The business of politics

Gerry Harvey: "D'oh, they're buying it cheaper online!"

I’m a total online shopping junkie. Evidence of this is that I now have a credit card dedicated to overseas transactions because it offers the best exchange rate with the lowest fees (i.e. none). You can guess then, where my loyalties lie in the recent debate about applying GST to importing goods below the existing $1,000 threshold for overseas purchases, and why I hold retail windbags such as Gerry Harvey (of Harvey Norman) in very low esteem right now.

Businesses of late seem to be intruding further and further into the area of law. The Mining industry did it with great success in the lead-up to the 2010 Federal Election, forcing the hand of the Labor government to abolish their plans for a Resource Super Profits Tax with a $17 million advertising campaign that ostensibly led to the shock upset of Kevin Rudd being deposed from the leadership by Julia Gillard. This is in spite of many, if not the majority, of economists and academics declaring it to be sound.

And now the Retail industry is hoping for similar results with a campaign of their own.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, had this to say about the subject:

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

(From The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith)

One such deception is in the very high cost of certain goods in Australia. Savvy shoppers have realised that it is sometimes cheaper to import an Australian made product from the US or UK than to buy it locally, and the difference is much greater than just knocking off the 10% GST – even including the cost of having shipped the product there and back again. I have yet to see a single compelling argument that doesn’t regard naked greed, or gross inefficiencies in the supply chain, as sacrosanct.

There are many reasons why we absolutely must ignore the stink being kicked up by the Retail industry, but most important is not allowing big businesses to dictate to government the laws that the rest of us live by.

Basic Drawing Skills

I usually try to find a picture to accompany the poems that I write, partly to make my blog look less dry and partly because it’s a helpful visual shorthand for understanding the message or mood that I’m trying to convey. For my most recent poem, The City, I was unable to find anything that I was happy with. In my mind I had wanted to find either a picture of a city in the distance with a skyline that vaguely resembled a woman’s curves, or else a picture of a woman in the far distance.

As hard as it might be to believe, the figures in this image are comprised only of 2 colours of pixels

Failing miserably, I decided to make an attempt at drawing my own. Now this thought didn’t exactly appear out of nowhere – I’ve been doing a “Basic Drawing Skills” class through Macquarie Uni for several weeks. I did a few sketches and decided that “woman in the distance” was going to be a lot more viable, and started to draw little tiny women silhouettes. I’ve always been impacted by the figures in this image – titled “Crosses at Golgotha” and by an unknown artist, which appeared in an article on computer drawing in an old computer magazine – and attempted to achieve a similar effect with a very, very sharp pencil:

Various attempts at drawing "the perfect woman"

The buildings in the background was a serendipitous discovery rather than a skill that I learned. While trying to quickly mock up a city I discovered that a pencil turned on its side actually does a passable job of rendering rectangular shapes.

Unfortunately, the sky didn’t turn out too well as my ham-fisted shading skills ruined my attempt at a cloudy haze around a full moon.

If you haven’t already, you can see the final result here.

But wait, there’s more! Sorry I got sidetracked – my original intention for this post was to write about the course, so getting to the point, finally…

Gaining perspective
The first session of the 8-week course dealt with perspective. The guy teaching the course gave instructions on what to draw, and we the students drew. There was no explanation or theory about what we were drawing, and it didn’t take very long to discover that maybe this course was a little too basic. Oh well, money’s been paid. Might as well get in some practice and see what I can milk out of it.

(Apologies for the darkness of the pictures. They’re all A3 size so I couldn’t scan them, and the course wasn’t Basic Photography Skills…)

1-point perspective - bird's eye view

1-point perspective - worm's eye view

2-point perspective

Drawing an actual object in 2-point perpsective. Flames due to boredom.

3-point perspective

One of the classroom stool in 2-point perspective

Most of the time I was just making things up rather than drawing what I was seeing

Cylinders in perspective

Cylindrical objects

Combining rectangles and cylinders

Trying not to be negative
The following sessions basically amounted to being shown increasingly difficult objects and being told to draw them with only the merest wisp of instruction. The second session was about negative space, where we were told to observe the gaps between objects.

