The World by Us

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest… Each day we have a plethora of opportunities to exchange, share, communicate, support, and connect with others thanks to the horde of online communities we now have at our disposal.

Though some believe we are feeling more isolated than ever.

An interesting hypothesis, and one we thought worth exploring. So earlier this year (inspired by this post), we solicited the opinion of the world wide web on community in a digital age.

Check out some of the responses we got:

“I’ve always seen online communities as a supplement, not a replacement, for real life ones. I use them as a means to stay connected to people when we’re not in the same physical space. I’d much rather be doing stuff in the real world, because real life is so KICKBUTT.”

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“I think there is always some loss to a community that is online. Its just not the same as a real connection, sharing your time with someone in a physical space. The loss of eye contact, body gestures, fine details… It is sad in many ways, yet being able to communicate and share from a distance has many benefits and will continue to be apart of society as we become more connected.”

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“I don’t think that there is any way to fully replicate the experience of having a face to face conversation with another individual with an online community. Though we have so many new ways to connect with each other, I think that many of us are feeling more isolated than ever.”

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“What I’ve had fun with – is to expand my offline friendships with extended online ones. This has opened up entirely new relationships in very cool ways.”

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“I am an Administrator on a large bulletin board; We are all bound together by the need for support and understanding (prisoners’ families). In real life we would not be able to make those connections so easily. One of the first things that members say when joining is “Thank God I found you! You understand me, no-one else does”.  In my experience the internet has enhanced my ability to join a community towards which I feel a real sense of “belonging”. It has been one of the most rewarding times of my life, and I have made and met lifelong friends through this medium.”

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“In the last year, I moved to a brand new city where I knew absolutely no one. As I explored the city, I was open to connections and talked to whoever was around me when it seemed appropriate, but in most of these cases we had nothing in common more than whatever situation we were in and whatever else strangers have in common. We could talk about local events or experiences, or tell each other our stories but that ended up being the extent of it. I had much better luck finding groups of people with common interests through online communities and then meeting them at events.”

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“The online world can be a good portal into real-world connections if you want it to be – for example, meetup.com or ‘tweet-ups’”

Like many who weighed in, we believe BALANCE is key. Our online and offline communities should not be mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing. Those of us living nomadic or urban lifestyles may have to work a bit harder to nurture our real world connections, but we think there are some fabulous ways to do that. We need only to get off our lap tops (iphones, ipads, etc.), turn off the TV, and get out there!

Here’s a quick look at just a few new community initiatives in our backyard that are successfully using the online world to expand our offline interactions:

This Place is Yours is an exciting non-profit media project launching later this year that seeks to ‘connect communities, open societies and create happier human beings.’ The beauty of this project is the way it plans to do this via online journalism & story-telling combined with real world events & workshops in order to foster face-to-face connection and community.

Urban Love - ‘Extremely social, guerilla-style events across Sydney’s underused inner-city spaces. A much needed chance to get outside, mingle, stretch your happy muscles, meet your neighbours and liven up our streets! Public street-parties every third Saturday 2-6pm. Rogue Tunes, outdoor foosball, great times & BYO drinks & food.’

Make Tonight Count - A new iphone app designed to share your plans for the evening with ‘a few mates, all your friends or the world.’ A nifty little tool to help us all coordinate our social lives. The night is full of possibilities and this app exists to help you take advantage of all of them.

What do YOU think?

Are Facebook, et al. causing loneliness and isolation?

How do you nurture your offline communities?

Why not make a commitment to foster real world connections in NEW ways this weekend?

A clever campaign and an unimaginable injustice we encounter everyday – whether we know it or not. The waitress at the restaurant, the hands that made our clothes,  the child forced to work to produce the chocolate we enjoy…

Human Trafficking – The Facts

• The U.N estimates that 2.5 million people from 127 countries have been trafficked to 137 countries for purposes such as forced labour, sexual exploitation, removal of organs, forced marriages, child adoption and begging.
• According to UNICEF, 2 million children will be sold into the sextrade in the next year.
• In South East Asia, many of these children are sold for as little as $50 and some as young as 6 years old.
• Profits from sex slavery exceed US9.5 billion per year.
• Human trafficking is the second largest organised crime in the world. It has become a bigger business than drug trafficking.
• Human trafficking victims are subject to rape, torture, forced abortions, starvation and threats to family members.

