An injection of Class A Awesomeness

August, 2010. Wow. This is my eighth month in. That’s... intense. It still feels like I’ve only been here a month or two. Amazingly, I got homesick for the very first time recently. It was quite a surreal experience. There are lots of things I miss individually of course – people, places, parties. A car and 24 hour Maccas. This was the first time though I felt a little wave wash over me. Australia wove. I was woven. Of all the things to set me off, it was a Facebook group called “Things Overheard at Macquarie Uni”. I had a little tingle recognising places, seeing friends’ comments and remembering adventures on campus. It’s not surprising really – I spent eight years there, almost 1/3 my life, and for the past 5 years it’s been where I’ve studied, worked and played (not in that order), so it’s been a huge part of me. Considering how much it came to define me though, Glasgow could not have come sooner.

Wait, was that serious crap? BORING! I know what you came here for! That’s right, salacious rumour mongering and borderline libel (did anyone else learn the difference between slander and libel from Spider-Man?). I shan’t disappoint as I deliver another injection of Class A awesomeness, taking you on a tour of the seedy streets of Glasgow’s underbelly.

Incidentally, on the night Carl Williams died, a bunch of us (predominantly Antipodean) went to trivia night and named our team “The Ghost of Carl Williams”. Nobody got it. So much for Australian celebrities. I fear if I were to announce “Adam’s looking to open a restaurant in Sydney!” nobody would bat an eyelid (also incidentally, I haven’t actually watched any Masterchef Australia, I’m just going off the SMH news feed. They’re very excited.) If he really wanted international recognition, Carl Williams should have done a cameo on Neighbours instead of killing a bunch of people. Or done a cameo on Neighbours AND killed a bunch of people. It worked for Kim Valentine*.

So, arriving back from Barcelona at the end of June I was doing preparations for a conference paper I was presenting that weekend, last minute as usual. Uncharacteristically I already had the research done, so just needed to coalesce it into paper format. Ladles and jellyspoons, let me introduce you to Screen Conference 2010. Screen is both an academic journal and annual conference hosted by the University of Glasgow. Both are world class, and regularly attract academics that literally ‘wrote the book’ in their particular field of interest. If you’ve never been to an academic conference before, let me set the scene. Conferences (usually) run for 2 – 3 days, are (usually) held over holidays, and are designed around a theme that everyone tries to shoehorn their research into, no matter how tenuous the link. Each day of the conference holds a number of panels comprising of (usually) three speakers, whose topics (ideally) have some sort of overlap. This year’s theme was the classically ambiguous ‘Performance’. It’s so vague it’s practically useless. It’s like in Year 8 when that kid says “The theme of The Silver Sword is the futility of war.” Nice work, Lucas McDonald*.

I was in the last panel of the conference, which means by that stage everyone, myself included, was well and truly over it. I’ve included the first 10 minutes here in case you were curious what the hell it is I actually do. This is... not really it, but I needed to say something as I don’t know enough shadow puppet shapes to make with my hands to entertain the audience for the full 20 mins. I warn you, this is well and truly an unimpressive and underwhelming paper I delivered. If you had to say something nice about it, you would describe it as competent. When I woke up very early that morning to finish it off, if I delivered my paper as intended I had to read it twice as fast and it went for 27 minutes. Suffice to say most of that morning was spent cutting around 60% of what I was going to say, and I still speak too fast. You are well and truly wasting your time by watching it all, since after the first minute you get the important bits of information, like:

1. I really, really, really am a gesturey guy like everyone’s been insisting lately.
2. My T-Shirt features a robot.
3. If you played a drinking game where you downed a shot every time I say “sort of”, you would be dead. However, instead of decomposing your body would be preserved in alcohol for the next 500 years until they can find a way to bring back the dead/you’d get eaten like a vodka melon at Freshers Week.
4. Following on from (1.), if you watched it without sound it would look like I was describing someone with really, really big tits.
5. Anyone can make their conference paper fit into the conference topic. My special skill is to fit the word ‘nipples’ into any paper.

You seriously don't need to watch this.

Anyway, I was expecting big things since it’s one of the top academic film conferences in THE WORLD. My conference experiences in the past had been fantastic, with fantastic food, fantastic drinking (respectable), and fantastic boozing (downright debaucherous) in a way that only people whose flights and accommodation are being paid for by the university seem to manage. I’ve made some great friends through conferences that I still keep in touch with, and, since I’d just said goodbye to two of my last Glesga friends in Barcelona, I thought it was probably a good idea to be sociable at this one also. The people did not disappoint, but everything else was pretty... underwhelming. I’d heard interesting things about the conference, that it was a pretty tough place with people itching to tear other people down. Screen has horror stories for making presenting students cry during question time, so I was expecting... I dunno, something. Instead it was all rather... meh.

