News
25th February 2008Good News! As of today, sections of 'O' are going to be uploaded to Youtube, revver, veoh, Metacafe and Google Video etc on a week-by-week basis.
See the downloads section for links to the videos.
28th March 2007 O2 has been completed and is available on DVD - see it's website, here. It's a very different kettle-of-fish to the 1st 'o' - all my own programming and work, this time around :)
9th October 2004 Back from the Dunedin Fringe festival now. Didn't go too well, more details here.
A speech I was meant to present after the
screenings, but couldn't because
there were too few people for me to
bother-
nevertheless:
*=====================================*
Fact
1. By the time I have finished this speech, 200 people will have died
around
the world from hunger, malnutrition and infectious disease.
Not that it's
a particularly long speech - about five minutes -
Fact 2. is that more
than half of that number will be under the age of five.
So what's causing
this?
A lack of food, a lack of shelter, a lack of hospitals - in other
words, a
lack of resources. Not that there's not enough resources to go
around -
Fact 3. More than half the food produced in the USA goes to
waste without
being eaten.
if the west were to adequately handle it's
food distribution, there would be
more than enough food to be supplied to the
third world, with more left to
spare. Not that I suspect they are interested
in doing so.
The question is, why not.
When a creature
has enough food to survive, what does it do with it's
remaining energy? It
entertains itself. In so many words, it does things
that don't need to be
done, but are nonetheless enjoyable. About 200 years
ago, westerners did not
have an incredible amount of leisure time. Most of
our time was spent
gathering enough resources to survive - and what little
was left over was
immensely valuable.
Now, with the third world shouldering most of the
burden for the gathering
of resources, we as westerners have more than enough
time left on our hands
to enjoy ourselves - are we happier? Of course
not.
Fact 4: Scientists have proven what buddhist have believed for two
thousand
years, that the brain adapts itself to a certain level of pleasure
stimulus
so that it never becomes utterly satisfied. This is what keeps us
from
becoming complacent slobs, and what motivates us to greater things in
life-
But what does this mean, when a society is self-satisfied and
unaware of the
prevaling and appaling conditions overseas? It means an
exponential increase
in the demand for entertainment. This has caused a
massive growth in the
entertainment industry -
Fact 5. The
entertainment industry has been the fastest growing industry in
the past 100
years, bigger than computers or mechanics. The increase in
demand for
entertainment requires that more people, time, effort and
resources be
invested into the production, distribution, cultivation, study
and
advancement of pleasure -
The problem with this is that Entertainment
does not serve a purpose in
itself other than pleasure - occasionally it
informs or enlightens, but
rarely. There is nothing wrong with pleasure, but
it must be measured
against the cost of resources required to create
it-
in our case, the true cost of our entertainment can be examined by
looking
across state lines, down the road, and into the
future.
Across state lines we see millions of people
suffering - not, my nail hurts
suffering, but genuine, 'oh, I'm dead' kind of
suffering - if there was
someone down your street who was in that situation,
chances are you would
probably help them. But because these people are in
another country we
don't,
and we put our spare time and money into
entertainment -
Looking forwards to the future we can see all those
'brand-new' products
that we're so proud of - cd players, dvds, videos, vcrs
and computer - all
of those will be sitting in dumps somewhere. All those
movies you've seen?
Forgotten. That person across the state line? Dead. Due
to our impulse
desire.
So what can you do? We're not all going to
suddenly ditch the playstation,
throw out the computer, park the car, unplug
the phone and devote all our
spare time to helping starving children in
Afghanistan - it's too much of a
divide, too much of an effort, or more
accurately too much of a change in
the level of pleasure our brains are used
to receiving for us to live with
it.
The best changes that we can make
to our lives are gradual ones. These are
the ones which will have the most
effect.
If we make too fast a change in our lives, there is quite a risk
that we
will pass through it like another fad, or rebel against it,
over-indulging
and undoing the good we may have done.
The first
gradual step towards change, that we can make as consumers, is to
change our
attitudes towards entertainment consumption, that is, to look at
what we are
consuming and why-
Are we purchasing out of an impulse desire? Are we
purchasing out of need,
or out of habit - this in particular applies strongly
to consumerist
societies like America which have a track record of obesity
and other kinds
of over-consumption.
The second thing we can do is to
look at where those products we buy come
from - are they reliant on
sweatshops or child labour? Are they made in
countries run
by
dictatorships?
Fact 6. The number of people in the world is
approximately 8 billion. The
number of people living in this world on less
than $2 US dollars a day is 5
billion.
the majority of products you
buy, rely in some way on third world labour for
their
cheapness -
competition between brands creates a drive within a brand to
look at further
ways of cutting costs - eventually these measures will end
up hurting someone
around the world - recently, three of the well-known
computer companies in
the world, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Compaq, were found
guilty of running
factories in third world countries which violated basic
human
rights.
