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My wish here is to be descriptive about my editing process and so open a discussion that may provide an insight into what I will be writing about in my PhD.
To date that is not happening.
It’s soul destroying to have to redo work that’s lost on a computer. This is the third time in a year and hopefully the last.
Though I am inspired to work/edit by the documentary roundtable and have people waiting to help me as soon as I’ve done the work I am paralyzed by my 500G LaCie drive having corrupted itself. La Cie just replaced it, but I have lost all the media, and I now have to reinstall my film. ANU provide mass data storage where I have put all my DV material so luckily I can retrieve it. However the process is not automatic because the files loose their file types when they are stored and when they come back I will have to automate adding .mov to them all.
It is an inforced cleaning out process which makes me re-evaluate where I am at and what I’m doing. As I have just gone up to Tiger OS 10.4.2 I found the backup from Deja Vu no longer worked and I spent 2 days mucking around with other programs to try and find something reasonable and reliable to replace it with.
Having wasted the last two days on sorting out backup (and loosing some stuff with Superduper) my advice is don’t use:
ibackup
backup scripts with automator (part of Tiger)
iMsafe or
Superduper
I have gone back to Deja Vu, using the update for Tiger, which I will have to pay for in a month. It originally came free bundled with Roxio Toast 6 but now requires an update which is not free.
In the meantime I have increased the ability of my workhorse. I upped my G3 laptop to G4 status with a 550 mhz processor, added a 5400rpm 60G drive and put in a dual layer DVD burner. I can now use Final Cut Pro 4 at home. FCP4 has much better sound control. This will see me through to the end of this project.
So what am I doing?
On suspension from my PhD in order to use this unpaid time to finish my film I look forward to the luxury of $350 a week scholarship money to write the PhD when I resume.
I have been looking for work and have found some meagre channels which are hardly sustainable.
My credit card it at it’s $4000 limit so I now spend what little I have keeping that at bay.
Some WW1 research for a history writer came up and I am potentially selling coffee machines in Shopping centres- both at $20 an hour.
Back in Ngarinyin country, another of the main performers, well known for performing the argula mask, died last week. I am quite distressed by the passing away of 5 key people involved in this research project. These people were all a major part of what I am doing, thinking and feeling. The argula mask is all about death and it is really coming home to rest with me in a way I never could have imagined. It is a heavy burden living with the dead; such a major part of this cultural practice.
Lat night I was listening to Howard Morphy on AWAYE Radio National talking with Djon Mundine, Marcia Langton and others. He said that he wasn’t convinced by a remote/urban divide in the same way I have been talking about for the past two years. People who live in their country are not isolated or remote. They are at home.
Now that sounds like Michael Jackson when I think about it.
Is it my idea, is it Howard’s idea, is it an old idea or are we both taking it from someone else?
posted by Dominique at 10:44 pm
2 Comments:
You’ve raised the issue of the remote/urban distinction, or false distinction. I thoroughly agree that the distinction is false, and I think it causes offence and annoyance on two counts, as follows.
First, those who draw the distinction often hold a misguided notion that it is only Aboriginal people living outside major towns and cities who can be ‘real’ Aboriginal people. That notion, it seems to me, is firmly lodged in the minds of many non-Aboriginal Australians, and especially those who have practically no contact with Aboriginal people. The notion of the remote, ‘real’ Aboriginal people is linked -- though the link usually goes unacknowledged – with the hoary concept of the noble savage. And it is linked too with those state policies of the greater part of the 20th century, which were based on classification of Aboriginal men, women and children by their lineage, as ‘full-blood’, ‘halfe-caste,’ ‘octoroon,’ and so forth.
Second, the remote/urban distinction is offensive because it is part of the settler peoples’ delusionary history of the world. It is a settler-centric world history, which settler peoples have tried to impose on peoples who haven’t formed settler societies – peoples who have no inclination to settle outside their own lands. There is an excellent passage on the delusionary world history held onto by settler peoples at pp 27-28 of the book, _Is history fiction?_, by Ann Curthoys and John Docker (UNSW Press, 2006). I will e-mail the passage to you, Dom, since it's too long to fit in this blog-comment.
In addition to what Curthoys and Docker have written on this point, it is well worth looking at Deleuze’s conversation with Claire Parnet, in the film _Abécédaire_, the part where they discuss travel, and clarify Deleuze’s use of the term ‘nomad’ -- see the section ‘V for Voyage’. Charles Stivale’s summary description of the conversation is here:
http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC3.html (I downloaded it last year, and to save you time I will email the ‘V for Voyage’ section to you).
Thanks for that! I'm just about to go tho that site.
I don't know who said it but I remember D&G get muddled up when talking about Australia using second hand ideas from Levi-Strauss. I'll have to chase that one up.
It's a sort of relief being in the D&G-less environs of the CCR. The feel I get is that there is a particular priveleged discourse which comes from Anthropologists and Historians trying to work out their individual and mutual taxonomies using Foucault as the ideas base.
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