event mechanics

I whole-heartedly agree.

(Via acatinatree)

I have had an article in the works for a while now where I have tried to address how to write articles for enthusiast magazines with the example of enthusiast magazines that service modified-car culture. The problem I was having was with how to position it. I have some great material derived from my PhD and the many dozen articles I have written (I have written 55 freelance articles this year, about 30 in the years previous, and easily over 100 as a staff writer). Now I have figured out that the best way for me to pitch this in the opening paragraph is to compare it to the introductory scholarship on writing for the news media.

These are the core analytical points I wanted to convey in this opening first section:

1. Writing for enthusiast media is not the same as writing for news media.
2. The enthusiast media is designed to tap into an enthusiasm and use it as a resource; it is primarily an affective discourse. News media is primarily meant to be free of affect and tends towards an ideal of ‘objectivity’.
3. If the point of news media journalism is to convey the Who, What, Why, Where, When and How (5 Ws and 1 H method) in the lead sentence, then enthusiast media attempts to hook the reader by inciting a particular affective response.
4. The news media attempts to represent the world so the reader can implicate it in their own respective lives; there is some truth to the ‘hyperdermic model’ of media transmission. However, the enthusiast media attempts to implicate the reader in the event of enthusiasm being reported on.

The second section then goes on to demonstrate what is required to be able to write in the affective mode.

1. An understanding and appreciation of the enthusiasm is required.
2. To understand enthusiasm means understanding the challenges faced by an enthusiast. Here I am unsure if I should offer a brief account of the post-Kantian conception of enthusiasm developed in my phd? It is by engaging with challenges that enthusiast bodies are mobilised. Within modified-car culture, a co-enthusiast will ‘read’ a given car in terms of the challenges it inculcates. This demonstrates the capacity and skill of the car’s owner to ‘rise to the challenge’.
3. Understanding the enthusiasm does not simply mean knowing about the objects of enthusiasm or even only the practices of enthusiasm. Within modified-car culture a car is not merely an object to be incorporated into the ego to facilitate gendered production of identity (hegemonic masculinity model), it is a topology of challenges that enthusiasts ‘read’ and confer respect accordingly. The aquisition of know-how is a product of practices that engage with challenges. There is a correlation between know-how and respect within the scene.
4. The job of the enthusiast media journalist is to represent how the enthusiast engaged with a given challenge. The affects of enthusiasm are expressed through this process of rising to the challenge, such as frustration, confusion, trickiness (like ‘smartness’), satisfaction, patience and determination.

The third section discusses the relation between an enthusiast magazine and the given enthusiast scene.
1. A given magazine covers a certain niche market which more often than not encapsulates a subculture within a scene.
2. The magazine is in a relation with enthusiasts and commercial interests. Within modified-car culture the commercial interests are mostly workshops and performance parts suppliers, but also includes event promoters.
3. Coverage of the scene is a media event that seeks to translate the affects of a given event through enthusiast discourse in such a way as to implicate the reader in the broader affective mobilisations of the scene.
4. The content of the scene selected for coverage in a magazine is explicitly valorised, through publication, as being worthy of appearing in the magazine.
5. The political economy dimension to enthusiast magazine coverage of the scene is that coverage is shaped by commercial imperatives of ‘keeping the advertisers happy’.
6. Unlike normal media this is not that much a problem in that those elements selected from commercial interests are also worthy of being valorised. The function of the enthusiast media is not to change the enthusiast-determined heirarchies of value within the scene, but to segment and select portions of it according to the commercial imperatives.

The conclusion points out that niche-market media that services a given enthusiasm is the way of the future for media companies that are coming to terms with shifting from being print publishers to being online publishers. In Australia, just as many other national contexts with a developed media ecology, there are many different enthusiast media publications that target and service many different enthusiasms.

With my current regime of ultra-disciplined eating and daily exercise on a perfect day where I only eat what I am meant to and exercise on the bike for 35min I am actually burning up over 2000cal a day. I am sure this isn’t healthy. It means I am losing approximately over 300g of energy per day.

