All posts tagged blind

• November 27, 2017

  The Weekend Australian Magazine story: ‘Lockstep With Lockie: Santiago Velasquez and his guide dog’, November 2017

  A feature story for The Weekend Australian Magazine, published in the November 25-26 issue. Excerpt below.

  Lockstep With Lockie

  This black labrador spends every waking moment by his owner’s side. He’s not just a faithful companion, but Santiago Velasquez’s eyes on the world.

  

  Their day begins soon after 6am with a series of movements so familiar they’re like clockwork. After rising from their beds, positioned side-by-side, Santiago Velasquez and his companion greet each other with affection and a leash is clipped to a collar. It’s a couple of dozen steps from their bedroom to the front door of the apartment, then down three floors in the lift to a small garden so that one of them can water the grass. “Quick quicks, Lockie,” says the young man, using the voice command for toileting. “Quick quicks.”

  After breakfast, Velasquez — known to all as “Santi” — leads Lockie to the balcony where he brushes the dog in the morning light, black wisps of fur falling to the floor. The guide dog stands docile, wagging his tail and panting happily. “It’s a good bonding exercise,” says Santi, a handsome 21-year-old with a swimmer’s strong build, a crown of black hair and sporty-looking glasses. In the ­distance is an extraordinary view of the ­Brisbane city skyline and surrounding hills but Santi cannot see it. Since birth, he has been blind in one eye with only three per cent vision in the other.

  It is a Wednesday in mid-October and they have a big day ahead. In an unpredictable, fast-paced world, Santi and Lockie rely on familiarity and routine as much as possible. Theirs is an intimacy of constant contact. “He’s very, very attached — that’s a massive understatement — because we spend pretty much every moment of our lives together,” says Santi, who takes almost an hour to groom his black labrador and then painstakingly shave his own facial hair by feel with an electric razor. “He takes a long time for everything,” says Santi’s mother Maria, laughing and rolling her eyes in mock exasperation. In truth, she and her husband Cesar are nothing less than patient, having taught their blind son that his only problem is that he cannot see, and that his blindness is no excuse for not doing the same household chores as his sighted brother, 18-year-old Camilo.

  Downstairs at 9am, Santi reattaches the leash and repeats his voice command, while Lockie walks in circles and sniffs the lawn. “Quick quicks, buddy,” he says, and he means it: they have a bus to catch. Santi slips a fluorescent yellow harness over the dog’s head. With this action, Lockie has been trained to recognise that he is now in work mode, and his focus narrows to the singular task of guiding Santi from home to university — and, much later, back again. The dog is now six years old but has been in training since he was a puppy to fulfil this role. Santi never knew him as a puppy: Lockie was three when they first met on a rainy day at the Guide Dogs Queensland head office. Since January 9, 2015 — a date seared into Santi’s memory — they have scarcely spent an hour apart.

  To read the full story, visit The Australian. Above photo credit: Justine Walpole.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• September 28, 2017

  The Weekend Australian Review story: ‘Sight Unseen: Audio description for blind theatregoers’, September 2017

  A feature story for The Weekend Australian Review. Excerpt below.

  Sight Unseen

  For theatregoers with impaired vision, audio description services help to make sense of what’s happening on stage.

  

  You are sitting in the front row of a theatre when a calm, male voice begins­ to speak into your ear, welcoming­ you and setting out key details about the play you are here to see. “The Merlyn theatre is a flexible, black-box theatre space,” says the voice. “For Elephant Man, the audience sits in a rectangular seating bank opposite to the stage. The stage is raised about 40cm off the ground, and takes up the full width of the Merlyn, about 10m wide.”

  You are listening intently to the voice because­ you cannot see what it is describing. You are blind, but you love going to the theatre, and you want to better understand the performance beyond the dialogue that all attendees can hear from the stage. This is why you are at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne’s inner city on a rainy Friday night, listening as the shape and layout of the stage begins to take shape in your mind’s eye.

  “A black proscenium arch frames the playing area, about 5m tall, creating a wide rectangul­ar space,” continues the voice. “A ­curtain of black gauze covers the entire width of the stage at its front edge, separating us from the playing area. We can see through the sheer material, but it softens the edges of everything behind it.”

