It’s true I guess. Sometimes I get half way through the day and realise all the clothes I’m wearing are from Incu and half the best jokes music I’ve heard came from Chris Wu at Popfrenzy.

Designer Vince Frost, uber editor Jess Scully, Sydney Festival director Fergus Linehan front up with Chris and the brothers Wu for a blow by blow from Time Out’s Sydney Style Council.

Chris on Sydney:

Until last year, I had been to the beach maybe twice in ten years, and then I moved to Coogee. Not that I go swimming or anything, but reading the papers by the sea or just seeing it from far away is kind of nice which I would have never thought. Maybe next year I will actually touch the sand.

He gave Cyclic a plug too:

Cyclic Defrost is also a local zine that is worth consulting because the articles are well developed and the subject matters usually diverge from mainstream musical trends and are written with a lot of heart.

Time Out must be giving the rest of the city’s tired looking street rags a real fright. Decent features (mostly), interesting, frank stories. What next?!

Having made it through the challenging first couple of years, the Australian publishers of Dazed & Confused magazine have apparently called it quits on the the UK title’s local version. The website seems to have disappeared, though the Paper Tiger home page still brandishes old Dazed covers.

Emmy Hennings’s interview with Charge Group appeared at Mess and Noise a few days ago. It’s an esssential read, and not just because they’re one of the most talked about groups in this town at the moment. It’s also Emmy’s last story for the site, as far as I know.

Here’s Emmy at her fangrrrl blog:

As writers we barely got paid and we all worked ourselves into the ground. Sometimes it was a fucking chore. But I’ll say now, without reservation, that it was worth it. Worth it because for a time we all felt like a part of - dare I say it? - some kind of dysfunctional but affectionate family. We all cared, and we were all proud of that thing that would birth itself every two months amidst strings of sleepless nights from Sydney to Perth, and that kept functioning because (mostly) young bands and (mostly) young writers were willing to meet at noisy pubs and weekend cafe tables and talk stories at each other over cheap recording devices. I’ve made wonderful friends out of fellow writers and interview subjects at Mess+Noise. It’s these friends who matter to me most.

Can I now align that experience with a company that states:

“This acquisition extends destra’s capacity to deliver credible and compelling content and create advertising opportunities on a multi-platform basis around targeted, online communities, particularly in the X & Y demographic”?

I don’t feel that I can.

A little over a month ago, I attended a conference on “ideas, techniques and technologies for building community dialogue” called New Connections. It was a great, shambolic and inspiring event. At the time, I blogged about Mark Pesce’s keynote address - his renaissance span of ideas is totally inspiring - but I always meant to cover a few of the other sessions.

Only a few days after the Australian federal election, and organised by Tom Dawkins and Cassie Charlton from Vibewire, politics was always going to be a crucial part of the “community dialogue” discussed. In the first hour, we heard from media communications academic/lobbyist Julie Eisenberg, founder of the Internet Advocacy Roundtable Alan Rosenblatt, Carol Darr from George Washington Uni, online strategist for the Kevin07 campaign Camilla Cooke, and Brett Solomon the director of Get Up! Australia. An impressive panel. Or it would have been if phone connections worked (the US speakers were on a glitchy line).

“Lack of understanding of the medium did the Liberals a disservice,” said Camilla Cooke. But while there was a general feeling among the Australian attendees and panelists that the election result repudiated the Howard Government, the reality, as pointed out by Brett Solomon, was that only a few per cent of the population shifted. It’s no Rudd-slide (in fact, final numbers look even closer - looks more like ambivalence on the part of the electorate). And with 250,000 active members, Solomon’s online organisation, Get Up!, had the potential to make a difference in swinging electorates, with, he said, “thousands added to crucial electoral rolls.”

US blogging culture is different to Australia. Per capita and real numbers are far far bigger there, and the move to mainstream acceptance here has been slow. There are similarities, however. As Carol Barr pointed out, “People engaged in these blogs tend to be very influential in their local communities. Tap into them, and there are clear benefits.” (Or was she just trying to get all the bloggers onside? - it worked with me).

“It’s still just 9am!” she announced, with respect to online take up in politics. She emphasised the importance of constituent relationship management, micro-targeting, but warned of privacy implications. And, what I found interesting, was IP-targeted advertising by postcode. Camilla Cooke said this was carried out in the 2007 Australian election. That is, ads served up on your favourite website that relate to you, because you’re in a marginal seat, because there’s a hot local issue, and so on. Seems later than 9am, but I guess politicians get up early.

Much of the greatness of this day was about the informal chats between sessions, the race across to Single Origin for great coffee, the not quite tangible flashes of inspiration at ideas. Later, Tom Dawkins announced he was abdicating the throne, moving to the US to work with comparable organisations (Vibewire’s been his baby from day one) - I suppose there’ll be a new leader, I wonder how the organisation will make the transition?

