Comments on: Unbecoming

By: home cooked theory » Blog Archive » Self-branding

home cooked theory » Blog Archive » Self-branding — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:36:58 +0000

[...] A key aspect of my online identity that I’ve been made aware of this week is the way that I have used my blog to express feelings of loneliness, isolation and disaffection with Brisbane since moving here. While those feelings have certainly had a real basis at times, particularly early on, it’s increasingly apparent that reading about those feelings on my blog has led people to make gestures and suggestions about my life (from coffee dates to flatmates) based on that knowledge. It seems that sometimes they have been offended when I haven’t recognised these offers as indications of potential friendship. [...]

By: melgregg

melgregg — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:42:06 +0000

Dear Ralph,
I’d love that – and to have it published by a Tasmanian independent press is very appropriate. I’ll follow up through email.
Thanks for the support,
Melissa

By: Ralph Wessman

Ralph Wessman — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 06:04:35 +0000

hello, can’t find an email address to contact you with so will go with the public comments; very much enjoyed your 11th January post ‘unbecoming’, any chance I could reproduce it in a small Oz lit journal, famous reporter? (next issue is June, it is both a print mag and and online journal – at walleahpress.com.au)

enjoying your blogsite very much,

Best,

Ralph Wessman

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 14:41:12 +0000

Jesus. I’ve had the worst Brisbane City month on record. The people Jean wants out of the Valley, at the moment they are like the rivers in Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty. The great River Of Dooleys with its cascading abuse from on high. The mighty Empire, so thick with knuckleheads its almost a statistical certainty that you’ll meet with trouble. And then there’s the Great Valley Mall, where only fools tread. I wade into Rics, I wade in the Troub, I wade into the Zoo. Sometimes I got ‘upstream’ into Fat Louies (which is more Apocolyspe Now than Lonesome Dove actually). And watching the bands, my mind often wanders, like the cowboys, to thoughts of the next crossing.

By: Renee

Renee — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:02:49 +0000

You can find whatever you want in this city if you look for it. And if all you look for is gentrification in order to despair about it, then that is all you will find. Go a bit deeper, that underground is still there. It moves and evolves and changes, just like cities, just like people. There is so much more happening here than most people give Brisbane credit for.

By: Mel

Mel — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:15:12 +0000

Around the New Year I was entertaining desperate thoughts of running away from Melbourne and the ‘scene’ in which I’ve found myself trapped, and starting a new life in another city. But you’re right – a new city is not a solution.

By: Mark Bahnisch

Mark Bahnisch — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 03:36:12 +0000

â€˜get the ***** out of my Valley!â€™

I had that exact feeling last night, jean!

By: jean

jean — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:32:59 +0000

PPS in about 1992 I coined the term ‘foodcourtification’ because I didn’t think ‘gentrification’ was an apt description. I always thought it would become a meme, but it didn’t. If it could do so now I’d be forever grateful.

By: jean

jean — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:04:16 +0000

PS, pursuant to Deleuze, because from Brisbane the rest of the world is always somewhere else, somewhere out there, I reckon it’s a good place to dig in and think about how you might want to shape the world

By: jean

jean — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:01:33 +0000

Mark has probably said a lot of what I want to say. I could add my own nostalgic reminiscences about bygone brizzy – in fact I could probably write a poem about the early-mid 1990s Brisbane of my memory – mango trees casting deep shadows over already over-grown lawns festooned with rusting hills hoists, themselves overshadowed by creaking verandahs furnished with mismatched op-shop furniture and empty VB tallies, and attached to falling-down queenslanders with peeling paint and the fading gentility of v-j walls and ornamental arches and bay windows, clustered together and populated by fluid, interconnected bohemias…but I won’t. It is also slightly disturbing how similar the flavour of my and Mark’s nostalgias are–have I been contributing to the collaborative construction of a cliche without even knowing it? maybe.

But I will point out that most of Brisbane’s (very recently acquired) bland shininess is a result of migration from (ahem) sydney and melbourne. That and the increased affluence of the aspirational suburbs, which makes me wonder how much access to authentic urban grunge is actually to do with a functional modern industrial economy and accompanying class divide…*

And maybe it’s the country girl in me, but my brief stint in Sydney in my mid-twenties, when everything-was-Brisbane’s-fault, almost destroyed me. I didn’t feel like I had the space to ‘become’, because I was too busy trying not to turn into a crazed bag lady what with the poverty, noise, smog, and complete cold indifference of almost everyone I met, even in the classical music scene, which should have been a ready-made subculture for me. So I ran away, and I’ve done much better back home.

Oh, and the Brisbane of McGahan’s Praise is ridgy-didge, not just in the 1980s but well into the 1990s. I was occasionally dole-ridden and white too, after graduating from music into the recession we had to have.

*[although I have been known to mutter 'get the ***** out of my Valley!' at the crowds in the wee small hours]