If you’d like to learn more, get involved or simply support great organisations working hard to end modern day slavery, check out:

Stop the Traffik

Not for Sale

Call & Response

Project Futures

Slavery Footprint

We’ve come across some uber-talented ladies lately. Ladies like the eccentric Claire Boucher (or Grimes as most know her). The 23 year old, Canadian born singer and producer has been making big waves in the indie music scene with her ethereal & infectious album Visions.

A darling of the ‘bedroom pop’ movement and in the company of artists like Washed Out, Active Child and How to Dress Well, Grimes is a one-woman show who prefers to think of herself as more of a ‘curator of stuff’ than a musician. While it was her album that first impressed us, it is her authenticity that has won us over.

With a slight lisp, an alternative personal style, and a penchant for Marilyn Manson, Claire is clearly unconventional. Regardless, she exudes self-confidence and a refreshingly matter-of-fact demeanour. However, just 5 or 6 years ago, she was ‘actively hated…locked in lockers, and thrown in garbage cans’ – a pretty traumatic high school experience by anyone’s measure. Though fortunately those days are far behind her now and the tables have turned.

These days, as she told Pedestrian TV, the fashion crowd who ‘would have destroyed her in high school’ are the girls buying the tickets to her shows. Who’s laughing now?

Writer/author/performance & visual artist/filmmaker/director/actor Miranda July is the ultimate ‘slashie’ and an incredible inspiration for aspiring creatives. Though according to her twitter account, she spends her time ‘divining the future of every single person…including you.’

Back before the success of her two feature-length films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011), Miranda was lonely, eager to learn, and longing to connect with other women. So she began an online project called Joanie 4 Jackie (previously known as Big Miss Moviola) – a video chain letter for female filmmakers to share their work.

The project became a beautiful support network and as one of the filmmakers interviewed describes it, “it was something special and different and kind of sacred…It was a little pod of love and hope.” Or as Miranda says, “Joanie 4 Jackie saved me, because I felt like I was part of something. That was my film school.”

The project is now archived at Bard College in New York where it continues to inspire and encourage budding female filmmakers.

For more Miranda, be sure to watch her latest film, The Future, which she wrote, directed, and starred in. It is a quirky and heartening take on life, love, individuality and the creation of art.

“I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like “Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore” — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It’s like, yeah, you’re thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled.”

- Miranda July

When was the last time you got your hands dirty and did a little finger painting? Unless you’ve got small children at home, you probably left that hobby behind long ago… Not so for American artist Judith Ann Braun.

Using fingers dipped in charcoal, Braun creates impressive murals, often drawn directly onto the wall. Her pieces range from stunning and intricate landscapes, to abstract symmetrical formations. No doubt a believer in the potential for constraints to boost creativity, Braun has set herself four simple rules which she follows in creating the majority of her other work:

1. Graphite
2. Square paper
3. Abstraction
4.  Bilateral symmetry

Intrigued by Braun’s unique form of art? You can catch her quirky, self-told life story in video form here. Or check out more of her work here.

“Look. Really look. Take the time to see it in their eyes. See their hunger for experience, the wide-eyed optimism, the fear that eats into their soul and the glint that twinkles when something, anything small, turns out just right.

They are the ones with independent minds. Hunting (not-so-secretly) for extraordinary experiences. Giving desire its due thanks to some kind of chronic fantasy they can not shake. Sweating it out for their cause, unwilling to conform and eagerly embracing the path les travelled as a way of asserting a uniqueness of experience and something all of their own…

…As we grow out of acts of youthful defiance and into finding our own meaning, we look most for why we struggle and why we live. For this, we need to be a little foolish. We need to fear less. To be true to what we know. To do what we can with what we have. Make like mavericks in our own small way. And show commitment as best we can.”

- RUSSH Editor, Jess Blanch

From the editor’s letter for issue 45 saluting ‘the people who have rebelled, outraged convention, sacrificed or done the jobs they didn’t want just to support their dreams.’

We’ve been on the look out for ways to reinvigorate our little backyard garden. In our travels, we’ve come across some fabulous ideas for repurposed planters, along with more brilliant & easy ideas for recycled design…

Spare tea pots lying around? Don’t let them hide in the cupboard!