Such as not paying a living wage, forced overtime, and in some
cases, forced
oral contraception for women. These are not uncommon, or even
the worst of,
some of the conditions created by the drive for
cheapness-
the world was shocked in 1997, to learn of the killing of
people of native
Ogoni tribes in their homeland of Nigeria, when they
protested because the
government forced them off their native land, under the
direction of Shell
oil corporation. Brief protests followed, then everyone
promptly forgot all
about it-
Companies like Nike have used forced
labour in dictatorships like Burma, for
years, where torture and rape are
common techniques to keep workers in line.
All so that someone in the west
can buy a nice pair of shoes, so think about
all that, the next time you
reach for the air jordans.
All this information is stuff you can look up
or read about - Naomi Klein's
'No Logo' is an excellent source of summarised
material for this stuff -
yesterday's news but no less crucial for that
fact.
The more information you have, the better and more compassionate
choices you
can make as consumers. What you do can change the world, if
only
incrementally -
The third thing you can do, as a consumer, is to
reduce or refine your usage
of entertainment.
Fact 4: The average
number of plays that a music cd gets in the US is 1.
That means that the
majority of CDs purchased, aren't even sold - the second
greatest number get
listened to once, then put back in the 'collection' and
forgotten. So people
aren't researching what they want to listen to or being
selective - they're
not critiquing and thinking, do I really want this item?
Which is kinda
equivalent to going and buying a chocolate cake when you hate
chocolate -
Impulse spending is effectively gambling, and everyone knows
that when you
gamble, the odds are not typically stacked in your favour. The
house always
wins - so Impulse buying wastes resources, wastes your money
and your
time.
The fourth, and last thing you can do to change your
consumer habits with
regards to entertainment is to reappraise - that is, to
re-appreciate, older
entertainment. It first struck me when I was living with
a collector just
how much good entertainment has been produced over the last
century. And yet
the entertainment industry continues to pump out an
increasing amount of new
films, new computer games, new cds, new dvds - all
to satisfy the public's
desire for new and different things, even if they're
only slightly different
every time-
the desire exists because people
are unaware of how much entertainment
already exists - there are hundreds of
great old films, some of which have
dated in a humourous way, some of which
are just as relevant today as they
were back then - there are screeds of
records, any style you can think of,
but marketing has the upper hand, and
through the mediums of television,
radio and newspapers you could almost
believe that no film existed bar the
ones made in the past year or so, as so
little media attention gets paid to
them.
To put it
mildly, there is a massive amount of resources being wasted all
around the
world because people are unaware of stuff already in existence.
It was a
desire to reappraise some of this older footage that led to the
making of
'o'. 'o' exists because this beautiful footage exists, but nobody
has seen it
-
I thought I'd take the best of what I could find and bring it out for
people
to enjoy-
thereby not wasting resources, but also informing
people of how much stuff
is out there, if only someone will take a
look..
So - reading, reducing, refining and reappraising are the four
keywords I
use to form a concept I call 'entertainment ecology'-
which
can be loosely defined as the reduction of the amount of overall
energy that
we as individuals invest into the entertainment industry, so
that the
remaining energy can be distributed more compassionately. I.e
Towards worthy
causes or people's personal or socially-conscious dreams.
Don't get me
wrong - everybody loves new things, exciting things and cheap
things- but
looking at the world around you, on a case-to-case basis,
deciding whether
what you want is really what you want, and whether it has
any consequences,
beyond the purchase itself.
(pause)
There is one last phase in
entertainment ecology - and that is
relinquishment - simply put, to give up
whatever hold entertainment has over
you, and to entertain ourselves when we
want entertainment, rather than just
out of a habitual fix. Relinquishment
means getting out from in front of the
tv set, the home, the cinema, the bar
or clothing store - going out and
looking at the stars, or a tree or your
children. Give this exercise at
least five minutes- the amount of time it
took me to read this out to you -
and if you don't see any results then you
get your money back - which is
easy to do since it doesn't cost you anything
- but, you might surprise
yourself and actually enjoy it, despite the lack of
financial investment.
Ganghi said, "Whenever you are in doubt, recall the
face of the poorest and
weakest person you may have seen, and ask yourself if
the step you
contemplate is going to be of any help to them." - let that be
your guiding
light as you leave.
Thanks for listening to a young man
ramble on-
Good night.
*==============*
4th August 2004 - Uploads working.
28th July 2004 - This site is online!!
18th June 2004 - 'o' is performed at the Meteor Theatre, Hamilton, for the Hamilton Fringe Festival.
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