I joined a panel on print media - “why bother with print?” - with Rachel Hills (New Matilda) and Matt Khoury (City News). I’m not sure how interesting it was for the audience, but I basically discussed the Cyclic Defrost model. How it works. Why we do print. To cut a long story short, print’s great for reaching new readers, and Cyclic’s focus is exposing readers to artists they aren’t familiar with (web’s great on the other hand for building relationships with established readers and people who are looking for specific artists); print’s portable and very readable; and there’s a sense of finality to the printed word you often miss online. There was a lot more, but I could go on all day.

Speaking on that panel, I missed discussions of the legal issues around digital technology, health and technology, and engaging young people in rural areas, but after wolfing down one of the last sandwiches (our panel ate into the lunch break), it was time for the session I’d really hoped to catch, on web 2.0. The interactive web if you like - though a lot of the audience had trouble getting their heads around it, let alone get into any real discussion. Conversation swirled around corporate and government influence; the shift from “god-like” journos making pronouncements from on high to the user-generated content model, and the related shifts in quality; egocentric networks, preening parlours (myspace), and the modularising of the web. Heady stuff.

Vibewire has just relaunched with a social media/web 2.0 look too.

I found myself wondering what all this social media is doing/will do to our social abilities. Communities develop by adults reinforcing childhood growth, and children imitating adult behaviours. But where people communicate primarily online, do we run the risk of evolving into otaku?

Start of a new year. Back to work. That’s my way of saying it’s been quiet here and I’ve got some good excuses. January in Sydney is crazy, people can’t get over the thrill of new year’s and summer, and the Sydney Festival doesn’t help.

Well here’s a stop-gap. First up, check Vaughan Healey’s funny q & a with Andy Weatherall.

Healey: I was talking to some friends about this interview, and one of them asked me to ask you when you are going to stop making goth records….

Weatherall: (laughs) ha ha yeah well they can get fucked… No but I guess there is a dark side to the music, it’s kind of infused with a dark humour. To me goth takes itself too seriously, whereas my music has a kind of sick humour; maybe like dark overtones but there will be a poppy melody over the top. If you mix the dark and the light it turns out even weirder. Perhaps they are gothic records, but gothic in a subtle way.

If someone asked me to sum up the vibe of my records I would say it was something like this old 1950s British movie called the Lady Killers… or like a friend of mine who a couple of years ago said the music sounds like an Edwardian bathroom. I thought that was a perfect description. It probably is gothic, but not in that kind of po-faced, long-leather coat, eyeliner.. not that kind of teenage goth, I supposed it’s grown-up goth.

It’s always a pleasure reading David Byrne’s blog, and Wired has him interviewing Thom Yorke here, which is pretty great too. It takes a while to get started, there’s a bit of backslapping. But it’s a frank discussion of sustainable touring, Radiohead’s pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth opening gambit on the new record, and talking in the abstract, just what an album is about now music’s downloaded one song at a time.

Byrne: I’ve been asking myself: Why put together these things — CDs, albums? The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists’ part. Maybe it’s just because everybody’s thinking musically in the same way for those couple of months … Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

Yorke: Yeah, but the other thing is what that bundle can make. The songs can amplify each other if you put them in the right order.

Byrne: Do you know, more or less, where your income comes from? For me, it’s probably very little from actual music or record sales. I make a little bit on touring and probably the most from licensing stuff. Not for commercials — I license to films and television shows and that sort of thing.

Yorke: We always go into a tour saying, “This time, we’re not going to spend the money. This time we’re going to do it stripped down.” And then it’s, “Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights.” But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don’t like all the energy consumption, the travel. It’s an ecological disaster, traveling, touring … We did one of those carbon footprint things recently where they assessed the last period of touring we did and tried to work out where the biggest problems were. And it was obviously everybody traveling to the shows.

Byrne: Oh, you mean the audience.

Yorke: Yeah. Especially in the US. Everybody drives. So how the hell are we going to address that? The idea is that we play in municipal places with some transport system alternative to cars. And minimize flying equipment, shipping everything. We can’t be shipped, though.

Since when did music magazines put artists on the cover without doing a feature in the middle?

I picked up the latest jmag expecting Urthboy in depth, but that’s all it is. Less than 60 words.

I walked up to the Teachers’ Club on Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, on Friday morning, sure of only one thing. I was going to get some good coffee. Across the street from the club’s new conference facilities is one of the top two coffee purveyors in town, Single Origin Roaster (though as this review says, the owner can be a little unnervingly friendly at times) - I needed that after radio the night before, DJing alongside SYLK and Catcall at the Oyster magazine launch the night before that, and the day job - suitably refreshed I crossed back to the Teacher’s and into the mass of people making/hoping to make new connections.