Meanwhile, perspective's gone right out the window

Tree trees are dirty tree
One reassuring thing at least, was that the teacher was actually competent. Every scribble that proceeded from his pencil actually looked pretty good.

He drew the one on the left, and the ones on the right were my first attempts

Slowly getting better, a bit more tree-like

What you don't see here is my original attempt at a palm tree. The difference between what I thought palm trees look like in my mind, and what they actually look like in real life, varied greatly

First attempt at a landscape. My terrible shading skills makes it look more like beach nightmare than tropical paradise

Animal instinct
Things got a bit easier once we got to animals. Learning to break animals down into their constituent shapes was truly helpful. It’s a shame that I don’t have the original pictures to show you, so that you can see what we were drawing from.

Some kind of cat

A tapir busting to go to the loo

A sloth (or something) holding onto an invisible tree branch

Various other creatures at the mercy of my 2B pencil

A shade too sketchy
As I mentioned before I found shading to be the hardest. Converting a full colour picture into black and white inside your head, and then trying to render the comparative colours using shades of pencil is an really tough!

It's supposedly trivial to get 10 distinct shades out of a 2B pencil. Oh, and I suck at drawing bananas

The subject suddenly changed from shading to sketching without any warning

I'm really proud of that ship, the rest not so much

Maybe the teacher got bored, 'coz we started drawing random stuff like shoes - the top one was drawn from memory, and the bottom one was the shoe I was wearing

... and back to shading again. I found the pineapples are surprisingly easy to draw

The same again from the reverse angle because the teacher thought my first attempt wasn't ambitious enough because it was so small. But AHA! I have finally conquered the banana

Drawing cloth is essentially an epic difficulty of shading, which is why the teacher just plonked a cloth on the table and said "here, now draw this". He probably tortures kittens in his spare time

As if the last one wasn't difficult enough, the next task was to draw *translucent* cloth. Sadly, this was also as close as we were going to get to drawing a naked woman :-(

Character building
The next sessions concerned people – how to draw faces and bodies. This was the most interesting because for the first time the teacher actually spent a decent amount of time talking about the things that we should be looking out for, such as proportions, anatomy, etc.

Guess who the guy on the right's supposed to be. Clue: he's an actor...

The freaky looking face on the left is supposed to be a gorgeous woman from a beauty ad. Makeup confuses me. The other scary looking lady is from a '60s record cover

Faces in profile. The proportions weren't going according to plan

Another famous face. Uh huh.

… and then we were back to drawing random stuff again. No idea what lesson we were supposed to be learning from these. Maybe it was just practice for the sake of practice.

First drawn with the left hand (left) and then properly with the right hand (right). Point? No idea

The scissors again, this time drawn with my eyes closed. And coloured pencils with completely random shading to indicate colour, and not at all true to life

Random tools. I just couldn't get the shape of that spade, and the perspective is still just as wonky as that earlier attempt with the cup, book, bottle, etc.

The plane by itself, and "drawing" with the eraser

Random light on dark vs dark on light

My final body of work
The class started off with myself and about 6 others. The rest were probably in their early 40’s onwards. We never really hit it off because there was no introductions or ice breaker – we just sat down and started drawing the minute we walked into the classroom.

The last lesson was attended by only one other lady and myself. Tragic, ‘coz that was the most interesting lesson – drawing bodies:

We drew people from womens' magazines. Like animals, it's all just shapes

On the left is Hugh Jackman and son; on the right a scene from Transformers

Drawing hands in detail. Doesn't really beat the old "trace around" method though :-)

My piece-de-resistance. Hawt. Didn't get to finish 'coz we ran out of time, but she would've been a masterpiece to rival the Mona Lisa, I tells ya!

You decide: was that was worth $160?

The City

Here’s the other poem that I mentioned before. The reason why it took so long is because I couldn’t find an image that I was happy with. In the end I drew one myself. Shame the scan’s a bit shabby though.

