I wouldn’t count myself as particularly anti-capitalist, or particularly political. But this article on Disney deciding to set up schools in China made me so angry I thought I was going to vomit. Then I read this other article on the same issue, realised it was worse than I originally thought. Like eating cereal for breakfast and then discovering the milk is off. And then upon further investigation, finding that the milk is in fact brake fluid. And the cereal is in fact dog shit. And the house is on fire.

Let’s take a look at why Disney might think they well equipped to handle formal education:

• pretty much every Disney story revolves around someone who is either fantastically rich, or becomes fantastically rich (with maybe the exception of Notre Dame)
• they usually feature tyrannical paternal figures to encourage the notion that responsibility to parents is more important than personal desires
• deformity and difference constitute comedy or evil
• blatantly chauvinistic
• they encourage the notion of a happy ending
• they reduce the world to the simplicity of black and white (quite literally, as everyone knows Disney protagonists are westernised. Can anyone spell ‘white supremacist’?)

I was going to put a picture of The Hulk here to represent my anger, but then I found out Marvel was bought by Disney in August, 2009 so this picture will have to do.

So, without having any previous ideological foothold to guide my negotiation of consumerism in this fast-paced and crazy capitalist world, and yet wanting to feel as though I am making a difference one purchase at a time, I decided to boycott Disney. Yes, that’s right. I am becoming a Disnedent.

This way of life applies ethical consumerism to Disney products. Which means basically I will not consume any more Disney culture. Most ideologies have weird grey areas. Like, is it right to eat meat if you find it on the ground? What if you kill the animal yourself? What if it’s free range? And can they even feel pain, properly, anyway? I can see no such grey area here. Disney’s idea of dabbling in education is for financial gain, a marketing plan that encourages ignorance and is beneficial only to Disney stockholders.

Consider this from the head of Disney Publishing Worldwide:

Disney estimates that it can earn over $100 million in the next five years from the education sector though it’s a challenging market because it’s a country where counterfeit Disney products, including DVDs and merchandise sell more than original ones. China, Hampton said, is a “promising market and as a company it has a high priority for us”.

These sucker companies join Disney in the boycott through affiliation:

• Buena Vista Records
• Holywood Records (sorry Queen, you’re blacklisted)
• Lyric Street Records
• Mammoth Records
• ESPN
• Marvel Entertainment
• Starwave
• Miramax Films
• Fox Family Worldwide
• Saban Entertainment
• The Muppets (not all Jim Henson, Labyrinth is safe)
• Pixar Animation
• New Horizon Entertainment

If you know of any companies that are affiliated with Disney that I should be including in the boycott, please let me know. Just like people sneak meat into shit (fish products in wine for example) it’s difficult to know whether a company is in cahoots with Disney just by looking at them.

Maybe Disney aren’t the only corporation to exploit areas of life that they have no right to touch. But this demonstrates that Disney see no difference between human rights, like the right to an education, and capital gain. They obviously can’t distinguish between someone’s money and someone’s mind. So if you at all give a damn about stopping the rapid decline of intelligence in the world, I would encourage you to join me in this boycott. And even if it doesn’t make a shit of difference to anything, at least you can feel morally righteous in the knowledge that you’re not an accomplice.

]]> http://ryan-paine.com/2010/07/12/boycott-disney/feed/ 1 http://ryan-paine.com/2010/05/09/why-getting-pole-axed-is-okay-sometimes/ http://ryan-paine.com/2010/05/09/why-getting-pole-axed-is-okay-sometimes/#comments Sun, 09 May 2010 09:57:37 +0000 Ryan http://ryan-paine.com/?p=749

For some reason lately, every time I got out for some hair of the dog, I wind up getting drunk, and partying like it’s September 10 2001. I often go out alone, looking for interesting randoms. When this happens, and we strike up a conversation, I lose myself in the moment and I don’t want to leave, I want to stay and continue learning about this person, and sharing something about myself – I enjoy the communion more than the beer or the dulling effect of being three-quarters pissed.

I worry about it though, because my New Year’s resolution was to develop my self-discipline, and refraining from getting pole-axed when I’m stressed, or distressed, or when it’s Friday and the clock strikes beer o’clock, is an important part of this.

But I’ve been pretty good lately, and I made three new friends this weekend, and reunited with a very dear old one – not bad for a shy, bumbling, socially awkward, self-conscious, introverted and reticent binge-alcoholic – and I’m now feeling abuzz with the possibility that the world is not full of cunts, which makes it very hard to concentrate on mundane life administration (such as how to replace alcohol with Dharma), but which makes it easy to spend Sunday evening thinking up ways and reasons to help make the world a better place (such as sharing this with you).

And meeting random young people at the pub is one of my favourite pastimes, and is the main reason I couldn’t give up drinking. Maybe it’s indicative of a significant social malaise, that some people need to be inebriated before their inhibitions are lowered far enough to allow new people in, and to allow themselves to reach over these inhibitions, to others.

It’s vaguely sad that our social skills have corroded to that extent, because socialising is one of our inherent needs, and mostly we suck at it,  but if something doesn’t work properly, and there is a workaround available, then maybe we just have to make do with that for a while, until we figure out how to really fix the problem – if, indeed, it is actually a problem.

It’s one thing to make the resolution to not drink so much, but it’s a whole other thing to be okay with reneging on that resolution once in a while. A way of being okay with this is to revel in the benefit of your lack of self restraint. This weekend I wouldn’t have met three new beautiful people, and reunited with another, if I hadn’t gone out for hair of the dog and then wound up dancing like a retard with a person who knows how to count steps.

