Just click here, select my name and cast your vote (my name is right up the top!) and then PLEASE, tell your friends to do the same.
The panel will be deciding the industry award over the next two weeks, and the remainder will be judged based on votes for People’s Choice. I borrowed a camera to shoot the film I entered and ever since I have been going crazy writing short films, but I don’t own the equipment. If I win either of these awards, I will be able to make short films all day long!

Help me out and vote, before June 6th. I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes.

You can watch the video on my website by clicking here.

For info about my previous entries, see this article by the Hornsby Advocate.

Produced by Ryan Linnegar/Found At Sea

Lumières will be available to purchase through iTunes and Found At Sea’s website on June 29th, 2010.

Watch it on YouTube here or view the embedded clip below. Either way, HD is best.

So I did my small part to farewell Penguin Plays Rough from their current address. The lovely organisers have promised it will be live again next month in a new warehouse venue, so you haven’t missed your chance entirely.

This photo by Lucy Parakhina sums up the vibe of PPR, and this is BEFORE the masses descended upon the carpet.

Very laid back.

If you were unable to come down to see me read this story at PPR, here is a video version, shot by my friend Marianna on my iPhone. Quality is not top notch but it’s definitely audible…

Make SURE you check out the Penguin Plays Rough events to follow, it was truly a wonderful night.

PPR - Methuselah’s Last (Story Reading) from Sam Webster on Vimeo.

19th of May, 2010.

Photos by Lucy Parakhina

Penguin Plays Rough is a monthly meeting for storyholics. Gather round the lovely red armchair and listen to tales from various programmed writers. Please keep in mind that, according to the Facebook event, this will sell out. Doors close after about 80 people have entered so try to get there early.

Here are the details (as posted on the Facebook group) about the other writers and a map is available here.

If you want to RSVP on Facebook, here’s the link.

STEVEN AMSTERDAM (www.stevenamsterdam.com), winner of the 2009 Age Book of the Year Award for ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming’, and participator in the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival, is coming to this very lounge room on WEDNESDAY MAY 19.

ZOE COOMBS-MARR is just about to take a solo show called And That Was the Summer that Changed My Life to the 2010 Next Wave Festival. She was one half of the team behind the MAD MAX RE-MIX, and is one third of the performance trio POST, who won The Age 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival Performance Award and The 2007 Adelaide Fringe Festival Award- Paradisical Performance for their show Gifted and Talented. She has a ridiculous list of other good things behind her which you can check out at: http://2010.nextwave.org.au/festival/projects/90-and-that-was-the-summer-that-changed-my-life

ANNA HOUSTON is an actor who has performed in everything ranging from Bell Shakespeare national touring productions to Tim Tam ads. She’s recently written a play through the Griffin Playwriting course, and my spies inside the course tell me it’s damn fantastic. Apparently it might have something to do with the woman who shot Andy Warhol, but that’s hearsay. What it WILL be about is interesting things. That, I can be sure of.

JAZZ ANDREWS is coming all the way from Newcastle just to read at PPR #16. He just had a story published in the recent AMPERSAND magazine which had something to do with sticking penises in ice cream because of an Allen Ginsberg poem.

Ginger, fanta-pants, match stick, ranga… The terms are endless, anything that could be related to the colour orange can be primed by adolescent minds, chiselled into sharp monikers ready to hurl. Though we may argue that ‘carrot tops are green’ and ‘It’s not red hair, it’s orange,’ these feeble responses get us nowhere because somewhere along the line, we found ourselves demoted in the social hierarchy. But this piece is not about being a redhead, or about hoping that our fiery locks can be spun into gold. It is simply about the power of creating a social vernacular, and its effects.

Last week, the Victorian government released their latest advertising campaign to stop reckless driving. Many of you will remember the last such campaign: Speeding - No one thinks big of you. The slogan was designed to be mimicked by its audience. The hope was that people would take up the waving pinkie as a means of denigrating reckless drivers, wounding their egos and curbing the production of over-flowing testosterone. What’s important to note is that the slogan was a pun, a double entendre built on sexual innuendo. For those who haven’t seen the latest VicRoads campaign, the government body has decided that the ham-fisted approach is cleaner and more affective. The tagline pretty much sums up the approach: Don’t be a dickhead. And why shouldn’t they? It’s easy to write a joke which appeals to low-brow humour. Why waste time with a message when you can make a joke about it. That’s what kids like, isn’t it? Tactless Jokes?