I don’t always do the perfect day however as this would be a shit life. Going out to dinner once or twice a week and a few nights on the booze balances it out. I am choosing my meals carefully to make sure they are healthy and contain very few calories. Plus I mix up my exercise and do sometimes more and sometimes less than 35min on bike (most of the time it is only 20min if I do less, then a walk). It will be interesting to see if it is accurate however, because it means that even including these ‘normal’ meals and a few nights on the booze with the odd slip up I am losing over 1kg a week.

If I was super-ultra-disciplined it would mean I would be losing over 2kg a week, but the regularity and relatively boring diet would drive me (more) insane.

Just so you don’t think I am starving myself, this is my diet and energy consumption and burning/exercise according to my iKeepFit iPhone app that has a database of all foods (and allows me to input ffod and beverages like corn wraps and Mother energy drink).

8x cups of black coffee 8kcals
mother energy drink 208kcals
Celery 6x stalks 62cals
Apples large raw 116cals
tuna in lite oil x2 466kcals
corn, raw, small 62kcals
spinach raw 2x cups 14kcals
corn wraps x6 389kcals

Total consumption 1325kcals

Base metabolic rate -2521kcals
Activity level desk job -504kcals
Exercise -429kcals

Net kilocalories -2129kcals
Weight/gained lost -304g

This is per day remember.

With five weeks to go before the wedding at which I am doing one of the readings, I reckon I might aim to meet my next weight goal of 115kg.

Above meals consist of an apple for breakfast, celery and tuna for lunch, corn stalk for arvo tea, corn wraps, spinach and tuna for the evening meal. The celery and the wraps fill me up and give me a satisfied feeling of having eaten so I don’t feel like eating any sugary or fatty foods. The celery in particular is magic at this. It contains bugger all calories and would almost use up more energy digesting it than in what it contains. There is hardly any sugar in my diet except for the apple and the Mother energy drink. There is basically no fat except in the minuscule amounts in the low-fat oil used in the tuna.

I enjoy being disciplined again. It gives me a sense of purpose.

To best use my skills developed during my BA (English) and PhD I am looking at doing some sort of short course. I am not sure if I will learn any new skills, more I want to learn how to use my skills I already have. Plus, more importantly, demonstrate to existing and future employers that I can use the skills I already have.

So far I have found this Level IV TAFE course on the advertising media industry. It seems suitable to learn how to speak the jargon of the advertising industry and learn how to interact with advertising media professionals. I know I would be good at such a job and gaining some vocation-oriented training would be good.

Does anyone else have any ideas about either evening or distance/online short courses I could do?

Monetizing Enthusiasm: The Missed Opportunity of Social Media and Car Enthusiast Magazines

Abstract: The publishing industry that services the scene of modified-car culture in Australia has largely missed the boat when it came to moving from being a once profitable commercial print industry into a profitable social media enterprise. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in the context of the last 30 years of modified-car culture and the enthusiast media industry that developed around it. A number of possible approaches are proposed for monetizing enthusiasm through social media that should be useful for other enthusiast scenes.

When post-structuralist marxists become capitalist.

My heart is well and truly broken.

Here is the original image on Flickr of a presentation by Christian Fuchs at The Internet as Playground and Factory conference.

I wonder where Christian is on McKenzie Wark‘s diagram of what Jodi Dean called his Grand Unified Theory.

Wark’s diagram represents social classes/subjectivities not in relation to the means of production, but in relation to the labour of capitalising on opportunity.

So I am doing NaNoWriMo. I am going well. I am writing in a non-linear fashion, which may be against the rules apparently. But, meh.

I will start posting chapters once they are finished and once I have the next five-in-a-row done to ensure continuity. The only goal is write 50000 words. I am writing short chapters of 2000 to 2500 words. At the moment I am starting around two or three chapters a day as I come up with new ideas for the plot and whatnot. One chapter, the first, is finished.

The novel is called The Hoon. It is romance-action story set in the early 1980s of Australia. It is focused around a family that owns a tow truck and fast response mechanical business.

It is good self-therapy.

Summer: I woke up one morning and I just knew.
Tom: Knew what?
Summer: What I was never sure of with you.

It feels odd and somewhat appropriate that I am returning to this post about 500 Days of Summer to finally write something substantial and finish it. It was started on October 7, so over a month ago. Of course, as a case of life imitating art, my own non-relationship with M. ended.

