Category Archives: Lehan Winifred Ramsay

OccuPod, OccuPad, OccuPhone.

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 42 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Lane

Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Most of those people who would go to an Occupy Wall Street protest do not have stocks and bonds and huge investments. I don’t think we need to occupy Wall Street. If it’s change we want, I think we need to occupy Apple.

Steve Jobs is gone. I love my apple computer. I love my ipod. I heard that someone bought their son an ipod and then had to buy them a computer to make it work. It really never occurred to me that I needed a computer in order to drive my ipod, because I already had the computer. But I’d have bought it anyway because I like them all. I like the way they look, like the way they feel, and to be honest I like the way they invest you with ignorance about the internal organs of the things. A friend of mine just made a computer, he said it wasn’t difficult, you just work out the things you need and put them together.

No Mac user ever has to be bothered with building their own. You will never need a garage for your mac. At most you will need one white cable that connects your mac to something else. You might be able to borrow that from one of your friends, but it’s good to have your own. It’ll make you feel a little less powerless if something goes wrong.

I think that some of the grumbling is right. Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street Sub Slogan should be GIVE UP YOUR MAC. Give up your ipod. Give up your iphone. Give up your Solar power unit. Give up your external water drive. Sorry, tank. And your speakers. Sorry, sprinklers. Are we really going to admit that we have bought into the habits of the wealthy 1 percent and stand to lose our quiet bystander status by standing up to ourselves?
I want to know why we are selling power generated by solar panels to the electricity companies. Do they really want to buy it? Aren’t they actually in the business of selling electricity? Isn’t there by now some way that we can sort and bundle all the power of our block?

I want to know why turning off lights and unplugging devices has gone out of fashion.

Couldn’t we start a QUIT POKING campaign to get people not to plug in so many things? Shame everyone into giving up the white cables? I want to know why blackouts have gone out of fashion. I want to know why we all blame Kevin and Julia for not finishing the insulation. I want to know why we are such careless people. But I guess I do know.

This problem is so much bigger than we can manage. Even if we do something, chances are the Chinese and Indians and all the other baddies-du-jour will just use up more, and we likely will only achieve a balance. With us getting a little less and them getting a little more. And actually we don’t care to give things up just to share.
If nothing else we could turn around and look at one particular system and its efforts to become energy efficient and thoughtful about their use of the world’s resources. Apple.

Apple is very cutting edge, and in the eulogies for Steve Jobs we heard that Apple products have been designed some years in advance. What is the Future as Apple sees it. And more importantly, is that future changeable? If we, Apple’s Loving Masses, feel that we need to change, become a little more technologically simplified, does Apple have the flexibility to respond, as it always has, with new product?

Are we still going to be following Steve Jobs, is I guess my question. And we have followed him, through expensive bulky packaging and cables that redesign for each product, and recalls that go by word-of-blog. But we should have got the hang of this beauty thing, this design thing, we should just get it by now. We don’t need to be taught any more, and anyway there isn’t a great IT design guru to teach us. We should get it. What is necessary, what isn’t, what constitutes great design as useability and function and what constitutes great design as line shape and colour. And where the vision of the future is, where you can see the next product peeping out. In fact, we should be ready to design our own.

I loved Steve too. And I spent a lot of time reading stuff and watching stuff and thinking stuff, I wanted to learn from him even if I couldn’t meet him in person. Now I think I’m nearly ready to give him up. I went back to the 1984 Apple advertisment, and I watched it until I understood that it was the kind of lame preppy boy dream of a lecture room full of bored computer engineers fantasising about the babe out the window practicing for the sports festival. Would Apple, if we were to ask them, if we were to occupy their thoughts, make for us a new story, a new narrative, in which we were all liberated from Big Business?

I love my computer, but I do not love my own stupidity. Sure I can simply upload from one computer to the next, never having to start again from scratch, and although the computers have been designed to do this, the cost of having your computer fixed often more than purchasing a new one and sucking the brain of the old one – Apple doesn’t really recommend it.

