Issue 22 has a cover by We Buy Your Kids. Plus interviews with Anonymeye, Knitted Abyss, Eugene Carchesio, Belbury Poly, Fennesz, Wavves, VVM, and Mountains.

There are also features on the DIY cassette scene and the tentative stirrings of a reborn electronic underground Sydney.

Plus our cover designers do a guest spot in the Sleeve Reviews section and author Christos Tsiolkas digs his favourite music in Selects.

Hassle your local record shop for copies or get the PDF.

If you’d like to get this issue and the following two issues to arrive in your letterbox without having to do anything else then renew your subscription with a new ‘donation’ then just subscribe, you’ll get a free CD for good measure.

I dashed out the following, and a sub-edited selection of three made it into the Spectrum section, in today’s Herald, alongside an interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The other picks were from Susan Wyndham (SMH literary editor), Elizabeth Ann McGregor (MCA director), Sandra Yates (SWF chair of the board), Susan Hayes (OzCo literature director). Illustrious company, maybe they were after gender balance.

(Alex Ross – taken from Stop Smiling interview)

Alex Ross in Conversation with Ramona Koval: Hip-hop and Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth helped New Yorker music critic Alex Ross see classical music through a different window, and as an outsider to that world, it really changed the way I listen to music.

From Hot Copy to Hard Cover: Asa Wahlquist has spent plenty of time on the land as a reporter; her writing brings a dry, pragmatism to the environmental debate.

Rock’n’Roll Lives: Don Walker’s poetic reflections. Stephen Cummings’s tell all shock. In between, the warm Mark Mordue. Does it get better?

The Inside Out of Book Design: I know, I shouldn’t. But as a design lover, the cover catches my eye long before I open the pages. Shapes my opinions. I’m looking forward to an insider’s view.

Penguin Plays Rough: In a Newtown sharehouse, a clutch of Sydney writers and readers meet every month to read and rant their work. It’s wild and wonderful and this time the readers are Craig Silvey, Eddie Sharp, Lexi Freiman and Pip Smith.

Out of the Box with Christos Tsiolkas: OK, so I’m also doing something at the festival, which I’m nervously looking forward to. I’m interviewing the fantastic writer, Christos Tsiolkas, via his records. I’m comandeering the format of another FBI radio show – Out of the Box – to do it.

But there’s more to it than Aston Kucher and Hugh Jackman, and it’s not all about the Fake Stephen Conroy either.

So I went and asked a couple of media addicts – Stilgherrian and Stu Buchanan – why they tweet and wrote it all up for New Matilda.

Since last Sunday I have:

• Spent a week in Perth to attend the Greenhouse 2009 climate conference. No gambling. Chaired a session on climate change adaptation. Lived at Burswood Entertainment Complex – Perth casino – for five days. Did not leave. Oh, did leave one night, for Meupe night in town – got Pimmon CD and Wooshie seven inch single. Back at casino, found myself sitting at a parking station as it was the only place I could charge my laptop. Swum at Cottesloe beach on the last night with new and old friends, followed by fish and chips and Little Creatures beer on the beach. Flew back to Sydney after my longest time away from Nina Bea
• Appeared in the Sydney Writers Festival 09 program
• Program review at radio. All in order, apparently
• Skipped through traffic, petered out of petrol at Albion and Elizabeth Streets, had to push my scooter to the side of the road. The shame

But think Perth and it’s the Meupe record label that comes to mind – they’ve released great records by Stina, Pimmon and Dave Miller among others. I interviewed Traianos Pakioufakis, the guy behind Meupe, when he guest designed the cover of Cyclic Defrost, in July, 2006 (read here).

Here’s a recent taster from the label. Wooshie – Both Sides from the Natural’s Is In It 7 inch single – Meupe described it as follows:

Debut release from the mysterious sound wizard Wooshie (aka Dylan Michel). An ethereal balance of light and darkness, subdued chaos and forlorn rhythm. Cosmic waves crashing against a dark southern shore, Middle-Eastern-Soviet contemplation followed by futuristic erhu bossanova. A truly beautiful 45 that seems to consider the nature of chance, duality and balance.