  You are hearing the voice because your earphones are connected to a wireless radio receive­r that sits inside the palm of your hand. Later, this wonderful technology will allow you to follow the action you can’t follow with your eyes.

  While the boisterous audience take their seats behind you in the minutes before a performan­ce of The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man begins, you are listening to pre-show notes that are being broadcast into your ears from the green room on the building’s third floor. There, a bespectacled 26-year-old named Will McRostie sits before a computer, a live video feed of the stage, and some audio equipment that allows him to speak into the ears of theatregoers who have registered for audio description services this evening.

  “The play makes extensive use of smoke and haze effects,” says McRostie’s voice. “Nozzles emitting smoke are hidden in the walls of the set, sometimes leaking heavy mist that tracks along the ground, and sometimes blasting plumes of light smoke that billows to fill the space. Two powerful fans set into the floor of the space are sometimes activated to catch this smoke and propel it toward the ceiling. On occasion, the smoke is so heavy it becomes difficult to see the performers.”

  Difficulty in seeing the performers is the entire­ purpose of audio description, a niche and little-known service that is sometimes — but not often — available for people with low vision who attend theatres and cinemas. Because of its exclusivity and the resources required to produce­ the service, it is usually available only in Australia’s capital cities, and only for the bigges­t productions on the annual theatre and cinema calendars.

  To date, audio description has largely been provided in an ad hoc manner by volunteers and, as a result, the quality of the service exper­ienced by blind patrons can vary wildly. McRostie is at the forefront of a movement to professionalise it, however, which is why he founded an arts start-up named Description Victoria in March this year.

  To read the full story, visit The Australian. Above photo credit: David Geraghty.

  No Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• July 10, 2012

  The Weekend Australian book reviews: ‘Digital Vertigo’ by Andrew Keen and ‘The Blind Giant’ by Nick Harkaway, July 2012

  Two digital-themed non-fiction books rolled into one review, for The Weekend Australian. The full review follows.

  New portals of perception in a digital age

  As cyberspace encroaches ever deeper into our everyday lives, it’s worth pressing the pause button to question how we choose to spend our time in an era of digital distractions. The two books under review present opposing viewpoints on this conundrum.

  In Digital Vertigo [pictured right], Anglo-American entrepreneur Andrew Keen takes a critical stance against the technologists behind social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, for reasons exemplified in the book’s subtitle. Keen knows his topic from the inside: on the cover the title is presented as a Twitter hashtag and the author’s name as @ajkeen. He has more than 19,000 followers on that medium, and this book seems to have been written between his frequent pond-hopping to speak at social media conferences.

  The tale begins with Keen staring at the corpse of Jeremy Bentham, the long-dead British philosopher and prison architect best known for his Panopticon design, in which inmates can be watched by outside observers at any time: “a prison premised upon the principle of perpetual peeking”, as Keen writes. Per his wishes, Bentham’s body is permanently exhibited inside a glass-fronted coffin — an “auto-icon” — within University College, London. Keen’s segue is that social media represents the “permanent self-exhibition zone of our digital age”.

  A curious introduction, no doubt. Time and again, Keen revisits the concept of the auto-icon while examining how our culture has become “a transparent love-in, an orgy of over-sharing” and comparing today to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where “to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude was always slightly dangerous”. Many readers will recognise a kernel of truth in this comparison: to log on to the internet in 2012 is to be inundated with requests (demands?) to share, to socialise with other humans.

  Keen’s title is also a reference to the 1958 Hitchcock film Vertigo, where the protagonist eventually learns that everything he believed to be true was the product of malicious deception by his peers. Keen ties this to social media by describing it as “so ubiquitous, so much the connective tissue of society” that we’re all “victims of a creepy story that we neither understand nor control”.

  The scenic route that Keen takes to arrive at this tenuous point is not particularly interesting. He fills entire chapters by paraphrasing academics and journalists, and attempts to list seemingly every start-up social business making waves in Silicon Valley. As a self-described “super node” of the social network, Keen seems quite proud to tell us that he closed his personal Facebook account in September last year.