Gaze upon yon city, said the husband to his wife
See her marvellous spires, her luscious gardens!
I long to soar in the joys of her festivals!
I want to dance in her streets!
I desire to know her mind!
Gaze upon yon city and rejoice!
For it will soon be mine, and I will call her home

Gaze upon yon city, said the wife to her husband
See her mounds of waste, her fetid sewers!
Have you plumbed the depths of her sorrows?
Have you fought in her streets?
Can you trust her heart?
Gaze upon yon city and despair!
For it will never be yours, and you will never call her home

My brain’s too full (again)

It’s a sentiment that I’ve probably expressed before, but I feel as if my brain has too much stuff in it. Sometimes – like tonight – when I emerge from the cinema after a particularly stimulating movie it’s like my brain is on the verge of exploding. Friends and family might interject by saying that this is because I spend all day and night ingesting information from the Internet – which is true – but the difference is that everything on the Internet is already already cooked well-done, and partially digested, even.

A heavy diet of this “junk information” has completely ruined me for anything even remotely intellectually challenging. I make 2 passes at a crossword before deciding that I won’t get any more clues out; I only read as a distraction to pass the time while doing unavoidable business; and I absolutely can’t stand television.

The whole point of TV is to enslave – keep you watching, book you into a timeslot where they sell you ads by demographic, drip-feed you stories one 45-minute piece at a time. Who has time for that? You only need to know the key memes, or the right buttons to push, to get other people to volunteer lots of information which you then pick apart discussion-forum style:

• Big Bang Theory/The IT Crowd: my real life, except people laugh at the jokes.
• Modern Family/3 and a Half Men/How I Met Your Mother: oh, that’s the one with that… guy… from y’know… and the hot chicks, right?
• Sex and the city / Desperate Housewives: 4 vaginas in various states of decay, wrapped in designer clothes and acting like cunts.
• Law / medical dramas: (s)he slept with who?!
• Crime shows: the answer is… science!

Instead I’ve imprisoned myself in a virtual jail of my own design. Instead of zoning out in front of the TV every night like a normal couple, I’m leashed to the computer: checking Facebook, ensuring that I’m not missing any offers on OzBargain, seeing if anybody has replied to my forum posts, flogging myself to write the next GeekReads or THRIFTerrific blog post, etc.

Fortunately, Jenny suffers no such problem. She’ll happily while away the time watching (or rewatching) her favourite TV shows and movies while I’m here in front of the computer Googling to see if the correct expression is “while away the time” or “wile away the time”.

I think writing is my catharsis, purging my mind of the thoughts that build up like the pile of rubbish being delivered by never-ending stream of garbage trucks. A rare moment of output instead of input, a verbal overflow. But considering the above, it makes me wonder what kind of writer I’d be if I wasn’t constantly filling my mind with other peoples’ ideas. Am I really creative, or am I simply processing information like a worm turning food scraps into vermicast*?

Do I have a point? No, not really. I’m just rambling to relieve the pressure (and to avoid writing what I “should” be writing, which is a review of The Social Network for GeekReads). By the way, I apologise if anybody is offended at my using the word “cunt”, although you shouldn’t be surprised.

OK, I think I feel a little better now. Thanks for listening.

—-

* This analogy will probably make more sense once I get around to finishing my “worm farming” post on THRIFTerrific.

Jack

I’ve been sitting on a couple of poems while I worked through my travel posts. Here’s the first one, called simply Jack:

I’m a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none
Many trades I have learned, many deeds have I done
I can fiddle the fiddle and cobble a shoe
Anything you think of I likely can do

I’m a real Mr. Fix-It, always down on my knees
I can help with your plumbing, even speak some Chinese
In need of a favour? You just have to ask
I’m ready and willing to perform every task

I’m the salt of the earth, can I give you a hand?
I don’t want your money, do you not understand?
I toil and I strive and exist just to please
I take all your troubles and give back only ease

I know you have problems, I know you’re in need
I insist that you tell me, do not make me plead
No do not deny me, you must not withhold
I’ll not let you keep me out here in the cold

I’ll do it, I’ll show you, believe me it’s true
When everything’s done there’ll be nothing askew
This cut? Ah it’s nothing, a bandage is fine
A risk in my business, occurs all the time

So what if it doesn’t look much like the picture
They use funny lighting to fool and to trick ye
I followed the manual right down to the letter
I don’t think that you could’ve done any better

It might not be perfect, I gave it my best
It’s not all that crooked, please don’t get depressed
I really am sorry, but when all’s said and done
I’m a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none