First thing I did on confirming my trip west side, was check what’s happening Meupe-wise in Perth. And they’ve got a night at Spectrum Project Space in Northbridge. If I can tear myself away from the talks and things.

But I’m yet to say anything about Peter Alwast.

That’s a still from Alwast’s piece (via Gallery Barry Keldoulis). But he won the Queensland new media prize and a still is not new media, even if it is on a canvas. Oh and I hear it’s not ‘new media’ anymore by the way, it’s ‘media’, as in ‘media art’.

Greg Hooper described the prize winning piece, Everything, in Real Time:

The winning piece, Everything (see cover image), by Peter Alwast (it’s an acquisitive award so into the GOMA collection it goes) uses three large projections of what seem to be cut and spliced together clichés of digi-art animation. Shiny pipes, translucent shapes, clouds, mountains, CAD style building frames, lickable butterscotch cars, reflections into shiny domes to show off some projective geometry/linear algebra. Over the top runs a soundtrack that also seems to recycle the standards of collaged and cut-up sound, even down to the slightly manic sounding street preacher. (Subpsychotic street person rant = gritty urban equivalent of salt-of-the-earth charming peasant folk wisdom?) Overall, there’s an aura of slick and meaningless process, an empty consumption of surfaces that gets a bit creepy.

I just don’t agree at all.

It’s time-enabled painting. That’s three-dimensions – time plus the flat film on wall from three film projectors. A surreal mesh of images, in the three film frames, only heighten the sense of 3D. In the gallery notes, Alwast refers to shifting his gaze from PC monitor to window to phone to TV, and so on. And you get that in the film, the perspective seems to shift internally, so different subjects within the film move independently of one another.

It makes sense. We’re overloading on information. At the moment, for me, it’s Twitter, The Australian and the SMH, the New Yorker, Feedly, abstracts for a conference I’m heading to next week, a Christos Tsiolkas novel and the latest Quarterly Essay (on climate change and coal mining). There’s radio and TV, downloaded HBO series, DVDs, YouTube stars. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t go more than half an hour without checking my phone.

In a way, Alwast’s piece makes some sense of that mess of images. And while media artists are obsessed with technical challenges. Who can do this very macho bout of programming or gear tech or whatever, Alwast’s gone and observed something quite real and quite powerful. It’s a way of seeing the world. Art, I guess.

Anyway, the aim was a couple of short profiles, potential introductions to a magazine feature. A place and a face. Here’s what I came up with.

Faces

There’s no entourage to speak of, but she’s the star.

He pulls his backpack around and crouches in front of the Oporto restaurant. Green-striped polo shirt – collar up – and baggy jeans, he takes a camera from the bag, pulling the Canon E.O.S. strap over his short brown hair and suede tennis visor. He checks something in the viewfinder, presses a button and adjusts the lens.

She’s about the same height, approx. 170cm, dressed in a fawn jumper, snug over red shirt and blue jeans. Brown discus-shaped handbag. He snaps a picture as she curves her head around to him like a model. Eyes sparkling, teeth glinting. Her eyebrows arch, but she holds them smooth. She giggles with the pose. It’s a funny smile, like a recreation of something she’s seen.

He snaps. She reaches to see the preview, then steps back into position. Carefully pats her shoulder length straight brown hair, parting the fringe across her face. He looks past her, at the backdrop of light rail cables stretching back to a horizon of George Street and the glitzy Guys And Dolls billboard at the Capitol Theatre behind. Needs to get the composition right. He’s done this before.

She flashes that smile. He snaps, laughs, picks up a red Esprit shopping bag, and they’re off to rejoin their friends.

