A bit of background: Dunedin in a university town. A couple of weekends ago a bunch of first-years and associated organisms were injured when the wooden juliet balconies they were heinously overloading whilst watching a shitty band do a street show unsurprisingly collapsed onto people below. That no one died is a minor fucking miracle. A quick look at the scene < will illustrate the excruciating degree of inevitability in play here, exacerbated by local police who decided they simply 'couldn't' (quote/end quote) do anything about the egregious overcrowding and general jejune fuckery that had unfolded.
I may be a callous old bitch but I remember what it was like to be a young person. Vividly. The thought process looks something like this: durr/fuck yeah huh huh huh/durr/mmmm chips/huh huh huh/fuck yeah drugs/durr/mmmm genitals/durr. These days a young person's development is also inhibited by a combination of neurotic helicopter bullshit + the scourge of superentitlement, and I do feel moments of genuine sorrow for the generation raised in these circumstances. But I'm also just going to say a few unflattering things at this point because no one else seems to have expressed them publicly and that troubles me.
I may be a callous old bitch but I remember what it was like to be a young person. Vividly. The thought process looks something like this: durr/fuck yeah huh huh huh/durr/mmmm chips/huh huh huh/fuck yeah drugs/durr/mmmm genitals/durr. These days a young person's development is also inhibited by a combination of neurotic helicopter bullshit + the scourge of superentitlement, and I do feel moments of genuine sorrow for the generation raised in these circumstances. But I'm also just going to say a few unflattering things at this point because no one else seems to have expressed them publicly and that troubles me.
1: Right- some of us are gifted with foresight, some just with foreskins, but how the bubbleheads overloading those balconies made it through the previous eighteen years without getting their tongues stuck in powerpoints is anybody's guess. I look at them and get this sound in my head like a balloon rubbing on glass. You have got to fucking wonder about the people standing underneath them, too (see first pic). Physics: you're at university. Look into that while you're there and if you are a pointless shitlord, try feigning viability in public.
2: These days, when subadults act the fool resulting in injury, they tend to receive a great deal of breathless and often highly conspicuous support, almost as though they were somehow heroic. For... not dying? Not actually killing someone else? Am unsure. But I am sure that undifferentiated positivity is not always the most appropriate response. Give negative reinforcement a chance, people. A cattle prod to the taint of everyone present is indicated, if only for attending a gig by a band that looks like < this.
3: More troublingly, the police were actually on the scene but decided they didn't have the power to go onto private property and intervene. Uh huh. This puzzles me since bitter experience informs my certainty that they would have intervened with pepper spray, batons and German fucking Shepherds if the crowd had been browner/weirder/listening to different music/less visibly affluent. We've been perplexed and sort of freaked out by recent developments in police culture and policy down here, and this incident is quite indicative of the tone-deaf, rudderless WTF stuff they've been up to lately. Police have the time and resources to locate and intimidate TPP protesters with preemptive home visits (yes, that really happened), but are nowhere to be seen when violent fuckwits are making central Dunedin a no-go zone on a Friday night, especially for women.
Student culture isn't what it used to be, largely because students aren't what they used to be. Tertiary education isn't a smart kid ecology anymore; it's a punter-based economy, thickly stacked with attention-seeking, pay-to-play slow learners demanding their store-bought version of the student experience. Hence all the pyromaniacal look at moi Saturday night crap- they are unimaginative, externally motivated and calibrate their activities to provide maximum social media spectacle. In the absence of policy to contend with this bullshit, one can only assume that the agencies concerned are outsmarted by people who hoot in circles around furniture fires.
I really don't give a fuck if all this sounds like a letter to the Editor circa 1923. In my own day, a fairly hardcore Class-A-loving arts cohort used to tear shit up without attracting the popo, and if we were raided it was usually because a cluster of jesus monkeys within the police was convinced everyone in black was a baby-eating satanist (it was the nineties). Panda rides and drunk tank lags were for the engineering contingent. I'm absolutely in favour of creating enough trashy memories to ornament the arid remainder of one's existence and christ only knows we need them more than ever these days, but I deplore the basic-bitch approach that seems to be prevailing. It is deplorable that debauchery is heading the same way as literacy.
Anyway. This event was a massive organisational fail and local cops have no business being 'bemused' or defensive when the circumstances and outcome are plain for everyone to see, which is why I'm bitching about it on the internet. When it comes to crowds, either police that shit or GTFO. You know... develop coherent management policies instead of acting surprised and butthurt every time a mouthbreather glasses up Castle Street, because these children obviously require supervision. Personally, I would abolish the police altogether and just issue selected senior women with the prods that I mentioned earlier.
I realise this critique means we are probably now threats to national security. But what would you rather be- the peppercorn or the arsehole? Get the fuck off my lawn.
Student culture isn't what it used to be, largely because students aren't what they used to be. Tertiary education isn't a smart kid ecology anymore; it's a punter-based economy, thickly stacked with attention-seeking, pay-to-play slow learners demanding their store-bought version of the student experience. Hence all the pyromaniacal look at moi Saturday night crap- they are unimaginative, externally motivated and calibrate their activities to provide maximum social media spectacle. In the absence of policy to contend with this bullshit, one can only assume that the agencies concerned are outsmarted by people who hoot in circles around furniture fires.
I really don't give a fuck if all this sounds like a letter to the Editor circa 1923. In my own day, a fairly hardcore Class-A-loving arts cohort used to tear shit up without attracting the popo, and if we were raided it was usually because a cluster of jesus monkeys within the police was convinced everyone in black was a baby-eating satanist (it was the nineties). Panda rides and drunk tank lags were for the engineering contingent. I'm absolutely in favour of creating enough trashy memories to ornament the arid remainder of one's existence and christ only knows we need them more than ever these days, but I deplore the basic-bitch approach that seems to be prevailing. It is deplorable that debauchery is heading the same way as literacy.
Anyway. This event was a massive organisational fail and local cops have no business being 'bemused' or defensive when the circumstances and outcome are plain for everyone to see, which is why I'm bitching about it on the internet. When it comes to crowds, either police that shit or GTFO. You know... develop coherent management policies instead of acting surprised and butthurt every time a mouthbreather glasses up Castle Street, because these children obviously require supervision. Personally, I would abolish the police altogether and just issue selected senior women with the prods that I mentioned earlier.
I realise this critique means we are probably now threats to national security. But what would you rather be- the peppercorn or the arsehole? Get the fuck off my lawn.
In important jewellery news, I bought some oldish heishi beads online, strung them up for myself and am very pleased with the result. You know the ones- those bakelite/record vinyl discs that look like yards of polished snake around the neck. Heishi is a loan word describing the flat stone beads made by Native American peoples and seems to now apply also to African pieces in the same style made with vintage plastics and coconut etc. Now that I actually have a neck, I like to pack as much shit around it as is possible and these fabulous collars fulfil my need for scale and irregularity. Highly recommended.
There is... definitely uncertainty surrounding what else will be posted this week. It will b arrgghhh Dandy Warhols.
Do you have a gap between your front teeth?
I do.
There is... definitely uncertainty surrounding what else will be posted this week. It will b arrgghhh Dandy Warhols.
Do you have a gap between your front teeth?
I do.
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