Review: Performance Reviews

I had my performance review with my boss about two weeks ago, and unlike any I have ever had before, it was worthwhile. We spent the majority of the time mocking the process, talking about plans for the upcoming year, and agreeing that I should study next year while continuing to work. Which, I think we can all agree, is awesome.

Particularly the fact that we both agreed the concept of a performance review generally implies that your performance has not been tracked for the rest of the year - yay for good governance!

But generally, if you're not blessed to work where I now do, performance reviews go like this:

• You get given a sheet to fill out.
• You fill in your "goals" from a list of goals provided to you by the organisation.
• You give a vague idea of what you'd like to be doing at two arbitrary intervals in the future - generally 1 and 5 years. Try and think of something adventurous, but not too adventurous - "I see myself in a management role" is good, "I see myself beheading the entire board one-by-one on a guillotine made from the bones of middle-management, marching upon parliament with a burlap sack sodden with their bloody heads, installing myself as Supreme Commander of the government and military, and reigning for a thousand years in blood and tyranny" is perhaps over-stepping the invitation.
• Then either,
  a) Your boss tells you that you didn't do what you said you'd do last year, but that you met your performance management obligations so you're not fired, and you get an "Acceptable"; or...
  b) Your manager writes that you've done what you said you'd do in the previous year, tells you that you've "excelled" and then admits that no one is allowed to be graded as "excelling", because upper management have vetoed all bonuses for this year, and "excelling" means you contractually must be given a bonus.
  
• Both you and your manager go back to your desks wishing the whole meeting had never happened.

I found this comic that I must have done about two years ago (but never published), and the prediction is starting to look scarily apt.

I'll let you guess whose prediction I mean.

Performance reviews - 2/5

Review: Celebrities fictionalising themselves

Last night I saw The Trip. It's a Michael Winterbottom film that carries on from Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon played slightly fictionalised versions of themselves, in amongst an array of other British celebrities.

This time around, it's kind of a middle-aged road story - think Sideways, if Giamatti were actually feeling sorry for himself, rather than playing someone who feels sorry for himself.

And much, much funnier. The dialogue is mostly improvised, and it's basically two good friends who've spent a lot time together travelling the countryside eating good food and taunting each other, having those occasional moments that two old friends have when they both happen to hit exactly the same emotional (and comedic) wavelength. And we're in on the joke the whole way a long.

It's interesting, because it seems that this is a bit of a new movement in film (television and cinema - The Trip started as a BBC series) and also, perhaps to a lesser extent, literature. Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park saw Ellis rewrite his life into a critique of domesticity, modern consumption and his own prior work (either Patrick Bateman, the killer from American Psycho, or a copycat, circles the periphery of the narrative, haunting Ellis' fictionalised self). To some extent autobiography is always a fictionalising of the self, but these works all take it another step - creating new situations for their "characters", and sometimes even inventing partners or alternative home-lives (Ellis' wife and Coogan's girlfriend Mischa).

So the question is: is this the next stage after the mockumentary? That genre has now been thoroughly worked and re-worked, and is now essentially de rigeur for comedy. Is the next step to take fictionalised versions of real life people and play it cold, somewhere between a documentary and a film that just happens to be about the celebrities in the film?

In the hands of someone like Winterbottom, who seems to have taken the hints of it from 24 Hour Party people (a brilliant film, and a real Mancunian love-in on and off screen) and turned them into their own genre in Tristram Shandy and now The Trip, it's wonderful, hilarious, illuminating and often legitimately touching. There are several scenes where we see an existentially helpless Coogan look out into the distance, and as an audience member I actually thought, "Oh god, do you get to that level of fame, and that age, and still feel that hopeless need to prove yourself, to keep moving, to stay young?"

It's also a tribute to Coogan (and Brydon, but to a much lesser extent) that he's willing to play the fictionalised version of himself as such an arsehole. I can't help but feel that to be self-aware enough to play that role he can't be as bad a person as he would have us believe.

But where does that leave those of us who aren't already famous? This genre, by it's very nature, locks out the newcomer or the unknown player. In some ways, it's a high-brow Punk'd - we get to laugh at and with the celebrity, we get to feel like we know them, but then the show ends and we're still sitting in our living rooms or movie theatres on a normal wage, known only to our friends.

Ellis couldn't have written Lunar Park if he wasn't already a celebrity author whose life, and sexuality, were well known - the book would read like the autobiography of a paranoid schizophrenic with a pathological fear of children's toys. We wouldn't care about Coogan and Brydon travelling the countryside from restaurant to pub to cottage if we didn't already know their faces and their disparate personalities.