I find Apple to be a great company, I have many positive experiences with both it and its products. I always wonder about organisations that are difficult to criticize, and so when I find one I examine it. I am old enough to have tried to learn some computer programming at school, without the computer, and to have found it unfathomable and discouraging. I am old enough to have studied Typing at school, and to have avoided shorthand. So it could be that my attachment to Apple is gratitude, for sparing me a lot of discomfort. For not having to be ready to pull the computer apart when it didn’t turn on, but to have to rely on a professional.

Most of those people who would go to an Occupy Wall Street protest do not have stocks and bonds and huge investments. I don’t think we need to occupy Wall Street. If it’s change we want, I think we need to occupy Apple.

ARTISTS! Join Up!

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 37 Comments

Tags

, ,

Rainy Day

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I read about a man, an arts administrator, who used to go to art colleges and tell the art students: join the police, join the army, join the public service, because you might change something there. He didn’t mean that art didn’t change things, though it so often fails to. He meant that an artist joining the ranks of the police, the ranks of the army or public sector might make a difference to that institution.

I’ve always thought that was very clever, since I read it wherever I read it. There is something about the way artists think that could be so useful in places like that. Artists think that their souls will be destroyed by going into them, but I think there is nothing like an unappreciated life’s work for soul destruction. The arts don’t have highly paid jobs. A good job in the arts is actually not the arts at all, it’s management, and one of those isn’t going to give you a particularly good wage.

I guess you might say what’s the difference, taking a job in the police force or taking a job as an arts manager. Certainly, if the arts management job allowed you to use your unorthodox thinking skills to make new ideas bloom, that would be good too. But arts management jobs are kind of conservative. I don’t know for sure but I think the police force might be a little more radical than that.

Artists do go into interesting jobs. Usually though they go into them as artists, with one eye on an exhibition. Or they go into them as side-jobs, to provide enough money for art production. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about taking hold of that talent you have for thinking about things in a different way; whether unsentimental, or without having to have a positive outcome, or looking into the guts of the thing, or thinking about whether the world really needs it. Taking hold of that kind of thinking, and giving yourself body and soul to a new way of using it.

I think that artists are a bit passive. That is, despite the tendency to flamboyancy or obsessiveness, despite the showmanship, artists are often a bit separate, a bit introspective, a bit outsider. Not really keen on being pushed around, and not keen on being singled out for odd behaviour. Perhaps that passivity is learned, as being different is a hard thing for a kid. Whatever it is, it manifests itself in odd ways, and one of those ways is in avoiding things that they will find difficult. Going into a job in the police force would be difficult. And that’s a good reason not to do it. But think. All the artists we’ve known who’ve had extraordinary talents to make things happen, to bring about change, to transform the way people think. Imagine what they could have managed had they set their minds to changing the police force. That’s why I agree with the man who first wrote about it, whose name I no longer remember from a book I no longer have.

Creative people, if you take a look around their living spaces, often have great practical ideas for ways to improve things. Once their told that they are impractical that idea seems to stay with them – still, a lot of creative people take on practical jobs to support themselves. And that’s great, but it’s not what I mean. I wish more artists would decide to take on an institution, an organisation, a corporation. Not to challenge it. But to make it better.

Maybe it just seems like a waste of time? To spend years of your life doing what ordinary people do, take an ordinary job. But really, no job with you in it would be ordinary. Not if you really cared about it. What’s happening now, with the arts, is that a lot of people spend their time making art objects, art installations, art events, as if that’s going to really make some huge transformation in people’s lives, and it doesn’t. There is so much of it around, so many people solving this output problem in just the same way, that people don’t really take a lot of notice.

Art doesn’t have a new kind of value that it didn’t have in the past. Maybe it has less value, because more people do it and more people own it. But it doesn’t have more value. And art isn’t seen as having a world-changing effect. There is no Nobel Prize for art, though there is for Literature, which could be a part of art.

Join up. Join the police force. I often wonder what this country would be like with a leader who was a trained artist. More than a woman, more than Labour or Liberal, that leader being an artist would make a fundamental difference. Not a flamboyant difference, because the system is in place and that system would rein in flamboyancy. It wouldn’t be Australia Council Funding for All, a Museum in every Shopping Centre. It wouldn’t be like that at all. But I have no idea what it would be, because as far as I know it hasn’t happened. Apparently Hitler was a “failed” artist. Does that account for his overwhelming popularity as a leader? Or for his excess.

