.
These changes are so positive and exciting that we wholeheartedly support them. This is just the beginning of changes to live music regulation which will help foster and develop a pride and awareness of the value of artistic culture in NSW.
The next step is to make obtaining Entertainment Licences easier for venues owners. There are combined Liquor/Entertainment licences in other States which should serve as a model for NSW. Currently venues in NSW have to approach local councils for a Place of Public Entertainment Authority, pay huge administrative costs and compile a negative impact statement from the local community. In NSW, poker machines, televisions and amplified background music are all exempt from Entertainment Licences, but an acoustic guitar in a venue requires this rigorous and expensive process. These laws are inconsistent and need addressing.
Please make life easier for people who want to put on live music in NSW. The industry, the audience and the musicians are ready and waiting. All that is stopping them are complex procedures and huge expenses involved in bringing entertainment to venues.
The fact that these changes are proposed obviously means that the State Government is committed to fostering creative culture in NSW. Please put your trust in the hands of those who are willing and able to create a music culture to be proud of. Live music has enriched all of our lives and now is the opportunity to make it accessible to as many people as possible.
Imogen is a producer at FBi. I support this letter and will be adding my name to it. Please email her to add yours if you agree.
HI GUYS
As you may or may not know, the NSW Government is rewriting the Liquor Act and there are proposed changes which mean good news for Live Music in NSW.
This is a letter I have written as a submission to the Department of Gaming And Racing – submissions in support of these changes close this Friday, so I’m keen to get as many people to sign it and SEND IT BACK TO ME – so that I can submit the one document with everyone on it.
Please put your name and job title (or whatever role you think most appropriate when it comes to live music – supporter/punter is just as important as musician!)
SEND THIS ON TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED AND PLEASE RETURN TO ME BEFORE CLOSE OF BUSINESS ON FRIDAY.
Cheers
Imogen
isemmler at bigpond.net.au
We are writing in support of changes to the Liquor Act outlined in the current draft which will benefit the support and prosperity of live music in NSW. Live music in all forms provides the backbone to our developing cultural identity. Music is the lifeblood of so many people’s lives, and the lack of live music and venues particularly in Sydney is a really depressing situation for music lovers and musicians across NSW. As a group we represent a diverse community of musicians, music lovers and music supporters across Sydney.
Compare Sydney to Melbourne where there are more live music venues and where there is a clear cultural commitment to live music from councils, communities and government bodies. People from Melbourne are proud of their live music culture. That pride in Sydney belongs to a relatively small community who support existing venues. So much of Sydney’s artistic culture exists hidden away in warehouses and ‘illegal’ venues where a desire for live music and entertainment exists, but where the infrastructure to support them does not. Where is the Government support for the creative people who can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Licence but who have the ability and the know how to create a live music culture in NSW? In Melbourne it takes a relatively small amount of money to open a venue where the service of alcohol is ancillary to the main purpose of business which, culturally speaking is musical/artistic performance. Please, make it easier for the music community in Sydney and NSW to prosper by supporting laws which make putting on live music simple and straightforward. We want to live in a city that is proud of its musical culture, which supports venues in communities, which has its own live music precincts where venues are protected, and where opening a venue for the purpose of live entertainment is a cheaper and less complex option than under current law.
1. Amendments to noise complaints process:
We support changes which take into considerations a venue’s ‘first rights’ in the noise complaints process. So many venues in Sydney have closed due to complaints from residents who HAVE MOVED TO THE AREA knowing there is a live music venue nearby. Live music particularly thrives in inner-city areas. These areas are also the home of a growing number of residents who move there to be close to the city and then complain about the noise. If these residents continue to complain and close down venues, where will our live music go? This law is the ONLY protection that venues have in this sort of situation.
2. Restaurant Licences:
We also support the new On-Premises Licence which has the potential to support live music, a ‘purpose of business’ which is ancillary to the sale of alcohol. For acoustic music and jazz in particular, this sort of Licence would bring live music to people of all ages in all sorts of communities. It would also provide musicians with more work opportunities.