Most of the conferences I attend are organised by professionals, with months or years in the making, and this one was nothing like that. Tom Dawkins and Cassie Charlton, the organisers from Vibewire, had blu tac and posters and programs and all manner of other paraphernalia spilling out of arms and bags, and, half an hour after the keynote was to begin, the posters were still being affixed in the main auditorium. But given they had six weeks to get it together, at the same time as running their electiontracker coverage - well it was a pretty good effort getting it together.

Billowing masses of jargon clouded up the place in Mark Pesce’s keynote, but his sharply inspiring ideas cut through the obfuscation relatively unscathed. Instead of dwelling on technology, he stepped back and looked at the way people interact socially in terms of human nature and biology. His basic premise was that left/socialist and right/libertarian philosphies, the two bookends of partisan politics, are rooted in basic biology.

The tension between altruistic and selfish behaviour.

Darwin broached it in the Ascent of Man saying morality provided no advantage to the individual, but immense advantages to the tribe or group (these quotes were abused by colonising Brits - probably a large reason why they’ve been dropped from the evolutionary canon) - and until recently biologists didn’t accept altruism as a natural phenomenon, expecting individuals to work for their own good and that of their children. Ants and bees, which don’t obey the selfish ’survival of the fittest’ laws and yet produce highly successful colonies, were a spanner in the works for biologists, but, just this year, biologists started publishing on the idea of “multi-level selection“. Suddenly you’ve got a scientific justification for the tensions between altruism and selfishness as critical factors in natural selection - and compelling support for politics/social media/human nature taking in elements of both.

Basically social groups do better for the individual/children if they’re selfish, but they do better for the group if they behave altruistically. You need both.

Dunbar’s work on social group size showed that humans have an optimal group size of 150. The first urban groups (1000+) appeared 10,000 years ago, and, since then, we’ve had more people in our circles than our cortexes can keep up with; competing groups, and real advantages to be gained from altruism. That’s skyrocketing. Pesce argues that, “In the network era, the benefits of altruism disproportionately outweigh selfishness.”

Wikipedia vs Encyclopaedia Britannica is a good example. Now everyone, no matter how marginalised, can make a contribution to society. And (here’s the important bit), Wikipedia gives a selection advantage to everyone who reads it, simply by giving them access to the facts.

Pesce discovered a community of amateur online psephologists (via Crikey) including Poll Bludger and Possums Pollytics. By sharing their election stats knowledge, these bloggers brought readers up to a shared level of understanding - a point where all parties could take part in debates and advance the group’s knowledge.

This idea of blogging communities isn’t as neat as the wiki resource, but it’s equally important. In this knowledge sharing environment, spurred on by the thrill of conversation and competition, the group makes advances in ideas and understanding that they wouldn’t have individually. This idea holds equally true with music blogs by people like Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Emmy Hennings… try it.

“Sharing is the shape, promise and danger of the world to come,” according to Pesce, a future that’s described in John Robb’s Brave New War - equal parts good and bad. There were no easy answers, just (for me at least) quite a step up in thinking about where it all fits in.

More to come…

What is a stylus if it’s not touching the record, etc. Stylusmagazine.com’s shut down. I’m still not entirely sure why, but it’s a real loss.

The new issue of Cyclic Defrost is out this week with launches in Sydney and Melbourne around the corner.

Interviews with Aaron Martin, Boy Is Fiction, Burial, Cameron Webb/Seaworthy, Clinton Green, Roger from Extreme Records (and a free Extreme sampler CD), Francis Plagne, Cailan Burns from Pretty Boy Crossover (our guest cover designer), Ivens, Mark Pritchard, the Nam Shub of Enki, Odd Nosdam and Danny Jumpertz from Feral Media.

They’re all online now, with several web exclusives including my vox pop from Australia’s emerging dubstep community and interviews with Solo Andata and Victor Bermon. Truckloads of reviews too.

The launches…

Sydney - Sunday Dec 2 from 6-10pm - Concrète @ Sticky Bar, via Taggarts Ln, off Crown St (Surry Hills) Sub Bass Snarl (live soundtrack to film), Peter Newman & Scott Morrison (live audio visual performance), DJ sets from Eli and I. Entry by donation with all proceeds going to the Hope St Mission.

Melbourne - Thursday Dec 6 from 10pm - East Brunswick Club (280 Lygon Street, East Brunswick) Terminal Sound System, Marc Hannaford, Robert Vincs, Scott Tinkler and DJs. $10.

Next Friday I’ll be on a panel to talk about print media and why anyone would bother with the expense, environmental impacts, and time between conception and publication of print publishing. We’re packing up the new issue of Cyclic Defrost tonight, and I can assure you I find myself asking those questions from time to time, but when I’m holding a hard copy of the magazine later in the weekend it’ll all make sense.

It’s part of Vibewire’s New Connections, in Sydney next Friday November 30; a conference on ideas, techniques and technologies for building community dialogue.

Vibewire says it’s open to journalists, social change activists, community and charity organisations and academics with an interest in political participation, media, technology and social change - which basically means if you’re interested in those things then you should come (registration fee details at their site).