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Same goes for those giant tea cups:

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Keep an eye out at your local vintage haunts for old mailboxes:

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And vintage bathtubs:

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Put those old coffee tins to good use:

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Broken chair? Bathroom shelf & towel rack!

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Give your storage a little character (notice the antler hooks top left!):

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Put your wine on display with varnished old paletts:

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Same goes for wine glasses and that rusty old rake:

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Check out more of our ‘Trash to Treasure’ inspiration here.

Ah New York…

Brilliant food, world class theatre, and the exciting possibility of being saved by oncoming traffic from Ryan Gosling. The city has so much to offer…Today, we take you on a photographic tour of the birth place of the hipster: Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Williamsburg bridge

Diner

Diner specials, written on the table for us to contemplate (we went with the Bar fish and it was delightful)

A fine afternoon beverage: Brooklyn Lager

In case of fire…

Signs of spring!

Perhaps one of our favourite finds: Maison Premiere. Absinthe cocktails, oysters galore, and just look at the place:

It is Thursday evening. 7:30pm. We  arrive at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, New York for British theatre company Punchdrunk‘s interpretation of Macbeth. It appears to be a converted warehouse and reminiscent of the elaborate haunted houses of my childhood. The ambience is similarly eerie. Upon entering, we discover the hotel’s curious ‘history.’ Completed in 1939 and set to be New York’s most luxurious hotel, six weeks before opening, just after the outbreak of WWII, the hotel was locked up and abandoned.

We’re advised to check our bags & coats. ‘It’s warm inside’ they assure us. “And you’ll want to be free to run around…”

Bags & coats checked, we’re given white masks (which we’re instructed not to remove), and escorted through big red curtains to the bar, complete with 1930′s jazz band, songstress and decor. We grab a drink, only to be told we’re heading off, bottom’s up, and we’re following our guide to the lifts. Lift doors open one floor up, our guide invites us forward, allows one person to walk ahead, stopping the rest of us as the lift doors promptly close…leaving one lone soul on floor 3. Here we go.

Surprisingly, the rest of us are allowed off together a few floors up. We are told we cannot talk at any time, but can return to the bar on the 2nd floor at any time we like. Then we are left to roam almost 100 rooms across 5 floors for the next 3 hours…in silence.

The further we explore, the deeper we dig, the more we surrender to curiosity, the fuller the experience: The discovery of the candy shop (and a fellow masked participant happily munching on sweets as if he owned the place) – a delightful room we return to often for a quick sugar fix. The decision to follow a frantic actress down two flights of stairs to the ballroom, rummaging through drawers, reading letters left behind, trying to piece together the story. Lingering to discover what happened when the psychiatric nurse leads a fellow audience member into a small hospital room, shuts the door behind the two of them…and screams.

This is what we came to New York for. Something we couldn’t find anywhere else (save maybe London, where we were once invited to a club in an abandoned underground railway station and were only allowed in if we donned vintage dressing gowns and animal masks.)

The most powerful moments of our adventure were a stunning slow-motion, bloody, and erotic banquet scene, and what was described by another audience member on our way out as ‘the foetus rave’ – a mind-blowing, strobe-laden, nudity-filled birth/beheading scene.

The beauty of interactive theatre is the way it challenges us to move beyond being passive recipients of entertainment and invites us to actively engage with it. We’re left to put the pieces together as we go. The intention was not for us to see and understand the full story of Macbeth. Instead, it offered us a break from the predictable and coherent, the opportunity to return to child-like exploration and adventure, part dream, part nightmare, letting our imagination determine the meaning behind the various scenes we experience. Each of us participating in the creation of art, rather than simply observing it.

If you happen to be in New York, Sleep no More is still running. Catch it while you can!

Hello Lovelies!

We’ve got flowers in our hair, margaritas on our mind and the big apple in our sights…

We’re off today to enjoy a little R & R  in San Francisco, Mexico & New York.

We’ll check in here when we can and fill you in on our travel musings & inspirations, but just in case we decide to embrace our ‘unplug,’  please bear with us! We’ve got a back-log of things to share with you. But first – loved ones, enchiladas, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman on Broadway are calling…

We’ll promise to be back to regular posts in just a few weeks : )

xx

 Photo via Sabina