Cultural Baggage

“Cultural Baggage”

Naomi Klein of her book No Logo believes that Western society is experiencing an 'etherialization of capitalism'. It's believed that it has drained the concept of production from the market and filled the vacuum with images, signs, symbols and branding, producing a semi-religious aura which expands to fill the public space (Seabrook, 2004:34). These symbols and logos have become attached to products, distorting how the consumer values the actual product. Skeggs explores this concept of the production of items being no longer created for their immediate use by the producer, but for their market use (Skeggs, 2005:56). Society has come to comparatively value its commodities on the social and cultural benefits rather than just the use value. This issue is further developed as the exchange value of products differs so dramatically from the use value that it must possess other qualities to be accepted by the consumer as of reasonable worth. The Louis Vuitton designer wears are a prime example of such culturally charged objects. With luggage price at thousands of dollars the distance between cost of labour hours and exchange rate differ dramatically. Through Skeggs theory of 'Propertising Culture' this essay will explore how the Louis Vuitton brand successfully acquires such high exchange value of its products, and what properties their products possess for consumers to believe the price is an inherent quality.

Blogging for Ana

I wrote this piece a year ago for a university assessment. It is on the online Pro-Anorexic/Bulimic movements which you may of heard about. I interviewed twenty different girls between the ages of fourteen to twenty-eight with the majority being sixteen to twenty. They were so candid and honest with me which was both beautiful and shocking. By now I have lost contact with most of them, but I hope they are still doing ok.

“Blogging for Ana”

Lucy* looks at me in disbelief as I place my caramel-latte on the table in front of us. She glares at it, almost frightened of the frothy sweetened milk. I can see her mind ticking over as she counts and converts calories. “350 calories that is.” she says pointing to it. “That's like 40 minutes running to burn off you know?” She looks up disapprovingly, attempting to drill guilt into me. She's right, I probably should know better. Yet being a recovered anorexic and her still in the depths of the obsession, I chose to ignore her comments and revel in the pleasure that is enjoying food. A practice so feared by those with eating disorders.

I can't blame her for being rude, she thinks she means well. She's trying to keep me in check. That’s what members of the online Pro-Ana/Mia movement do – encourage through fasts and discourage from food. The difference is that I am no longer a member.

The Pro-Ana/Mia movements are online communities used by mainly young girls with anorexia ('Ana') and bulimia ('Mia') to support each other not through recovery, but in their efforts to sink deeper into their disorders. Through websites such as 'Fading Obsession' and 'Ana's Underground Grotto', members share tricks on weightloss, how to hide their disorder from family and doctors, and how to avoid the 'Dreaded Road to Recovery'. Each blog has strict rules to abide by. Members must participate in group fasts, daily post their weight, BMI, the calories they have consumed and expelled and their chosen eating disorder. Extra credit for having multiple eating disorders and self-harming, and a family forced hospital visit as the Mecca to prove that you are a real ‘Ana Angel’. Some blogs are so bitchy that members who fail to abide by the rules or to lose weight face rejection from the community, left once again with no one who understands why they're dying to be thin.

South Africa

I recently came back from an amazing trip Volunteering in South Africa and then backpacking up the East Coast through Swaziland and Mozambique. I met so many amazing people and had such an awesome time so I thought I would post up my photos with the stories behind them.


This gorgeous little girl is named Aviwe. She's a beautiful girl I taught whilst I was volunteering. She got teased a lot by the other girls because her mother couldn't afford to have her hair braided. She also had extremely bad eyesight and would walk back and forth from her desk to the front of the black board to see the writing. She never had pencils and had to borrow them off the children around her. One day I came to school and gave her a set of color pencils and pens and the look on her face was to breathtaking. She seemed so shocked which I found was extremely hunbling. Seeing the immense effort she put into her work there onwards was heartwarming and was the highlight of my whole trip.





I took this photo outside of class one day whilst the children were praying before the lesson.






These three are my favorite photos I took of the whole trip. At this point I had been volunteering for a month in the school and had started conducting a range of interviews with the people of and supporting the township I was working in Imizamu Yethu. On this day I tagged along with Africa whilst he took a German couple on a township tour. As we walked up Mandela road there was music playing competing against the singing from the church. I love how much personality the children of Imizamu Yethu and the Sentinal school have and these photos are no exception.




I came across these children when the American volunteer, English volunteer and I were walking though the back streets of the township. These children caught my eye as they hobbled along sharing a pair of flippers!


I adore this photo. After finishing my volunteering I decided in a day that I wanted to ditch my plans to stay in Cape Town for the next month and rather go backpacking. The next day I had bought a bus ticket and was on my way up the East Coast. When I first planned it I thought I would just go through the Garden Route but from everything I heard from the other backpackers I ended up deciding on Mozambique as the Mecca of my trip. At this point I was half way through my journey and met up with Simon, an Australian guy in Durban who I had met once or twice and had to decided to come along as sporadically as I had. I arrived in Durban by midnight and the next day we hired a car and started making our way up to Mozambique. After one very random nights stop over in St Lucia, Simon taught me how to drive the manual hire car and within 20 minutes I was driving us to Swaziland. This is when we had just crossed the boarder from Durban to Swaziland after the rain had stopped. Simon took it while I was driving, happy to see clouds again because apparently the sky in Cape Town is always "boring clear blue".