Part of it was the conference panels only went for two days over the weekend (a weekend conference? Bizarre!), whereas my other ones had gone for three. There were seven panels on during each session, which meant there were a lot you missed (though this is fairly typical). The keynote speakers were rather average, though there were some excellent individual sessions and panels. Apparently organisers had made an effort to reign in some of the more confrontational types, and it’s true I only witnessed one blow up. Still, I think the vibe was largely underwhelming. It started with a lacklustre pre-conference welcome on Friday night, where food consisted of chips and peanuts. I am not kidding. Chips and friggin’ peanuts. Even high school debating nights get a crappy dip and supermarket cake! Previous conferences I’ve been to have dished out some amazing food, so we were off to a worrying start. (I’m happy to report it got quite a lot better during the main event, but still! First impressions!)

Usually at conferences you get a bit of segregation – there’s the kids table and the adult’s table, with established academics and professors entertaining themselves, while the only people in the world who could ever possibly be intimidated by them, PhD students, mill sheepishly amongst themselves, equal parts awe and disappointment on meeting their academic celebrity crushes who deliver papers they wrote eight years ago and couldn’t be bothered updated because hey, they’ve got tenure. Early career researchers are the worker bees that buzz between the groups, ‘networking’ and desperately trying to avoid having to take that job at the Royal Bank of Scotland because who needs money when you can be chronically underappreciated instead? The ghettos usually begin to break down on day two, dissolving over the conference dinner and turning into a massive brainy love-in by day three. At Screen though it never quite came together. The conference dinner was brief, everyone kind of went home after, and by what was essentially the second day (Sunday), people just split up and disappeared.

I was fortunate enough though to tag along with some Glasgow Uni based folk for an amazing post-conference dinner. Mel and husband Connor invited a few of us back to their pimped out penthouse apartment in the city centre, where Mel proceeded to whip up a multi-course meal that I would have to describe as pornographic. Seriously, it took about four hours to prepare, had upwards of 40 ingredients, and probably took the better part of a day to clean up after. I found it highly amusing sitting there with as blank a face as I could muster as conversation turned to British cartoons and schlock sci-fi from the 80’s. I would try and bring conversation back to familiar territory by chiming in with a pithy remark about Lindsay Lohan, but then I think she’s even more dated than Star Cops. We watched the first two episodes of said show, which I have to say was awesome. It’s odd though, whenever I hear an Australian accent on a show amongst foreign ones it always sounds so fake. The first time I heard Emilie de Ravin on Lost I thought she sounded terrible... until I found out she was from Victoria. At least she probably feels terrible too. I’m also terrible at picking when foreign characters actually ARE played by Australians, like watching the entirety of True Blood Season 1 before discovering Ryan Qwanten was from Home and Away, or thinking Dichen Lachman in Dollhouse did a great Australian accent in one episode and then finding out she’s an Adelaidy from Neighbours.

I digress. It’s kind of my thing.

All up, I think my experience with Screen was clouded by the fact that it was home territory, and I’d built up a lot of expectations going in to it. I’m sure it wasn’t the conference, it was me. The calibre of papers was quite impressive, I met a lot of great folk (though it was quite civilised this time, and unlike the last conference, we didn’t end up pole dancing at a place called Pop World). It was nice that when I presented I didn’t feel like a total fraud, but the interesting thing for me is that it cemented in my mind – This is not what I want to be doing. I’d been thinking for at least six months now that I don’t want to go into academia when I graduate, at least not for a number of years. Watching people playing the game; networking, publishing, reading, like, books and stuff, I was struck with a very strong conviction that it’s not the life for me. That was interesting considering other conferences have had the opposite effect on me.

Seriously though, chips and peanuts?!?!

Several weeks later, my alternative future vision became one step closer to fruition. After months of consideration, a resubmission and several increasingly snarky follow-up emails, I finally got approval to go to Hollywood! That’s right, thanks to the wonders that is Macquarie University postgraduate funding, the university will cover my airfare, cheap accommodation, food and some transport to interview film industry folks for three weeks! I still can’t quite believe my good luck, but it’s starting to dawn on me how much prep work I need to do, and how much schmoozing will be required. In celebration, I decided to buy some new clothes, since my wardrobe consists almost entirely of t-shirts with mildly ironic or amusing images. I did buy some clothes that you do up with buttons, but I really couldn’t go past an awesome dressing gown that had part of my tat printed all over it. I finally own something fine enough to be married in.

Do I want to be a Vegas pimp or do I want to be a wizard? WHY CHOOSE?!

There are a few more stories to tell, of visitors and Fringes, but that, as ever, awaits another day.

* I cannot verify these as facts as I was not there for these events. However, I can't deny them either on the same logic. I can also not deny that I've never seen Kim Valentine or Lucas McDonald in the same room at the same time. Think about it...