Yes, they do. In fact, I’m not so much worried about the fact that seventeen year olds on their P-plates will laugh at the crass statement, and then go on their hooning merry way. I’m more concerned about the thirteen year old watching television, turning and calling his younger sister, eight and having trouble with her spelling lists, a dickhead. (For those who might argue that dickhead is also part of the cultural vernacular, try using it in a formal setting with someone you respect.) I’m concerned about the child I once was, sitting in class, minding his own business. I’m worried about the way he feels when his chair is repeatedly kicked in time to the rhythmic chanting: What are you gonna do about it, ginger? You know what ranga means? It’s short for orangutan. I’m worried about the way that the child, who for some reasons or another already feels socially unacceptable, now has all of his fears distilled into one term, one word which describes something genetic he can’t control. It’s not just about painting redheads and Emos poorly; it’s also about condoning their segregation, and providing a vernacular with which to do so.

Why must VicRoads take the new campaign (closely following a campaign designed to create social habits) as a lowbrow regurgitation of the things which we, as social human beings, would be best to avoid? Why integrate dickhead into the cultural vernacular? Why paint red-headed children as reprehensible. As young adult novelist Foz Meadows argued on her blog, it is a blunt attempt to reflect the perceived values of youth, but are we so blind as a culture to believe that a governing body, and their incredibly widespread campaigns, do not affect the way we, and our children, think and speak?

***

Edit: HERE is a much better alternative by Sussex Safer Roads. It is poignant, beautifully made and makes the point.

Also, the VicRoads advertisement ‘Gingas get fresh’ on YouTube is more ‘disliked’ than liked, and comments have been closed…

Image by Adam Selwood / CC BY 2.0

In her February 11^th instalment of The Wry Side, Caroline Overington released a light-hearted diatribe about gamers, asserting that “anyone over the age of 30 who spends any time deep in some sagging sofa, console in one hand, the other down the front of their pants, imagining themselves to be a combatant in some pretend city, is lame…anyone who has an avatar…bearing a physique that is in every way discordant with the physique of an actual gamer - is major-league lame.” Though Overington’s piece is designed to be wry and satiric (and the fact that I am writing this response shows how effective her piece is), the stereotype is one which has become all too prevalent within the recent censorship debate.

Gamers are lazy, masturbatory, fat fantasists. It’s a description which prompts me to ask: why not also attack accountants staring at a computer screen all day? Why not attack me as I sit in an Albury cafe, leisurely chain-sipping my Mocha Latte, typing this article? It seems that it is because those things are considered professions, yet gaming is deemed leisure activity. The clear assertion is that people are less successful because of what they do in their leisure time. Overington’s opinion is that a legal eagle who, on his off time, likes role-playing as a real eagle, must be a failure in his profession. (”I know what I’d think [when I found out], I’d think: ‘I’m going to jail’.”) However, I can’t imagine we should consider our local GP, a weekend golfer, as a man who can only count to 18, and chooses his medical tools based on how long he wants his patients to survive. No, gaming is apparently insidious because it is fantastic, and role-playing is obviously a sign of some sort of social disorder. I hope my readers do not empathise with the characters in Stephen King’s Misery in their time off, or I may soon find myself, like King’s writer protagonist, hobbled in the master bedroom.

Michael Atkinson supports Overington’s theory that games greatly alter everyday activity, saying that “one can go to the cinema and see someone beheaded and…we permit it within certain restrictions…Interactive games are different…the person playing is doing the actions and therefore it has a higher impact.” (ABC’s Good Game, January 15th) Surely, if one can see the difference between interaction and passivity, one could also see the difference between interaction and real life. While I may have seen someone maimed in countless movies and games, when the footage of a civilian being beheaded by terrorists first made its rounds online a few years back, I couldn’t bear to watch a moment. If an intelligent man like Michael Atkinson can tell the difference between viewing and interacting, should we not also assume that gamers are intelligent enough to perceive (and control) the difference between interaction and real life? Atkinson says that he feels “more at risk from gamers than the outlaw motorcycle gangs” but while his concerns for censorship are well intentioned, they remain clearly limited by the idea that gamers are somehow unable to think clearly enough to differentiate fantasy from reality.

With the increasing popularity of modern technology, it is a wonder that these stereotypes still exist, unevolved, as a part of political rhetoric. Given that the video game industry raked in US$11.7 billion in 2008, it seems foolishly tunnel-visioned to perpetuate the myth that gaming is a niche market for the socially inept. It seems backward to imply that mere fascination with the fantastic is duplicitous enough to destroy the otherwise respectable patterns of daily life. The stigma surrounding empathetic interaction seems to direct that, as a writer, I should not engage in any kind of literary endeavour which might allow me to intellectually take on a fictional persona, for fear of leaving the everyday responsibilities of the workforce behind. After all, who can focus on a deadline if Anna Karenina is still without conclusion? Such a thing would be ridiculous!

