Reverse migration

[ataxi]

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

Comments

[eclipsedeyes]

it's really interesting to see you say these things about reverse migration, since I've been thinking a lot recently about the fact that so many Australians (particularly intellectual Australians) leave, that I've had such thoughts and that it's (in a way) a giant copout - that we're somehow unable to accept the meaning/identity of home. Not that there's anything wrong with travelling, specifically, but the fact that so many australian writers and thinkers seem incapable of focusing on the local is very sad.

read this in a book of translated excerpts from Iranian blogs the other day: "God invented war so that Americans could learn geography!"

[ataxi]

Love the quote, though unfortunately I doubt many Americans have learnt geography as a result of the war (I don't think I know much more about Iraq than I already did - maybe a couple of additional place names

[eclipsedeyes]

I should mention that when I said I've been thinking about those things I didn't mean "I have formed the opinion", more that I was literally trying to figure out why is it that people need to leave and whether it is that suburban life as you put it actually lacks meaning or if it's just that we reject it as meaningless because of what we think it represents and thus reject ourselves. I think I just mean that so many Australians (not you, necessarily, by the way, in wanting to live O/S) seem to need to escape what they are

[ataxi]

It wouldn't be reasonable for me to reject the "suburban life" out of hand. For one thing it'd be a bit of a blow to my mum and dad and basically everyone I know here if I did. It's more a case of it urgently needing to be put in proper perspective. Particularly with respect to how privileged a life it is, how different a life it is to that lived by the bulk of the world's people, how easily it can alienate people from their communities, and how irrelevant the corresponding material goals can be to happiness

[johjohjoh]

yes, leaving the country with only a backpack for nine months... I couldn't a gree more

[ataxi]

You're not particularly harsh, you more or less describe my feelings. However I think contempt for suburban living is an easy option. It's more challenging to try to empathise with people who want to live like that.

Urban sprawl is a different issue, but it is a horrible blight on reality in Australia. The offensive thing about it is not even that it uses space up, it's that it uses space so poorly. Just the distance between houses and places isn't the problem, it's all the ugly street patterns and cutout shopping malls and petty boundaries of territory.