3. We also support the Special Events Licence and the All-Ages Licence. Both will bring all sorts of music to all sorts of lives, and will also help musicians to reach a wider audience with greater work opportunities. The success of music festivals in NSW is a good example of how people flock to events which support live music: the Blues and Roots Festival and Splendour in the Grass Festival in Byron Bay; the Big Day Out; the LOUD Festival in Newcastle; Homebake Festival and last year’s Cockatoo Island Festival are just a few. There is a huge community of music lovers of all ages in NSW. They need more community events and more under-age events. They deserve it.
These changes are so positive and exciting that we wholeheartedly support them. This is just the beginning of changes to live music regulation which will help foster and develop a pride and awareness of the value of artistic culture in NSW.
The next step is to make obtaining Entertainment Licences easier for venues owners. There are combined Liquor/Entertainment licences in other States which should serve as a model for NSW. Currently venues in NSW have to approach local councils for a Place of Public Entertainment Authority, pay huge administrative costs and compile a negative impact statement from the local community. In NSW, poker machines, televisions and amplified background music are all exempt from Entertainment Licences, but an acoustic guitar in a venue requires this rigorous and expensive process. These laws are inconsistent and need addressing.
Please make life easier for people who want to put on live music in NSW. The industry, the audience and the musicians are ready and waiting. All that is stopping them are complex procedures and huge expenses involved in bringing entertainment to venues.
The fact that these changes are proposed obviously means that the State Government is committed to fostering creative culture in NSW. Please put your trust in the hands of those who are willing and able to create a music culture to be proud of. Live music has enriched all of our lives and now is the opportunity to make it accessible to as many people as possible.
I’ve started reading Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. It’s quite enjoyable – less rigorous than Literary Theory – An Introduction (not surprising as it’s a different sort of book – he’s not obliged to summarise key thinkers one after the other) and more like a curmudgeonly rant, albeit a lucid, witty and ethical one.
What’s missing is his own biography (although he has written his memoirs elsewhere). It looms large in the background, but I want him to acknowledge it more – maybe he will later in the book. For example, when he says that cultural theory is “really a product of an extraordinary decade and a half, from about 1965 to 1980″ (pp. 23-24) and that “Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers” (p. 1) he sounds a lot like those irritating baby boomers who drone on about how music was so much better in their day.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships between art, theory and politics, so I found the following passage interesting:
Marxism had been badly tarnished in the West by the monstrosities of Stalinism. But many felt that it had also been discredited by changes in capitalism itself. It seemed ill-adapted to a new kind of capitalist system which revolved on consumption rather than production, image rather than reality, the media rather than cotton mills. Above all, it seemed ill-adapted to affluence. The post-war economic boom may have been on its last legs by the 1960s, but it was still setting the political pace. Many of the problems which preoccupied militant students and radical theorists in the West were ones bred by progress, not poverty. They were problems of beaurocratic regulation, conspicuous consumption, sophisticated military hardware, technologies which seemed to be lurching out of control. The sense of a world which was claustrophobically coded, administered, shot through with signs and conventions from end to end, helped to give birth to structuralism, which investigates the hidden codes and conventions which produce human meaning. The 1960s were stifling as well as swinging. There were anxieties about packaged learning, advertising and the despotic power of the commodity. Some years later, the cultural theory which examined all this would itself be at risk of becoming one more glossy commodity, a way of touting one’s symbolic capital. These were all questions of culture, lived experience, utopian desire, the emotional and perceptual damage wrought by a two-dimensional society. They were not matters which Marxism traditionally had much to say about.
Pleasure, desire, art, language, the media, the body, gender, ethnicity: a single word to sum all these up would be culture. Culture, in a sense of the word which included Bill Wyman and fast food as well as Debussy and Dostoevsky, was what Marxism seemed to be lacking. And this is one reason why the dialogue with Marxism was pitched largely on that terrain. Culture was a way for the civilized, humanistic left to distance itself from the crass philistinism of actually existing socialism. Nor was it surprising that it was cultural theory, rather than politics, economics or orthodox philosophy, which took issue with Marxism in those turbulent years. Students of culture quite often tend to be politically radical, if not easily disciplined. Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness is a deeply disturbing affair.