Someone who thought about this a lot (maybe Buddha, but maybe not) said that everything should be taken in moderation, including moderation. So give yourself a break.

In the same week that I gored myself, I accepted a job offer from Wakefield Press. I’m visiting Brisbane for Christmas, then I’ll be heading to Adelaide to resume a seat at my old desk, to make books full time again. I won’t be needing any presents this year.

This may come as a surprise to many of my friends and colleagues in Melbourne, but it’s been on my mind and in the works for a couple of months. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and working with the wonderful people at Wakefield. I’m looking forward to having an occupation again.

For seven months after Voiceworks I drove aimlessly around Queensland in my campervan, Delilah. For the last five months in Melbourne I have found it difficult to shake my holiday habits – in particular my tendency to start the day by sitting down with a computer and/or a book and chasing miscellaneous ideas down rabbit holes, which is fun, but not conducive to gainful employment or paying the bills or saving the world.

A lot of these ideas have related to agency and social entrepreneurship, as I have dallied with the idea of starting up a literary agency. The loftiness of this ambition has dawned on me only recently – along with the fact I am wildly under qualified. So I’ve deferred these aspirations for the short term. I will spend the next couple of years gaining experience of other areas in the industry – rights and contract management, hopefully. I will knuckle down and get to New York, where I hope to gain a placement with an agency – as a reading assistant or general work-experience lacky.

Wakefield, blessedly, are aware of my long-term ambitions. They always have been, even as I fumble about figuring out exactly what they are. When they originally employed me as a typesetter, they knew about and supported my aspirations to work as an editor. I took manuscripts home to work on in my spare time, and gradually worked up to the point where I was typesetting half the time, and editing the rest of the time, or thereabouts. I will do the same again.

Because this work aligns so perfectly with my own work, I don’t baulk at working overtime to advance my skills and experience. So I’ll continue to work with the writers I have been building relationships with, to the extent that I can in my spare time or within my new in-house capacity. I hope to bring my new networks and experience into this equation.

This decision also has ramifications for this blog: the new focus in my life will inevitably be reflected here. It’s early yet, but I have plans to move this away from a blog where I ‘empty my thoughts … on literary culture, philosophy and interesting things that happen’, and develop a focus on my exploits going into bat for young writers, as a book editor, aspiring agent and location-independent social entrepreneur.

Wakefield Press are incredibly supportive employers – such that Michael and Stephanie, as well as various members of the long-term staff have continued to be inspirational mentors and friends during my years at Voiceworks. I look forward to upholding their motto: ‘We love good stories and make beautiful books.’

I’ll be having short-notice farewell drinks at Prudence this Friday, from 5pm if you want to come.

The last time I wrote about my life I included some comical pictures. This time pictures would be gross, kind of like this:

Because two new things happened to me the other day. No, three! One. A doctor had a pair of one-use-only scissors half an inch into the bottom of my foot. Two. Sitting at an Errol Street cafe, I called to my friend across the road as we spoke on the phone: ‘I’m waving my crutch at you.’ I was trying to get her attention. Three. I stepped on a broken hookah pipe.

Living where I do, it was only a matter of time.

We all saw it, and none of us decided to pick it up. I was ambling around the backyward, squinty-eyed from sleep and looking not for a hazardous piece of glass but for socks.

After that I was going to put the socks on, then some shoes, and then I was going to seize the day. Instead I seized my foot, brought it closer to my face and said ‘Fuck! really loud. Frustration, mostly, because the pain hadn’t hit yet.

As I was anticipating the local anaesthetic – still the most painful experience of my life, including the bit where I actually stepped on the glass, including tattoos, piercings and various other trauma – I wondered about how pain is localised. There I was, in a relatively low amount of pain, then I would experience relatively excruciating pain, then I would feel nothing. But would my pain remain where I was, the only difference in the world being that I could no longer feel it? My nerves would remain as severed as they were before the anaesthetic, it’s just that a chemical interference would prevent my brain from being aware.

I imagined driving past the hospital some time and remembering the pain I felt in there. I don’t know – I guess I was expecting that I would remember the pain in exquisite detail. Now that it’s a dull throb, I don’t really remember the acute pain.

Then I wondered how being surrounded by others’ pain might affect the psychology of a person over time. Forget the question of dealing with others while they express distress as a result of their pain, what about being surrounded by so many loudly firing synapses?

I also wondered about my doctor: he was almost dismissive of me, as though I was an inconvenience, rather than someone who needed his compassion and medical expertise; I wondered if his capacity for empathy had been diminished by constant contact with others’ pain. Probably not, because otherwise he would have left the profession by now.

And admittedly, I wondered this mostly while I was hopping down the hall like a dickhead while he carried on ahead, walking like someone who hadn’t just gored himself on a bong. Also, I gradually realised, as I prattled away, that his scorn was indiscriminate. I wasn’t its target, I was just in the way.

The thing is, he got me wondering about doctors past, how it would have been a vastly more hostile place in the days before anaesthetic. How would those doctors have fared, surrounded by pain they could not stop? Indeed, to alleviate their patients’ pain in the long term, they often had to inflict greater pain in the short term.

Then I wondered about the individuals experiencing that pain. Um, so this is basically me just wondering about how human psychology and behaviour might have changed since the way we experience pain has changed.

I stumble around barefoot all the time. Would I be less careless if I thought that severely injuring myself would result in enduring the acute pain of being stitched with anaesthetic? Because I was surprisingly calm after the frustration and anger had dissipated, and this had something to do with knowing that soon I would experience acute pain as a means to painlessness.

I know people who refuse to use pain killers unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I guess others have wondered about the long-term effects of numbing our pain. I’m gonna have a bit of time to wonder for a while …