It's sad to think that it's a form tied so inextricably to the concept of celebrity. On the other hand, the fact that these celebrities are so willing to play with the concept of their being well known to us, and the concept of celebrity itself, is refreshing.

And maybe that's the beauty of it - this artist is the truly only one who could have made this artwork.

The Trip - 4/5

Celebrities fictionalising themselves - a trepidatious 3/5

Review: Blogging

“Oh, god, he’s reviewing blogs on a blog,” you say. “How wankingly self-conscious, self-referential and pompous.“

And that’s exactly it, isn’t it?

How pompous is it of me to think that you’d want to know what I think? How am I qualified to tell you the value of something? Do I have a degree in journalism?

This is a lot of people’s problem with blogs. Who are normal people to have an opinion?

One moment you’re telling people what you think, and they’re going along with it, nodding, slapping you on the shoulder, and the next, people are demanding to see your papers before they evict you from Internetlandia.

Blogs are great for social networking, journalism, online diarising and reviewing. When done well, they can be any given person’s (literally anyone’s) on any given subject, with photos, videos, etc, all tied into a nice little package where you can comment back.

There are many great blogs, written by normal people (or communities), with no journalism experience.

When done poorly, blogs are boring, self-referential, self-aggrandizing trifle taking up a Google hit. I’m thinking of your typical “I hate *insert name of acquaintance here*” (like this one, in the news recently), or “The boring and largely irrelevant love life of *insert blog owner’s name here*”. These blogs devalue a great, relatively young form of writing.

Is it journalism? Well, that’s a loaded question. Blogs, by their very nature, are going to be biased, or at least be more biased (I’m looking at you, Herald Sun) than your average newspaper article. They’re basically all editorial. No one, generally, edits your run-of-the-mill blog, except the blogger themselves.

This can be refreshing. You get to see the thoughts come right out on the (web)page, without the filter of someone else telling the writer what to say. This can also lead to horrible spelling, grammar, formatting (look through mine, for examples) and unfortunate faux pas that are virtually unretractable, as long as someone can press “print screen”.

And for all the talk of how easy it is for any chump to setup a blog and spew his bilge into the passing river of opinion, it’s tough work to create and maintain a good blog. Many a good blog has suddenly disappeared for lack of updates, and many more great ideas have turned into dust in the hands of a poor writer.

I guess, like many forms of writing, it is what you make of it.

4/5

Review: Robert "Millsy" Mills

Oh Millsy, Millsy, Millsy.

What are we to do with you?

It’s hard to take anyone who came to fame through Australian Idol seriously. Now, I know, and I assume you know, that he was already reasonably well known around the traps in Melbourne for playing in a band that had a moderate following.

But somehow it seems that despite his existing in the Melbourne music scene outside of Australian Idol, we’ll always know him as the somewhat lame everyman of the first season of Australian Idol – you know, the only series that anyone ever watched. He wasn’t disturbingly Christian, like Guy Sebastian, he wasn’t a whipper-snipper on helium ocker, like Shannon Noll, he was just the dude you’d probably have a few beers with at the pub. You know, he'd probably be a bit of a dickhead, but you’d still hang out with him, because he’d turn up every week.

But then he slept with Paris Hilton.

Suddenly, Millsy became the archetypal little engine that could. How does a F-grade celebrity who was consistently middling in the show that brought him to fame land a multi-million dollar heiress with her own (admittedly very boring) porno?

We shook our heads. We slapped him imaginary high fives. We cursed him under our breath. But the boy had done well.

And he continues to do well. I have it on good authority that he is particularly good as Fiyero in the Melbourne production of Wicked (sorry, I'm not buying an exorbitantly priced ticket just to find out if the advice was correct), and while he did his time on midnight TV, he seems to be hitting his stride as a consistent middle-of-the-road performer.

Maybe Millsy is the archetypal Melbournian musician. He bursts onto the scene in a brash way that will eventually grow to be embarrassing, latches onto this fame to sleep around town, drinking the free drinks while the going is good, only to settle into some honest work that requires him to drop his personality, live within his means, and become a 9-5 artist.

The single greatest thing about Robert “Millsy” Mills is that he’s essentially the glue of the Melbourne social scene. Everyone in Melbourne is only two degrees from the man. It’s true. Think about it. You know someone who knows him, even if tangentially. So, even if the real Millsy is just a man, slowly settling into years of plugging away as a professional musician as a professional musical theatre actor, he’s still the glue of the Melbourne scene that birthed him.

3/5

Review : The Death of The Album

Apparently the album is dead. Or it’s going that way. Its lungs are slowly filling with fluid, and we’re supposed to think back on the good times we’ve had with the format, and feel nostalgic for simpler times as it slowly dies in the corner.