Places

Around the corner from Chinatown, at Hay and Harbour streets, a squat McDonald’s restaurant squeezes out beneath the Entertainment Centre. The hulking venue’s like a Millenium Falcon: futuristic ’80s, washed out, unwashed. Street lights, a big red sign to “Darling Harbour”; decades of intersecting dreams for the city.

A girl steps past the monorail, scooping ice from a Gloria Jeans frappe. The empty train has a full-length hoarding for Pom-brand juice – “Health’s Angel” – moments later, the light rail trundles parallel to Paddy’s Market, also empty.

Two mid-30s men talk too loudly at each other. One leaves, the other asks people in the square for money. Actually, it’s more like a triangle. 500 metres on each side: McDonald’s and Oporto sentry to Paddy’s, 100 years old this year. The market itself bares the scars of several rounds of reno’s.

A man in a square, grey suit swings his arms robotically, striding towards a row of three phone booths. There are specks of rubbish everywhere: cigarette stubs, broken plastic spoons, discarded wrappers. Chicken burger wrappers and napkins wedged into the old train track sleepers, the randomly placed seats. Plenty of pigeons and sea gulls. Two bins. A skateboarder’s oasis, if it wasn’t for the uneven paving.

The worry is that bailouts will be bad for us in the long term. But in the long term, as one sage noted, we are all dead. We can ban government rescues in the long term, if they’re such a worry. In the short term, the biggest hazard is too much moralizing.

How much evidence is there that moral hazard has any meaningful effect on decision making, for example in choosing to safeguard your home against fire?

Insurers count the cost of fire devastation – SMH, February 13.

The insurance industry said Government intervention after such disasters did not help reduce the strain on the industry and contributed to a moral hazard where people were less likely to hold private insurance.

Paul Giles, from the Insurance Council of Australia, said: “Those people who do insure look at people who don’t insure and say, ‘Well, I’ve been paying my insurance premiums for a number of years, why do I bother if the Government steps in?”‘.

Mr Giles said the fire services levy and stamp duty accounted for up to 40 per cent of home and contents insurance premiums, and governments would be better off encouraging people to take out private insurance.

It’s a beguiling argument, and it works logically. People tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll be bailed out. But context is everything.

‘Moral hazard’ isn’t applied evenly. In the past year, as this article points out, large insurers and banks have gone to governments, hat in hand, for bailout money.

Months ago, when the president announced a paltry plan to help out a few of the millions of homeowners who got caught in the sub-prime loan mess, he reiterated the credo: “It’s not government’s job to bail out … those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford.” Days ago, when he endorsed the giant Fed bailout of Wall Street, the president signaled it was government’s job to bail out big bankers who had made decisions to buy and sell risky securities they knew (or should have known) they could not afford.

At the same time, Australia faces escalating climate risks – bushfires, floods, sea level rise and storm surge. How prepared are insurers for these things, are they adequately prepared for the payouts?

Beyond all that, evidence is increasing that we just don’t know how to assess risk.

On writing.

And you came up with a few half-baked ideas and they really went for them, but then you were forced to actually come up with the goods. What would you do?

So, seeing as you’re an occasional blogger, the first panel might be something about blogging.

The best who live in Sydney?

• Frockwriter
• Sydney Observatory
• City of Sound
• Nosey In Newtown
• Fresh and New

Who would you choose? What would you make them talk about? How do you avoid the dreaded love-in that usually happens at these things?

On another panel, you might want some proper writers. Like novelists and journalists. Being a festival, about writing. But because you’re obsessed with music, it has to have a music element.

Do you get silly?

• how music ruined me and saved me as a writer
• are lyrics good love advice?

Or serious?

• if music has gone through a billion changes and revolutions and genre-births – sampling, mash-ups, etc – how come writing hasn’t quite followed suit?” (Twittering and mobile phone novels aside.)

Or do you just throw that all away and put a bunch of writers and musicians on a stage together and stage and let them battle it out?

As you can see this is all just a ruse to get my blog posting up. There’s no way a festival would ever ask for panel ideas this half-baked.