This is where I had got to with the original post, but now this post serves as something else:

I recommend 500 Days of Summer for everyone who has been, is or intends to be in a relationship. I saw it last night with M. and we both agree that it is a fantastic movie. It has prompted me to think again about an essay of mine from a few years ago on the concept of post-romance romance and Paul Anderson’s third film Punch-Drunk Love. 500DOS is a much better example of post-romance romance than PDL. In fact, of all the postmodern romantic comedies of recent years, 500DOS is the best example of post-romance romance yet.

We had similar discussions to that of the main characters Tom and Summer. How she wasn’t sure, how she still felt something for her man-child ex who had broken her heart and, paradoxically, how she didn’t want to stuff this (ie our non-relationship relationship, similar to the Tom-Summer relationship) up. She told me many times she wasn’t ready, that she wished it hadn’t happened now, that maybe this was the last chance she had. I told her she was worthy of breaking my heart. She did.

What to do?

I am pretty hardcore when it comes to enduring what life throws my way. It is easy when I feel contempt for most of the world and all the stupidities that it contains. I guess it is easier to think about what I won’t do.

I won’t stop falling in love. I could never understand the whole too-bitter, too-tough, too-broken hearted thing about people when they get to a certain age and decide that love somehow hasn’t delivered the goods so they are going to discard love and the possibility of love. That is just weak, not tough. It is an easy solution to complex set of problems. The empty feeling I have in my stomach every now and then when I think about what has happened, what hasn’t happened and what could’ve been is the price I pay for the absolute affection afforded by love. I am satisfied with this pain. She was worthy of earning it. I fell in love.

I won’t stop rolling the dice. One of my favourite sayings is derived from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: Roll the dice and up the ante. It is not enough to take chances. All of us take chances everyday. To take chances and up the stakes without regret is the only way to live a life worth living. I’ve got no time for meek and boring people who are mere functionaries in someone else’s life. Having agency for me doesn’t mean necessarily having control, but being able to engage with life’s opportunities without knowing what the outcome will be. I took risks with my affection even though I ascertained early on our relationship more than likely wouldn’t work, but I resisted the urge to end things.

I won’t fret about not understanding. I am pretty smart and have enough of a curious intellectual disposition to be able to at least grasp most of life’s curiosities. There are some things I’ll never understand, however. Like the way periods of absolute happiness immediately preceded annihilating sadness. I am grateful for the time we spent together. Many people never get to experience any of this.

I won’t stop inviting people into my world. A relationship isn’t just between two people but between two worlds that come together as a kind of synergy. I have an ethics of hospitality when it comes to sharing my world with others. I am lucky that I have lived alone for long enough that it allows me to cherish moments of solitude, which in turn allows me to properly value what it means to be with someone. Without my generosity I am nothing.

I won’t stop listening to special songs. Music, food, television shows, restaurants, cinemas, streets and fucking pubs all become incorporated into the biography of a relationship. I am lucky to have had enough failed relationships all while living in roughly the same area of Sydney that there is no singular determining geographical romantic biography for me. Our music, if that ever existed, once filled me with complete happiness, every song was a special song, a love song, but now they are all songs of heartbreak. I am OK with this. It bestows the songs a richness that the artists who created them could never give to them. It adds something beautiful to my world, which, although painful, would not have existed otherwise.

I won’t stop writing my poem. Sure it is about her, but it is my writing. It should be finished soon.

I feel better now. I think I have reassured myself of myself.

Say you find yourself staring at an old pot. Your brain, being an incredibly sophisticated computer, immediately assesses that it’s an old pot, and that old pots are boring. It’s not going to dance, or sing heartbreaking songs of yesteryear. It won’t even rock gently in the breeze. It’s just going to sit there being a pot. Probably a broken one at that. If it was on television, they’d at least have the decency to back it with some upbeat techno while zooming in and out, and even then you’d immediately switch over. But instead, because you’ve got the misfortune of actually being there in front of it, surrounded by other people, you have to stand and look at the poxy thing for a minimum of 30 seconds before moving on to gawp at the next bit of old shit, or everyone’s going to think you’re a philistine. The same principle applies in art galleries and museums. They’re full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It’s a weird mass public mime.

