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May 17, 2006

You get to like the drinking and the swimming around

Posts outgrowing comments once more, in response to Nat and Liz and in extension to my own initial rant here which grew something of a sparky response, mostly about the lack of a Hydey. Firstly -- it's great that there is a dialogue growing on this here Journals site, and that between our recipes, rants and dispatches from the front line of potential civil war, we can discuss an idea that has been at the core of why I started this thing, and where Concrete came from, and what keeps me in this city. It's like LiveJournal except with (slightly) less emphasis on the hotness of Jackson, and a little more sociology. Keep it up, people. Particularly you, Jackson -- stay that hot always.

The number of times I've tried and dreamed and failed to do something with community in Perth I can count on so many broken hearts. I've been doing it since uni, running around campus trying to get people to write for the paper, to care about their surroundings, to look at the buildings that surrounded them and see something other than a machine. The few people that dragged their arses up the stairs to my editors' desk came on a journey, and a good few of them are still floating around this very site to this day. We didn't change anything, but we had some fun. It felt like a good place to be and sometimes deep in the middle of a drunken production, 36 hours since our last sleep, with headlines blurring into inky swamps in front of our eyes, we felt beautiful and powerful and we felt like we mattered.

And then there was the youth festival, and the collaborative collective that became a day job I still have, there were the dreams of collaborative websites and always, always the chant of "let's start a magazine". And like Nat says, the reality and the mundanity of that too often shattered the dream. First we started a business to start a magazine, and then we forgot the magazine. Then we dreamed another dream, and nobody bar a few brilliant souls, who I hope one day will forgive me for never publishing their work, came along for the ride. Every time one of these things fizzled I felt as though I had failed, and could never quite bring myself to blame the city. There was the Dialogues project, for which there was money and hope, and there we had a great launch and a great party and what I hoped was proof of what we could achieve. In its way, it was -- the achievement was there for those of us who'd sweated and bled on it, and perhaps that's all it was ever meant to be.

As I get older, I find this subtle shift in my idea of what it is to be revolutionary. Once, I imagined a beret and a Molotov and the idea that if you show people a revolution, they will grab it. Now I realise all I have is the things that I do. The things that didn't work, they were never failures. Community is not a grand, sweeping gesture. It's everyday living. It's the things you do and the people you do them with. A city is great not just because it is planned to be great or because we have great graf on our walls but because the air sparks and crackles with possibility. All my adult life, my ideas have run into the brick wall of cynicism that surrounds any sense of ambition in Perth, and usually I've thought "fuck it" and tried anyway. And either not done it, done it and failed and felt like shit, or occasionally, so very occasionally, I've succeeded. I built a business, when people said you couldn't do that here. I've broadcast on radio, when I used to be too shy to speak on the phone. This week, what made me most happy was launching a website for a band that I love and two of my very best friends. I'm broke, but being broke is cool, so that's okay. And the little victories live on. This website seems like a little victory, and occasionally a larger one. It's tiny and insignificant but there's a community, and we may not all get along or even know each other but we share space and ideas grow, mutate and cross-pollinate.

Liz, when you responded to my initial post, you showed a piece of graffiti from an unknown Perth wall as a useful illustration. As you now know, it just so happened that that wall was the wall of my old office, where in another crazy experiment I'd got the staff to make up a sign that said "designated graffiti zone" to see what would happen. It was just coincidence, but there's a sense in which that graffiti was only there because of a sign I'd put up, another of those madcap plans of mine, and I didn't know quite how to respond. I was trying to resign from this place, but damn it if I still don't love this city. It may be small, we may lack hope and dreams beyond leaving, but I've spent half of my life here, and more, I've become an adult here and grown towards my cynical 30s, I've seen the oval of my old high school--where we used to be able to smoke pot with a perfect view of teachers approaching from all angles--razed and turned into apartments. I've seen good people I know die here. Like a real Sandgroper, I've done well in the property market. The great people that have left, they're still great people, just not here. The community is geographically dispersed but you're all still of this place, and when I leave, I will be too. I'll still be scuffing my feet through Northbridge streets, throwing glances at the madmen who've walked the pavement with me every day for a decade. I'll still be drinking cheap pints at the Hydey, and the Grosvenor, and even the Shents. I'll be exploring abandoned buildings in the CBD, and still wondering where all the hidden old cinemas are in the Murray St Mall. I'll be a sentimental old fool who can't get this shithole of a place out of his heart.

I'll still start my magazine. Things are happening. But they are happening with action, now, not dreams. And the action of individuals, not the vague idea of community that I used to put so much faith in. And hopefully they'll happen with all of you guys along for the ride (and Liz, that should not mean don't do your own!). I don't want to say anything more about that until I'm ready, because sometimes what you need is not a manifesto or a dream, but something real and done. One question, though - thinking of a title, will Pictures of Jackson, Monthly get the kids in?

Technorati Tags: perth

Posted by patrick at May 17, 2006 8:17 PM

Comments

Posted by: Liz at May 17, 2006 9:50 PM

Posted by: jackson at May 18, 2006 11:03 AM

Posted by: ruby at May 18, 2006 4:09 PM

Posted by: glenn at May 19, 2006 9:04 AM

Posted by: sean at May 20, 2006 10:29 AM

Posted by: randompanda at June 20, 2006 7:28 PM

Posted by: Patrick Pittman at June 20, 2006 7:36 PM

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