Messy Performance/Visual Art

Two stunning pieces of really messy performance art… I'd love to explore this

I never realised that vomiting could be so visually appealing. Millie Brown beats Jackson Pollock any time!

http://vimeo.com/18999606

^^ Ten minutes of having chocolate poured on your face? Well… Why not?
Also, just try to pronounce this artists name. Go on. I challenge you.

Harry Potter and the Media

Over the last week I watched every single Harry Potter film from start to finish with Loulou, culminating in the grande finale (!!!) last night at the cinema. 


It sounds lame, I know. 


But with the mind-set that my current Contemporary Media paper has put me into, it's been hard not to notice some of the clever and consistent digs at politics and the media which JK Rowling and the ever-changing directors have put into the stories.  
First of all is the very obvious example of Rita Skita. Aside from the fact that she'd drive anybody potty, she epitomizes the unethical journalist who twists quotes and events to portray a false sense of reality. The media, in essence, has an obligation to the public to provide a balanced and un-weighted portrayal of contemporary facts; leaving it to the public to interpret events in coordination with their ideologies and viewpoints. Yet journalists, like Rita Skita, very rarely do this. Most of them eventually even publish books (poor Dumbledore) to mind-wash, dictate, and corrupt the public into seeing their narrow-minded viewpoint (or, at least, the viewpoint of their mass media corporation *cough cough* Fox News, *cough cough* The Daily Prophet). 
There's also the political agenda. For instance "Undesirable Number One" = Harry Potter one minute, Death Eaters another, briefly followed by a mugger and robber, then back to Harry Potter. I mean seriously, just try to interpret that in a way that doesn't relate to the seriously confused propaganda bullshit that most governments (particularly the American Republicans) try to spoon-feed us. 
A similar point is the consistent portrayal of Sirius Black as a notorious mass-murderer who's on the loose. This is echoed in the phase of ridiculing Dumbledore while promoting Umbridge, followed by ridiculing Umbridge when she completely fucks up. Her hatred of "progress for the sake of progress", combined with corporal punishment, is a clear (and totally fair, of course) attack on conservative government. And their denial of the very existence of Voldemort until way too late reeks of the governmental cause of almost everything that's ever gone wrong on a large scale in our world.


So next time your English teacher tells you that Harry Potter isn't a very deep text, give them a lecture.

Careers?

I am officially a Health Sciences dropout. Yet as everyone else in my position at the beginning of this semester are feeling disastrous, I'm stoked. Their predefined career plans as they came to university was to go through medical school and become a doctor, but now that's gone. Now they have to do an undergraduate degree first and go from there back into the medical school...

Not me. 

I'm now doing what I want. 

But what's got me thinking is that I have absolutely no career plan in front of me. I've been brought up in a world to think that this should be concerning, yet somehow it's the single best aspect of where I'm at now. 

It's not the fact that I'm studying Biochemistry, Communications and Visual Culture, all of which I find fascinating. 

It's not that these have exciting prospects for the future- from biochemistry aiming to increase longevity drastically, to communications promising a vastly different media landscape in the future with the likes of Murdoch gone, replaced by a grounding in online social networking. 

Nor is it any of the other myriad prospects of our future, such as the "singularity", where the exponential growth of computational ability surpasses humanity, promising to aid both the biochemistry and communications I'm studying now. 

It's not even the fact that, yes, I am rebelling to an extent.

Rather, I recall Chris McCandless of Into The Wild. 

"Careers are a twentieth century invention, and I don't want one."

Thinking about it, I'm happy to regard this statement as totally true. And I'm more than happy to entertain the thought that we could, in fact, head back to the time known by our grandparents where you took life and work as it came. Our parents have created a world where we feel it's compulsory to, say, do a BCom and become an accountant, or an LLB and be a corporate lawyer, just because this supposedly enables us to have a 'comfortable' life. We have even been taught to 'know' that if you do a BA you'll probably become a teacher. Yet as I approach this semester, the last thing on my mind (if it's even on my mind at all) is a long-term 'career' plan. Sure, I'm taking papers that are vaguely related to where I think the world is heading, but this is only a general self-made guideline I'm using which combines my abilities, enjoyment, and some crystal ball gazing (or something of the like).

Loulou and I have been talking about it a lot, and what I'm doing instead of career planning is looking forward to the times when I'm earning money just to live. Enjoying experiences and writing about them. Living in China, America, Europe; settling down after a good twenty years or so overseas. I'll be over-qualified for the jobs I'll inevitably put up with in fast food chains and theme parks, but who cares! And if I somehow find myself in the journalism school in Florida, or a media office in China, then that'll be a lovely turn of luck. 

But until then, I'm searching for jobs to pay for the "college life" I'm now experiencing in Dunedin. I'm investing in shares so that when I do try to settle down in twenty years time I might actually have something to set me up. I'm pursuing Biochemistry and learning computer programming because I could even create diagnostic machines to replace doctors.

But most of all, I'm enjoying not knowing what's ahead. Life's a theme-park ride on which we have a front-row seat.