“Remember when the album was still young, and it was basically just a couple of singles, surrounded by cover songs as filler?”

Oh yeah, I remember that, you say, hugging your copy of Please Please Me.

“Remember when the album was an unruly adolescent, testing boundaries, getting a little fat around the edges as the growing pains set in?”

You pull over the milk crate and take out your copy of Freak Out!, The Wall and Blonde on Blonde.

And just as you’re about to pull out Abbey Road, Kid A, Grace, Murder Ballads, Dark Side of the Moon, Illmatic, Low, Never Mind the Bollocks, The Chronic, Nevermind, The Downward Spiral, Led Zeppelin IV, 36 Chambers, Blood Sugar Sex Magick, London Calling, Stop Making Sense etc etc etc, and start really bawling your eyes out, there’s a knock at the door.

The door abruptly slams open, and in stumbles The Album; drunk, barely lucid, muttering to himself. He walks muddy footprints over your carpet, steps clumsily on the records scattered around the floor and slumps into a lounge chair.Drool dribbles from his lip, and he undoes his top button.

“The rumours of my death have been great exaggerated,” he says, smiling dumbly.

And it’s true, you think, if somewhat unfortunate in light of its recent performance; it’s not in the best shape, and it’s definitely seen better days, but the album isn’t dead.

Sure, the sprightly EP (which could be considered the Twitter of musical releases - everything a band is up to in under 160 characters) is a safer bet in these times when people’s attention spans shrink and shrink. It’s also always been the case that you’re going to need a good single or two to get your album off the ground, but the album is still a strong and worthy goal for any band, singer or pop star.

It’s a big ask to make a good album, and it’s a big cost for a record company to back an album, as opposed to a single – more recording costs, multiple singles, ongoing marketing etc etc. don’t get me wrong, I’m not apologising for them - hell, the record company is really the reason we’re hearing the “death of the album”, “online revolution”, “download generation”. Perfect cases for this are the constant re-issues of albums barely a year old – see Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, or the “Deluxe Edition” of Back to Black by Amy Winehouse.

The album has become fat and useless in many people’s hands.

“The Death of the Album” is the product of lazy, hyperbolic journalism. When Pitchfork claims that Kid A is the product of a bygone era when the album actually existed, it’s something they do with full knowledge that album reviews are their main trade. Imagine Pitchfork receiving an album for review in 3 years time, the reviewer flipping it open and thinking, “12 tracks in one release? What the hell is this?”

It’s not going to happen.

1/5

Review: Australian relations with China

Diplomacy should, at its best, be a fluid and pragmatic approach to resolving issues, forming alliances and settling disputes between nation states.

This is all fine and well if you’re, say, America or the UK. You have reasonable amount of history and heft to throw around, your military firepower is significant (even if dated, in Britain’s case), and your standing in the world is established.

But what happens when you’re a comparatively young, tiny nation in, as Jerry Seinfeld so kindly put it, “the arsehole of the world”, surrounded by countries that (excepting New Zealand) can only vaguely be referred to as “democracies”.

What happens if the world’s most populous nation, with a several million strong army, governed by a multi-headed bat-shit crazy dictatorship, fond of jumping to conclusions about “security” breaches and prone to declaring any dissent or even criticism as “terrorist” in nature, is your biggest trading partner?

Teddy Roosevelt’s “walk quietly, but carry a big stick” only applies if your big stick is proportional to the size of the person you are attempting to negotiate with. Australia’s stick is about 32 times smaller than China’s, and it’s not like it’s telescopic, or electrified, or it has some kind of gun mounted on the end of it; it’s just a goddamn stick.

So, Australia’s attitude with regard to diplomatic relations with China is to take the words “walk quietly” from Roosevelt’s advice, and ignore the big stick bit, because the closest thing we have to a large enough stick is an aging superpower on the other side of the world - MacArthur’s feeling on the proposed Australian/US WW2 in this paper is reasonably scary, given the possible modern day parallels.

It shouldn’t be a shit fight to put on the film about Rebiya Khadeer’s life, “The Ten Conditions of Love”, within the bounds of an international film festival on Australian soil. It also shouldn’t be a bureaucratic nightmare to prove the innocence of foreign businessman, or at least plead their case, when it turns out that at least part of the evidence against them is apparently the personal opinion of an intelligence officer speaking outside of their job role.

It would seem that Sino-Australian relations are at a significant low. The fact that it’s come to this over a documentary and the apparently personal opinion of an intelligence officer who likes to blog about international trade in his spare time does not bode well for Australia.

2/5