Becoming

Becoming is a process, not an event.

Sitting on the edge of the inercity - on the new marble wall of the Seymore Centre, by the old buildings of Cleveland St and City Rd... across from Vic Park... sun setting into a barmy spring evening over a city that has been my playground for years.

Becoming is my aim and my destiny. I am curious as I watch myself change. I try to point myself in specific directions, but becoming happens almost despite us.

New plans, new priorities, new feelings and experience. Standing on the same street but seeing different things, hearing new sounds. Some poisons once put up with - now unacceptable.

The times I've wandered the streets of Redfern late at night, alone, no money left, no drugs left, no sense of self to speak of... fading. Fading like this sunset into this balmy spring evening...

Another birthday, but it feels different. I actually do feel older this time, and it's a wonderful thing. Its a deeply wonderful thing.

The process of becoming promts a looking-back.

It is hard - at least in these minutes, outside the Seymore Centre, on the edge of the inner-west - not to look for an exact moment when I first lost myself. Somewhere in between Chippendale and Flinders St... In the endless satties and viles, the countless hours of exhausting work in the filthy, sparkling places...

Because if I found the spot in time where I had lost the girl I was, could I not get her back? Could I not re-unite? Become what I was?

But becoming never looks behind itself. Becoming is a process, and I can only watch and tend to myself, as I become a new something.

I remember now how much I love this city! In this moment my love is felt, not intellectualised or remembered from earlier better times...

The pay-off of becoming is discovering home.

No I'm not!

(Mikhail Bakhtin)
I'm not boring (apologises for previous negative post... also for bad spelling - and that apology stands from now till the end of time, I'm only making it once...) Anyway, I just gave a paper on Nightclubs as Carnivalesque Spaces and people really listened and asked lots of questions and my chapter is going really well. Here's a random excerpt (from the chapter, not the paper):

"While it must be said that both scenes are predicated first and foremost on dance and music, where doof culture may be said to represent a ‘carnival of protest’, The Chemical Palace perhaps represents a ‘carnival of survival’, where new ways of living and of presenting oneself as a human being and a sexual subject are enacted on the dancefloor and beyond... St John explains that it is the all-inclusive ‘do it yourself/ourself’ ethos that permeates these events which gives them the ability to inspire participants to something more meaningful than a passive consumer hedonism (St John 2001, 15). Discussing the ‘greater social significance’ (beyond a simple pursuit of pleasure) of the doof, St John says that ‘spectator/star roles are not easily filled’ and then quotes Hakim Bey, who says ‘the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist’ (St John 2001, 15). According to Bakhtin’s definition of carnivaleque spaces ‘everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people’, making both doof culture and the radical queer dance party scene examples of carnivalesque space (Bakhtin 1965, 7). In FreeNRG, Graham St John also draws our attention briefly to Bakhtin, discussing instances in ‘Western cultural history’ – from Medieval carnival culture, to hippy festivals like Woodstock, to modern dance party culture – where participants have escaped the regimentations of the established social and economic order; he claims that ‘history reveals such Dionysia to possess a perennial quality’ (St John 2001, 17)."

It's also my birthday on the weekend and Liam and I are working up an acoustic version of "I saw a UFO and nobody believes me"!

I've just decided to get rid of PhD blog, and blog it here, cos my PhD basically is my life at the moment. Ah, that's the way it goes.

Yay! Sunday!!!!!

I am boring

Remember when I used to be interesting?

It's like everything in my life has shrunk and slowed-down.

It is calmer. It is safer. I am happier.

But I am dull.

The most important things to me are food and TV.

It's like I'm hibernating.

Will I be a butterfly when I emerge?

Will anyone ever read my thesis?

I think I will get a casual job. With money I could be more fun.