In any case, art and literature encompass a great many ideas and experiences which are hard to reconcile with the present political set-up. They also raise questions of the quality of life in a world where experience itself seems brittle and degraded. How in such conditions can you produce worthwhile art in the first place? Would you not need to change society in order to flourish as an artist? Besides, those who deal with art speak the language of value rather than price. They deal with works whose depth and intensity show up the meagreness of everyday life in a market-obsessed society. They are also trained to imagine alternatives to the actual. Art encourages you to fantasize and desire. For all these reasons, it is easy to see why it is students of art or English rather than chemical engineering who tend to staff the barricades.
Students of chemical engineering, however, are in general better at getting out of bed than students of art and English. Some of the very qualities which attract cultural specialists to the political left are also the ones which make them hard to organize. They are the jokers in the political pack, reluctant joiners who tend to be more interested in utopia than trade unions. Unlike Oscar Wilde’s philistine, they know the value of everything and the price of nothing. You would not put Arthur Rimbaud on the sanitation committee. In the 1960s and 70s, this made cultural thinkers ideal candidates for being inside and outside Marxism simultaneously. In Britain, a prominent cultural theorist like Stuart Hall occupied this position for decades, before shifting decisively into the non-Marxist camp.
To be inside and outside a position at the same time – to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary – is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one. One has only to think of the great names of twentieth-century English literature, almost all of whom moved between two or more national cultures. Later, this ambiguous position was to be inherited by the new ‘French’ cultural theorists. Not many of them were French in origin, and not many of those who were were heterosexual. Some hailed from Algeria, some from Bulgaria, and others from utopia. As the 1970s wore on, however, quite a few of these erstwhile radicals began to come in from the cold. The passage toward the depoliticized 80s and 90s had been opened.
Terry Eagleton, After Theory, pp. 38-40.
These were given out at Max’s funeral. I wanted to post them earlier, but my scanner stopped working and I’ve only just got a new one.
Click on this image to read the story of an amazing life:
Just woke up, made a cup of tea and switched on the tv news, as is my morning routine.
First story about violence at Bondi saw NSW Opposition (Liberal) Leader Peter Debnam complaining yet again about “Middle Eastern thugs”, clearly and cynically inciting racial hatred.
Next story was Donald Rumsfeld boasting of the success of American psyops in Iraq ie the deliberate corruption of the Iraqi media to serve US propaganda.
Now, I don’t identify as left wing (although on the political compass, I’m supposedly an extreme left-libertarian) but I sure as hell will never sympathise with the right while these disgusting people are its representatives.
Submissions made to the Attorney-General’s Department in response to the Fair Use and Other Copyright Exceptions Issues Paper of 5 May 2005.
Just received a strange email:
The following is from an unnamed Sydney musician…
I compiled some of my fave quotes from the bio page:
“Sydney-based musician and sound artist working with
whatever comes to hand” aren’t we all?
“He has made his own unique mark on the art-world
while never pandering to its politics” he was always a
wanker but now he actually belives his own crap, why
can’t he die instead of Derek Bailey?
“… he creates an ambiguous and beguiling sound world
” …poor deluded cunt
“… the most intellegent human being to ever play a
turntable ” they couldn’t spell intelligent right
“the most important musician in Sydney” – poor Matt,
the Dim Jenley curse….
“Media artist who works across music, radio,
Internet, film/video and installation” he’s a nice
bloke, well meaning, this sounds like an arts grant application
The last bit refers to me. Looks like I got off lightly!
(Yeah my bio is bland, but I hate writing bios (that one has been recycled (too) many times). Anyone want to write one for me?)
Scene politics, eh? 
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