Curmudgeon Asks: Where The Bloody Hell Are You, Then?

Forgive me internets, for I have sinned; it has been more than a week since I have updated this portfolio of cranky. The three spam-bots, two people and functionally literate chimpanzee who read regularly will, I am sure, grow and move on.



Canberra has been in the midst of what can fondly be termed IndieFest2011 (also known as the You Are Here festival) for just over a week now, with festivities winding up this weekend. I know it's fashionably post-hipster to sneer ironically at hipsters (and am clearly guilty of it myself at times), but I'm going to concede that this was actually a pretty cool idea. Any publicly funded arts event will inevitably raise some hackles about what the money could have been better spent on, but my best guess would be that this was run on a relative shoe-string, with the highest costs being printing the (admittedly very hipster) program and probably public liability insurance, with quite a bit of support being kicked in by local businesses like the alternative bookstore, all of whom will ultimately benefit if this grows big enough to rival Newcastle's This Is Not Art (TINA) Festival.

As with any festival of arts, attendees probably need to suspend their snark reflex, seek out the events they're most likely to enjoy, and try not to be whiny jerks about the free entertainment in some vain attempt to appear more interesting/complex/sophisticated/coolly aloof than everyone else. Fun and irony in equal measures abound if you're willing to kick in and explore, but if your idea of a great evening is pontificating about your general superiority from the couch then you'll probably have a terrible time.

Given the crapload of money the Territory will be spending on supporting a loud and sparkly firework background to bogan debauchery this weekend (Skyfire), recognition of Canberra's thriving and largely unpaid arts community goes some way to acknowledging the diversity of the Canberra community: we have, at the very least, bogans, hipsters, and the public service to consider. Plus, Friday night's Zombie prom was all kinds of amusement. Cheers to the organisers - you might be incorrigible hipster kids for all I know- but you manage some excellent festival.

False Starts and New Beginnings

Awake too early after a night heavy with gin, and sitting in my bicycle pajamas willing the world to stop spinning. This seems as good a time as any to try to win at the internet, the prize being an amusingly named blogger account which suitably reflects my general curmudgeonly streak.

The human race being a font of unoriginal ideas, all interesting variations on Youngcurmudgeon are taken, as are all the variations on Miss/Ms Misanthropy. I find myself forced to look at the C word as being one with rather more than the usual four letters. Having secured this, I am resigning myself not to be one of those bloggers who will be liked and adored for their pretty pictures of baked goods or charming and heartwarming tales of human endurance/romance/personal fashion. I am ready, in the style of Machiavelli's prince, to be feared (albeit with a healthy sense of irony).

So who am I, and what am I doing here? I am a twenty-something student, rapidly approaching an age at which my sequesterment in various institutions of higher education is somewhat unseemly. Having extended a gen-Y adolescence roughly as far as is plausible with various forms of academic pursuit, I feel my deep cynicism for the future of the human race is quite definitely supported by the evidence. For example, some of you read. This is an excellent start, however tempered by the fact that in large numbers your choice of reading materials tend towards celebrity endorsed cookbooks, mediocre crime fiction, columns by racist and fear-mongering hacks like Andrew Bolt, Twilight and pick-up artist manuals.

If you sometimes think the human race is doomed because the stupid people won't stop breeding, and your response to this is bemused exasperation and not some kind of alarming eugenics program, welcome. Please enjoy this brief collection of surly rants, and feel free to leave me some comments quantifying my elitist wanker quotient and letting me know what else you think. In return, I'll try to work on the TL; DR and do my best to turn my impotent rage into something which might bring you some entertainment.