*** Images by moggs oceanlane and David Goehring

A big thank you goes to Steve Lehmann for the music in this film. Steve and I were able to work together to strike the write chord (embrace the double pun - move forward) of the story. He really is fantastic and I hope to work with him again soon. Visit his site here.
Without further ado, here is the film. Best watched in HD if given the option.

LAPSE from Sam Webster on Vimeo.

PHASE: a state of synchronous operation.

The concept behind phase poetry is an audio installation which plots elements of a text against one another, creating loops which challenge the rhythm of the original work, converging and diverging mathematically. The text I used in the experiment is about the multiple avenues of meaning which occurs, branching out from one word, to a sentence, an idea, a novel which can be newly understood again and again by different contexts and cultures…

We began our lives as singular beings, individual words uttered together branching out into multiple meanings slightly divergent, splitting open for stories for poems for breaths (*exhale*) catching each other on the page. There is a poem tugging at my ears nibbling at my neck and struggling towards unity.

The audio is designed to reflect the text, starting in unity and ending split. The inclusion of the breath in the middle piece acts as an audio marker which indicates the distance between the playbacks at any one point. The concept would be to run something like this in a room with four different sound sources (instead of stereo audio), on an hour long loop. Over the course of an hour, phrases will appear to come together, and split.

LISTEN HERE (headphones required): Phase Poem Test 1

The best approach is to let the words wash over you, the phrases themselves are not recreated in the process, so once you have the original text understood, let the sound wash back and forth without trying to find sentence structure in the competing audio streams.The notion is to let go of the lucidity of the text, to mimic the nature of confusion which competing meanings would create.

Technical side:

Each audio stream is made up of one vocal track, and one piano track. These are panned at 100% left, 30% left, 30% right and 100% right, thus creating four different sound sources. Respective to their stereo panning, each track plays back at a different speed: 59beats per minute, 60bpm, 61bpm, 62bpm. At these tempos, it should technically take 1 minute for the slowest and fastest audio streams to be one line out from one another. By the end of that sample, the first and last are there approximately 15 lines apart. That is, the fastest audio stream has overtaken the slowest audio stream entirely.

I’m practically naked from the waist down,
I was hoping you would dress me back up as a doll,
And show me back off to all the patrons,
They are here but they’re barely listening at all.

Practically Wasted (Track 1)

Maclean is delightfully cryptic on what would be an odd-choice of opening track if it weren’t for the catchy pop piano driving through. The Mika-esque melody and innovative lyrics we come to expect from Maclean drive the tune from obscurity into favouritism. His sexuality is rampant and indefinite; we are close enough to hear of debauchery and passion, yet held away from gender-specifics, physical descriptions and any detail which may give past alliances specific personality. Maclean recalls anecdotes as melancholic odes, with an undefined ‘you’ in the shadows, pacing and sweating, then exiting as little more than a silhouette.

But there is love.

Pass me a peg - I’ll still put out your laundry,
Pass you a bandage and tie up my old knee.
It’s not that I’m alone, it’s you’re not here.

Beat Me To It (Track 3)

Maclean is a must-see performer, if only for the honesty he carries in performance. One gets the feeling that this EP is sitting under past lovers doormats, left after nightfall with genuine regret. White Canvas was not designed as a series of tracks, but a small journal of melodic missives. It was not made for my ears, though my guilty voyeurism relishes the honest moments, like the forceful lament of a planned future gone unfaithfully awry. White Canvas is a calculated tether to emotional crests, first pushing us away with the misfortune of “Beat Me To It” and then dragging us back into the optimistic, “Stop”, as if to reiterate the sneaking suspicion we all have that maybe 3 minutes of therapeutic pop is all the happiness we need. I suspect Maclean prefers his cynicism, given that the title track he leaves with calls out to helpless translucency over a dragging rhythm, “I’m no sliding door. If anything, I’m a wall. I’m white on white canvas.”

White Canvas is a small cry in a sea of youthful weakness, a cantata for our cultivated candour. In times of strength, we make demands. We draw breath from each other, our callous words demanding sweat from lover’s pores, grief from lonely hearts. We draw cowering masses under our arms outspread and then we fall, deeper than we were high, into the pit. In times of weakness, we make demands, desperately. For shelter and solace, or simple pleasures in grocery aisles.

We paint ourselves into being, starting with eyeliner and ending with witticisms.

We are drenched in sweat. White on white, we dance, and we dance, and we dance.

Brendan Maclean on MySpace and Twitter