If ever there was a more appropriate time for the Moby soundtrack from The Beach film to be playing in the background it was this moment. Whilst staying in Coffee Bay half way through the Trance Sky I went on a hike with Nathan and a few other people. The hike went for about ten kilometers up and over some of the most contrasting and breathtaking scenery. This point was coming to the end of the hike called "Hole in the Wall". There was no one around but the small group of us. We swam all the way out to the rock, climbed up the inside of the rock, and when the right wave came we jumped off into it! It was such fun and the water was so warm, it couldn't have been anymore perfect.


This is a Sangorma or Witch Doctor of the Imizamu Yethu township who I interviewed a day before I left to go back home. She tole me that she learnt her craft through her dreams and she was able to boost the immune system of people with AIDS yet not cure it. She was a very interesting woman and her room was filled with jars of twigs and seeds. The sticks she is holding are extremely important to her because you cant be a Sangorma without them. They were an entire cows tail and cost 500 Rand (around AUD$75) which was a huge amount of money to her.

This was in Swaziland when Simon and I were driving back from a HUGE hike. We decided we wanted to hike down to a waterfall and jump off it. We got our selves a map and took our tough little hire car out. We followed the tiny trail and came to a fork in the mountain to what felt like nearly a total drop. We could see another water fall about a kilometer or two away across a mountain but there was no track. After studying the map we decided to make our own track across the mountain which turned out to be a lot harder than it looked. As we made our way across the steep rocky mountain and high grass the snake factor began to creep into the back of our minds. We came half way up the mountain which was now a lot steeper than we had expected and were half way between the waterfall and the top of the mountain which would lead back to the track which would we could find our way back with. After much deliberation we decided it would be too hard to make it back up to the top of the mountain if we went down to the waterfall and we weren't sure how much steeper and rocky the mountain would get if we continued down. We eventually made it back to the top and promptly decided to go to the one hotel in Swaziland to get a cocktail. I took this photo as were driving back.

OTHER FAVORITE PHOTOS

Death in review

Death has been on my mind a lot lately. I have decided to do my thesis on its representations on screen and how that impacts the audience. One particular text which inspired this is the television show Six Feet Under. I am a huge fan of this show after my mother introduced it to me a few years ago. It is gritty and raw and painfully funny, it shows the reality you would never talk about with your friends. I have posted below a review on the first series that I did last year. Now that I look back on it, there are a few things I would change. I was reading a powerfully emotional novel at the time and I think this shows through my almost melodramatic dark writing. Anyway - to all the people who dont read this blog - I hope you like it

Death.

It's the one word which will never become desensitized. The one moment your whole life has been leading up to. When you're voice is silenced and there's things left unsaid. The ultimate full stop. Now of course there's the afterlife. Heaven and Hell depending on your relationship with God. Dust and dirt for the realists. But death is the full stop to a tangible existence. And when you're six feet under, when you're scattered across the Earth or sitting in an earn, your life-once-lived tears apart the lives of the people you once knew. It cripples them with grief, because once someone you love dies, a part of you is stolen, and your whole existence is uprooted. Most of us are fortunate to be touched by the potency of loss only a few times in our life. But what about the people who swallow the poison everyday? The people whose life is death. Whose weekly wage relies on car crashes and heart attacks and cancer. The funeral directors who we pay to deal with death for us.

The First Post

It has been on my to-do list for a while, but here it finally is. A blog of my works so far and hopefully more to come. I have a bunch of stories from uni which may as well be read or plagiarised by another uni student.

Moving to a totally unrelated topic of my work, I would like to promote someone else's. I am a huge fan of podcasts and probably listen to more podcasts than music (nerd). There is one in particular which is my favorite called The Moth. The Moth is a show held in New York where comedians, journalists, audience members and anyone with a good tale tells a story from their life without notes. The storytellers are amazing and the experiences they share are even more so.

One of the hottest events in town…
The Moth is an evening of
unashamedly old-fashioned storytelling…
the performances are enthralling,
funny and moving, with a typical New York intensity.”
- The Times (London)

Started in George Dawes Green lounge room in 1997, the Moth started as informal gathering of storytellers and listeners. "Each show typically features one or two celebrated writers, actors or artists along with other unique individuals with a story to tell on the given theme. Past storytellers have included an astronaut, a voodoo priestess, a neurosurgeon, a car salesman, a New York City cop, a former pickpocket and hundreds more." I highly recommend this blog, it's thought provoking, tear jerking, and embarrassingly funny!

You can subscribe to The Moth through iTunes or by going to the url www.themoth.org/podcast