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Jan. 24th, 2005
culture shock
Jan. 24th, 2005 10:46 pmI'm using my roommate's laptop to update because I can't be arsed to change the net.conection. She says my voice sounds different, I wonder if anyone else will notice.
The culture shock is horrific. And while this trip was the first time I cried leaving a place that didn't involve a lover (ah, wouldn't we all be happier if any of that were less understandable), that didn't disturb me so much as crying as we came into New York. We flew over Manhattan, which I don't think I've ever done at night and then turned around over the ocean and the ships were such small and lonely stars, not at all like like my now far away science fiction city and all its status games of sails.
New York is the greatest city in the world, on the edge of its most confounding nation and that duality makes me very sad, because ultimately no one is happy with it. During my last days at NIDA people asked about the WTC thing a lot, because they were running out of time, and what surprised me is how much there was to say and how little they knew but also how close they feel to us emotionally. Australia is so far from the rest of the world it confounds, as did the day I sat in the courtyard having to explain to kids who were working on Angels in America what that period of time was like in NYC and how AIDS is transmitted.
I've mentioned before, in passing, that Australia or perhaps just Sydney has this typographic fixation, that a huge chunk of the clothes are not adorned with logos so much as art made from words, that people asked me over and over if I took a photo of the Coca-Cola sign in the Cross (ultimately, I didn't). It's perhaps the thing that makes Australia most different from anywhere I've ever been, and moves me the most significantly. A culture relies on text-based art at different stages of its development and usually only for brief intervals -- when it is young because it has yet to develop any consistent visual iconography of its own; when it comes into its own as it announces itself to the world; and as it feels overwhelmed by information and the world outside itself. Australia does all three of these things at once, constantly and consistantly, and people wear shirts decorated with random phrases and snatches of poetry, slogans that have meaning there and ultimately deconstructed and destroyed text which seems to be decaying its way across art and men's shirts everywhere. Aobriginal art on the other hand is all visual -- it is not text as you or I understand it, but all aboriginal art tells a story, and if you understand the images you can decode the story of the art. To watch non-Aboriginal Australia grapple with its racist past and its current trend to be obsessive and patronizing towards the aboriginals (at least amongst well meaning arts professionals I dealt with down there) and to watch everyone seemingly not notice these mirror worlds of informative design fascinated me constantly. As did the Coke sign at the top of the cross, which wasn't anything but the usual sign, except all the times that it whispered, typography too is an act of prayer.
So our money looks funny, sales tax is freaking me out and the cars come from the wrong way. And while the smell of New York in snow will always feel like home and I worked hard to feel the relief of being in my city, the one the rest of the world believes is an embodiment of the 20th century, but I know damn well is more a legacy of the 19th, mostly all I can feel is that I don't really belong here anymore.
The culture shock is horrific. And while this trip was the first time I cried leaving a place that didn't involve a lover (ah, wouldn't we all be happier if any of that were less understandable), that didn't disturb me so much as crying as we came into New York. We flew over Manhattan, which I don't think I've ever done at night and then turned around over the ocean and the ships were such small and lonely stars, not at all like like my now far away science fiction city and all its status games of sails.
New York is the greatest city in the world, on the edge of its most confounding nation and that duality makes me very sad, because ultimately no one is happy with it. During my last days at NIDA people asked about the WTC thing a lot, because they were running out of time, and what surprised me is how much there was to say and how little they knew but also how close they feel to us emotionally. Australia is so far from the rest of the world it confounds, as did the day I sat in the courtyard having to explain to kids who were working on Angels in America what that period of time was like in NYC and how AIDS is transmitted.
I've mentioned before, in passing, that Australia or perhaps just Sydney has this typographic fixation, that a huge chunk of the clothes are not adorned with logos so much as art made from words, that people asked me over and over if I took a photo of the Coca-Cola sign in the Cross (ultimately, I didn't). It's perhaps the thing that makes Australia most different from anywhere I've ever been, and moves me the most significantly. A culture relies on text-based art at different stages of its development and usually only for brief intervals -- when it is young because it has yet to develop any consistent visual iconography of its own; when it comes into its own as it announces itself to the world; and as it feels overwhelmed by information and the world outside itself. Australia does all three of these things at once, constantly and consistantly, and people wear shirts decorated with random phrases and snatches of poetry, slogans that have meaning there and ultimately deconstructed and destroyed text which seems to be decaying its way across art and men's shirts everywhere. Aobriginal art on the other hand is all visual -- it is not text as you or I understand it, but all aboriginal art tells a story, and if you understand the images you can decode the story of the art. To watch non-Aboriginal Australia grapple with its racist past and its current trend to be obsessive and patronizing towards the aboriginals (at least amongst well meaning arts professionals I dealt with down there) and to watch everyone seemingly not notice these mirror worlds of informative design fascinated me constantly. As did the Coke sign at the top of the cross, which wasn't anything but the usual sign, except all the times that it whispered, typography too is an act of prayer.
So our money looks funny, sales tax is freaking me out and the cars come from the wrong way. And while the smell of New York in snow will always feel like home and I worked hard to feel the relief of being in my city, the one the rest of the world believes is an embodiment of the 20th century, but I know damn well is more a legacy of the 19th, mostly all I can feel is that I don't really belong here anymore.