Reverse migration
Cabaret is dead to me
I've been watching a tape of the band Sons and Daughters programming Rage* that I stuck on to record just before collapsing into the sack last night.
Sons and Daughters played a lot of stuff I'm going to call "cabaret-ish" where the focus narrows in on singer as icon, idealised as a replacement for some set of virtues. They played artists like Kate Bush, Nick Cave, Parliament, Gogol Bordello, Morrissey, Talking Heads, Leonard Cohen, as well as a bunch of other stuff, but if you had to look for a single relating factor other than 80s-ish timeframe it would've been "charismatic lead singer as focus". As much about the performance as it is about the sound of the performance.
Watching all these clips made me realise I don't like that sort of stuff half as much as I did ten years ago. Maybe because there's fewer pop stars I desperately yearn to be than back in the day. I still feel a tremendous amount of affection for it - and I truly wish there were more artists in the public eye who had something interesting to say** - but the actual sounds coming out of the speakers don't interest me as much.
Reverse migration
After a couple of years Max and I will both be in a position where our employment will be quite portable. IP Australia (for whom Max is working) have a policy of allowing employees to work remotely after a couple of years in the bureau, and I am currently a telecommuter (not that there's any guarantee that that will continue either in my current job or in jobs that I might get in the future, but still). It's not lost on us both that this might be a pretty cool thing, because it would mean that we could basically go anywhere in the world and not have to worry about work: we could take our jobs with us. Even if one of us couldn't, both of us have portable skills that probably wouldn't require us to obtain additional accreditation if we wanted to use them in foreign countries. Which wouldn't be the case if we were lawyers or doctors.
We are both attracted by the idea of reverse migration. According to a completely unsubstantiated article I read a while back, reverse migration from industrialised to developing countries is going to be one of the defining economic phenomena of the twenty-first century. I really like the idea of living in a country such as (say) Laos for a while. The lifestyle there is very different from Australia, and there are obvious financial upsides to drawing an Australian salary in a country where the means of living are, for the moment, extremely inexpensive by Australian standards.
I don't want to be an Australian living in Australia all my life. I want a richer experience than that, and even though family ties would, I think, eventually bring me back here, I believe a country is made poorer when all of its citizens remain there for their whole lives. There's no amount of internet browsing or travelogue reading that can match up to first hand experience of other places. According to Momus, who I've been reading lately (heck, he's pretentious but he's consistently interesting) 93% of Americans don't even hold a passport. Question: what kind of country is that? Answer: one with a crap foreign policy.
Equality
Finally, since we're talking a little about international economic difference, here's a link to an article by Chris Bertram on Crooked Timber about equality within and without American (and by extension, Western) society. The piece itself links to another article arguing an opposing view. Equality as a principle is interesting to think about because it's more nuanced than just "everyone is the same". You have to consider the distinction between, for example, equality of opportunity and equality of actual living standards. Most Australians pay lip service to the idea of a "level playing field" where everyone has the same "chance to win" (usually defined by the capacity to make your suburban home look like the set for a contemporary furniture catalogue), but shy away from the idea that society should be set up to make everyone actually have equal lives regardless of who they are or what they do.
* Anyone who doesn't know, Rage is a decades-old Australian television programme, basically free-to-air MTV, that does themed content from midnight until about 5:30 am (usually with a guest artist programming on a Saturday night) and the chart top fifty after that. I used to be obsessed with it when I was a teenager, now I rarely watch it at all.
** Can't really say why, but indie music at the moment seems to hold relatively few frontpeople with anything original or interesting to say. Lyricists seem to have gotten better at imagery and worse at substance. Probably, I'm just getting old.