Even though it is depressing to watch, I like the TV show Nathan Barley, co-created as an adaptation from a a fake TV guide listing (TV Go Home) for a fake TV show called Cunt. (Here is a link to one of my more infamous blog posts, it is probably NWS if you live behind a coarse language firewall, but if you did, then why are you reading my blog?:)

The above block quote comes from the regular Guardian column of one of the co-creators of Nathan Barley and TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker. I was introduced to Charlie Brooker’s column by a friend with whom I share many similar tastes in popular culture consumption. Brooker is a funny bastard, I certainly grant him that. His column from the 22 June 2009 is about having an ‘interest’ (ie hobby) and the relation between this ‘interest’ and the practices of ‘interested’ people and the way Brooker has always turned his ‘interest’ into a job.

Brooker’s column makes fun of what he perceives to be the contemplative mode of engagement expressed through the practices of visitors to archaeological ruins as they pause and consider a broken pot. There is a rhythm to this practice, of walking, having one’s interest caught, gazing upon this object of interest and all the while contemplating something about it. The capacity to contemplate an object reminds me of the way Bourdieu wrote about the capacity of certain upper-class consumers of cultural artefacts. There is a pleasure in the nitty gritty of seeking these objects out, but the point is to index their particular significance. (See Hilary Geoghegan’s essay in the ‘Enthuse‘ special eissue of M/C Journal on Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology.) To realise their significance requires an informal (for amateurs) or formal (for scholars or professionals) inculcuration of these practices into the enthusiast habitus. At stake is a subcultural assessment of beauty. For Brooker there is no utility in a this kind of Kantian reflection on the ‘beauty’ of the broken pot. The Bourdieuian would simply retort Brooker is not properly equipped to contemplate the broken pot’s beauty nor have the cultural capital to realise its significance.

I am not a Bourdieuian, however. I appreciate Bourdieu’s work and what he has given to the social sciences. I prefer to take another position, one that incorporates what, following Deleuze, is the virtual dimension of the cracked pot. Think about an amatuer archeologist’s practice. They come across several if not dozens of such artefacts similar to the cracked pot in their leisure-time labour. The great joy of such amateurs, just as it is for any subcultural practice organised around the indexing and cataloguing of significant cultural artefacts, is when something that might be an artefact does not fit into the schema of the established typology.

Bourdieu went to great pains to point out the class bias in Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgement. But what if Bourdieu was wrong to focus on aesthetic judgement and instead should have engaged with Kant’s notion of enthusiasm to describe the cultural practices of his research subjects? Participating in a cultural formation does not only require a cultural competence, it also requires one to be mobilised. The mobilisation was assumed in Bourdieu’s account; it is a variable he took out of his analysis of formations of cultural consumption and their intersection with class-based social stratifcations. Surely everyone has met people who belong to a particular social milieu but who choose not to particpate in the practices of cultural consumption ‘expected’ of such a social positioning?

The amateur archeologists as well as many other enthusiasts are forced to use their respective powers of imagination. The broken pot has a biography, its surface and its cracks are traces of events that have been inscribed upon it. Part of the work of the enthusiast is to decipher these material signs of its biography. For example, enthusiasts in modified-car culure can ‘read’ the material signs of a car and reconstruct the ‘amount of work that has gone into it’, which would be similar to an archeologist exclaiming to how much ‘history’ is present. ‘Amount’ here is quantitative but it is also qualitative, the biography (work/history, i.e. active/passive inculcation of events) is an index of enthusiasm, deciphered from the material signs of the object’s biography and immanently valorised within the practice of contemplating the object.

Charlie Booker seems to be mobilised by the challenge of cultural critique of those practices that he deems boring (amateur archeologists). It is an unnerving practice to simply pour scorn on other peoples’ enthusiasms and I don’t care much for it. Maybe there is some inverse cultural cringe here, but I think people should be allowed the dignity of pursuing their collective enthusiasms. For some it is the only thing they have for warding off a brutal and nihilistic ennui. Booker, and many other people I have met of my generation who are as cool as fuck, is alienated from his own enthusiasm and seems to get enthusiastic about pointing out the ‘absurdities’ of another’s enthusiasm.