I wish that more artists would think: I want to contribute, and this is not the best way to do so. Because I think it isn’t. Being an artist, being creative is not something that puts you on the path toward great leadership and great mentorship. It’s just not. I think we must be doing something wrong, I really do. And although I find immense value in having been an artist throughout my life, I also regret, a little, the things that the role of artist have influenced me not to do. I thought I would be able to do more. And I am hoping that someone one day does. So that more artists join the police force.

The Days when America was Everywhere

20 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Europe 09

Image and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I can tell you where I was on 9/11, 2001. I was in front of the television. Most people were, I think. This 9/11 I made a special effort to stay away from the television. When is television going to learn from the other media, as we have, that its grip on our minds and hearts is no longer a given?

It was a big thing, it’s true. A lot of people died, and it was all captured on film. It’s not like a hundred years ago, when something like that happening would have filled columns on the front page of the newspaper, a day or two after it’s happening. And then ten years later, a mention of the memorial service, crowds, rousing speeches. Yes, a lot of things happened over this ten years. Nothing that looked as alluring on television though.

Photogenic, is what they call it. Somehow the person or non-person looks even better on film than they do in real life. We surely can’t say that our overwhelming attention on this scene, on this story, is just our obsession with ourselves, with our small part of the world.

No, there is something alluring about this story.

A lot of it looks like a movie. A lot like the kind of special effects that come out of America. And it is a bit ironic, because it’s very rare that such effects come out of a real life drama. Real life dramas are usually a bit more prosaic. Like – too much smoke, or too far in the distance to be able to get any detail. Had the day been cloudy, for example, much of the startling sharpness of the documentation would have been lost.

Then there is poignancy to the fact that the missiles had voices. The bullets huge airplanes filled with ordinary people going about their lives. With mobile phones. The buildings filled with people filling in the details of what happened. It’s no wonder that the names of the people who died have been put down in so many dimensions, when the dimension of Who was Where When with Who was added. Because we know.

And then – the missiles were us. Turning our planes on ourselves. Like taking the hand of a child and making him hit himself. A double insult. I say us because it was both America’s tragedy, only America’s – but somehow it also was not someone else’s tragedy. It was our tragedy.

How?  How was it our tragedy?  Perhaps it was simply because we were saturated with it.

We watched it, and watched it, for months, and now when we look at the tenth anniversary of it, what we are seeing and reliving are those months of our lives when that is what we did. We are commemorating the experience of seeing it on television.

Perhaps it was a moment – the moment, of a new kind of connection for us. One where the smallest and largest grids were in place, the tiniest personal gesture with the hugest intention, where it all came together to give us the most detailed and massive depiction of damage that we had ever seen. Perhaps the perpetrators would be embarrassed to realize that they gave us the Greatest Show on Earth, and that it was from America. And perhaps it was ironic that television had been “internationalized” by the wars of Kuwait and Iraq. Access to cable television, CNN, and satellite had been in part pushed along by those wars. So too perhaps was our tolerance to endless depictions of damage.

We all remember 9/11 because we were there. We were in our living rooms, our offices, in front of screens, there. Ten years on we can still remember it clearly as we place ourselves back in front of screens, there. How could we forget the day our television opened up and spat out such a vision to us. Like the first real 3D movie, not an imagined space but a collective one; our first truly Sensurround experience.

As for the rest of us, those who were not America, perhaps we had never before realized how big America was. And it was huge. Far bigger than the biggest flat-screen. Far bigger than the biggest network. It was everywhere. It was in every lounge room, in the corner of every restaurant, in a window of every village. I don’t believe that there was any place that did not know America in those days, in those early 2001 days. Perhaps we will never again know an America as big as that. Myself, I saw America in a foreign land, and I saw it whilst waving goodbye my holiday plans in the days after, not knowing how far the dust of this America would be traveling.

Do you remember? How America was everywhere? Do you remember, that we held our breath, wondering what America was going to do, wondering if we should look away, seeing the handprint of America’s own hand upon its cheek? Do you remember how you tried to go about your business but just couldn’t? Had to have another look, and another, and another? And how kind the television was, not scolding you for that, but just nicely replaying it again, just one more time, just one more time. It’s really no wonder we feel so nostalgic about it, those were generous days. These days we must sit through many more interviews in between replays. When they come they seem too short to give us that breathless feeling. Perhaps at some time in the future that will be considered voyeurism, we will no longer be free to gaze. Those of us who were there, those of us will never forget the indulgence of those early days.

It has been ten years. The America has had its revenge, ten years of it, and we have watched some of it, most of the time. I wonder if we have been satisfied. I wonder how things have gone.

Heavens Legs

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Heavens Legs

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Heavens Legs are sleeping in the sunshine under a dark rock warm and humid. We all wish we could be there, we all want to be hibernating. If you venture out the kookaburra will get you, and no amount of tickling that fine beak will make him let you go. Squish, and squish, until those sturdy legs are no longer moving in fine sequence. Imagine the feeling of Heavens Legs across your bare stomach as you sit on the floor looking out into the dark night, and that’s how it feels in the kookaburra’s mouth right now. Heavens legs ruffles the feathers on Kookaburra’s cheeks. Snap! goes Kookaburra, and legs fly over the yard.

W+anchor & Skuttlebutt

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay, Politics in the Pig's Arms

≈ 116 Comments

Tags

W+anchor & Skuttlebutt

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

It surprises me sometimes, how emotionally sticky Australians are. But then it surprises me how deeply tolerant we are. Still we haven’t thrown W+anchor and Skuttlebutt overboard and they’ve been deeply irritating of late. W+anchor! Stop goading your sister! ENOUGH of Nauru. One more n-word from you and you’ll be put in goal.

There’s a particular wisdom that all parents should know. Never get caught out making a threat that you don’t intend to follow through. Never say NO if you’re not completely sure of what you would do if it didn’t work. Never do that, not even once. Now Skuttlebutt’s gone and done it. It’s hard to know what terrible consequence this is going to have, but we do know one thing, now that the high court has said NO, and Skuttlebutt has only become disappointed, very disappointed with you….to say in return, we know that things are going to be very different along our coastlines. My guess is, backpacking’s got tenure.

It would probably surprise a lot of Australians to learn that there are countries, even quite close to our own, where wanting to go to Australia is not considered illegal. Where finding a boat and catching a boat to Australia is not unlike the experiences of many Australians of catching a bus loaded with dead fish and live chickens through the mountains. It’s a bit risky, it’s uncomfortable, but then again it’s something to tell your family about.

Sometimes local transportation is just like that. But it’s cheaper.

If I were looking for a start-up business right now, I’d be off to one of those countries right now. I would find a nice building and open a chinese restaurant. Near the water. With a little guesthouse out the back. W+anchor and Skuttlebutt. At your service.

T.A.P.

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

,

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

My mouse is dying, it falls off at the edges. The track is weak, my fingers can move the curse but not make it change anything. I need a new mouse. I order one on the friday and it rings the doorbell on Monday, Mourning. In between I TAP TAP TAP with my thumb, and by the Sunday C5 and 6 are crackling against my pillow. Racing down my arm and back up, I feel like a broken collarbone. The new mouse has a little button on it, up and down so smoothly. If C5 and 6 can speak to my thumb, it seems, my thumb can reply.

Louting and Writing

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay, Politics in the Pig's Arms

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

, ,

Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I think that we should not place too much emphasis on the underlying motives and motivations for rioting and looting. Once it gets big enough it’s no longer individual rage. It’s spectacle. Spectacle every bit as large and sumptuous as the royal weddings. Of which there was one only last week. Wasn’t there? People love spectacle, and now with our social media we can all be part of them, whenever the and wherever the bigger all-present Media should point our attention.
People think that there can’t be any connection between a riot and a wedding. Especially if they’re not happening at the same time. But there is, people are glued to the television screen, it’s very big, very grand. The fact is, we can’t really get excited and make large pronouncements about natural phenomenon so well. But we can get excited about people tying knots and making their desires so public.
I don’t know what you thought, but I liked the brooms, I thought they were a very nice touch. I was really looking forward to the waves of looters, waves of brooms, waves of looters. Then I read that the brooms were a media construct, and I was disappointed. The waves of looters, they were the real thing, and then those brooms, they weren’t. And there I was, foolishly, imagining that they had all been doing their thing imagining themselves to be on camera.
Off-camera, I guess it might have been a little different. The problem is, there isn’t really any such thing as off-camera any more, if you’re English. All public space and much of the private space is now on camera. What that means is that as soon as there’s a hint of trouble on the streets, anything coming after that, anyone shown anywhere, are as good as there. Any youth not wanting to get his or her face on Television this week really had to cover up with anything they could. And anyone with anything on their face was, we all know, a looter.
Not a few months ago people with something stuck on their heads were called ever-so-fortunate, and were assumed to be guests of the Royal Wedding. Can we say that the prevalence of headwear at this riot is some kind of response to the tendencies of the British upper classes to dress up their heads? Maybe, probably. Perhaps the hoodie phenomena speaks to us of the facelessness of the riot monster creature, it’s headless-but-many-eyed, limbless-but-many-armed organic/robotic octopus-like presence.
Young people like social media spectacles because they can be part of something bigger than themselves. They let go of themselves and become part of the event, the machine, and if the machine tells them to loot, to light fires, to perform, that’s what they do. It’s a performance. Performance is no longer confined to the defined and delineated event. If you are connected, then in some way your mobile phone will hear of it and will call you. You do not need to make a decision to opt in. You are called. Your presence is sought. Your participation is assumed.
We’ve all no doubt gone through some kind of trying ordeal. Gotten to the end of it exhausted and confused; confused because we could not say why we would have done such a thing, such an ultimately unprofitable thing. We couldn’t see the enormity of it before we started, and by the time we did, it was too late. I’m sure a lot of people who participated in the events of London.
But what of those who wanted a riot, went into a riot, deliberately chose to riot. Most times a riot gets put down before it really gets to the size that it can be called a riot. Perhaps we can say that in this day and age, there is only a riot where there is a television camera. And yet, generally where there is a television camera there is also police, confrontation, conflagration, and the violence is usually put out before it can escalate. Perhaps this is a case in which the predictable chain of events did not happen. Social media getting ahead of Big Media, changing the conditions. Or maybe not the Medias at all, but the players. The performers.
The Police changing their strategies. Instead of jumping in, they were directed to stand back. This spectacle changes the rules. Instead of the performance we find it was the audition. The real performance will be the next one.
What’s it going to be, the next one? While all the aristocracy of the olympiad strut their wedding finery on the field will the surrounding suburbs be holding the torch? It’s clear that many young Londoners are looking for an excuse to party. And who could blame them. They watch their Greek compatriots, the Egyptians, the Libyans, and they have some real passion in their performance. England is neither too sheltered nor too miserable for comfort. Just irritated. A year to go to the Olympics, a lot of potential partiers have just gotten their wrists slapped and their mugshots snapped.
I too was a bit shocked to hear that ballet dancers, young ambassadors, school children had been involved in the looting. Usually we just call them youths, or unemployed, or black. Even our troubles are becoming gentrified. But then, ballet dancers have been outed by Bigger Media. Hollywood Herself. As has the U.N., and therefore anything ambassador.
We’re all going to seem quite old-fashioned if we don’t start gearing up for local riots. Clearly they are where the news is. Where the eye is. Not long before brands start popping up deliberately in the flames, not just the luck of the draw. Photographers breaking windows so they can set their models on fire, what a nice piece of editorial that would be. Designers wishing and praying that theirs will be the next target. Before long we’ll all be out hitting the shops. Getting a little of that cachet.

Ecology, Tenderly

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

,

Ecology, tenderly

Painting and Story by Winifred Ramsay

I saw two rainbow lorikeets in the tree at the top of the yard. This tree had hard brown pods, and one had opened. They were both standing on the branch next to the pod. One of them would reach into the pod and pull out the seed. It was a flat round seed encased in a piece of translucent paper-like material.  The lorikeet would give the seed to the other lorikeet, who would nibble at it and then let it go, and it would float down like a large snowflake through the yard. Then it would take one for itself, then it would give another one to its mate. They did that until the pod was empty. What a lovely partnership, I thought. Ecology, tenderly.