  What could have been an original tech-dissident’s tale from the belly of the never sleeping beast is instead convoluted and messy. Keen draws heavily on historical references and too often these miss the mark, though a thorough examination of the creation and fiery destruction of the Crystal Palace in London is a highlight. It’s worth considering whether the meandering and messy nature of Digital Vertigo — including many typographical errors — is a symptom of the author’s inability to avoid the attention-shattering properties of the web.

  At the time of writing, @ajkeen was still tweeting, by the way.

  Conversely, British novelist Nick Harkaway tries his hand at long-form nonfiction for the first time in The Blind Giant [pictured right], and strikes on a narrative that immediately grips the reader. Using tight language and evocative descriptions, Harkaway’s introduction is a nightmare vision of a dystopian, tech-led society where “consciousness itself, abstracted thought and a sense of the individual as separate from the environment” are all withering away. A contrasting vision of a “happy valley” follows, and is just as realistic and compelling.

  Harkaway admits in the afterword that the book had its origins in “unpicking the idea that digital technology was responsible for all our ills”. This late-declared bias aside, The Blind Giant is a measured and thoughtful take on a problem that will concern us all soon, if it doesn’t already.

  Though the author is clearly tech-inclined – he notes on page one that he was born in 1972, the same year as the release of the first video game, Pong – he is not fanatical. He compares attempts to switch off from the internet with refusing to open your mail: “It doesn’t solve the problem, it just leaves you ignorant of what’s happening, and gradually the letters pile up on the mat.”

  His narrative arc is well considered and draws on disparate topics such as neuroplasticity (how the brain alters its make-up to take on new skills and abilities), whether social media helped or hindered the anti-Mubarak revolutions last year (in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and London) and the intriguing idea that we are living in an era of “peak digital”: “the brief and impetuous flowering of digital technology during which we inhabit a fantasy of infinite resources at low market prices”.

  Harkaway is a consistently engaging narrator: his fascinating analogies, elegant word play and occasional use of humour all point to his storytelling skills. True to the subtitle, his book cuts to the core of what it means to be human and how we might go about managing new and emerging technologies.

  It’s no self-help guide to unplugging yourself from the wired world, nor does he encourage us to spend more time with our heads in “the cloud”. Instead, Harkaway urges us to acknowledge our humanness on a regular basis, regardless of whether that human happens to be engaging online or off.

  Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminishing and Disorienting Us
  By Andrew Keen
  St Martin’s Press, 246pp, $32.95
  

  The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World
  By Nick Harkaway
  John Murray, 288pp, $21.99

  Andrew McMillen is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist.

  No Comments / Literary Criticism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• May 30, 2009

  A Conversation With Reggie Watts, American musician and comedian

  I spoke with musician/comedian Reggie Watts the week before his Brisbane Powerhouse show on May 23. For FourThousand, where a condensed version of this interview appeared, I wrote that “you should expect elements of beatboxing, poetry, live vocal looping and physical theatre among a highly improvised show that’s won Watts fans across the world.”

  In my review for Rave Magazine, I wrote that “Watts’ absurd humour is most potent when operating on a seeming stream-of-consciousness: his finely-tuned comedic mind happily deadpans rapidly-fired high-brow concepts and phrases, much to our amusement.”

  To get an idea of what Watts is all about, watch this video. Note that our conversation is directly transcribed, with little editing. Let me know how that works out. It’s also my first attempt at aping Wooooo Magazine‘s interview style.

  R: Check 1-2! Hi!
  A: Hello!
  R: Hey, whasuuuup?
  A: Hey Reggie, this is Andrew!
  R: [robot voice] How are you doing, Andrew?
  A: I’m good dude, how are you?
  R: [normal voice] I’m doing alright.
  A: What kind of mood are you in?
  R: Well, I don’t know. I was just showing my friend some things on the computer, and some effects pedals. So I guess I’m in a good mood.
  A: I’ve got two sets of questions for you, so it’s up to you to choose which one you want.
  R: Okay.
  A: I’ve got the serious, or the stupid questions.
  R: Serious or stupid questions. Hmm. That’s a hard one. I guess, maybe.. the stupid ones?
  A: Okay, we can try that.
  R: Depends on what ‘stupid’ means.
  A: Well, these are just random questions that I’m going to throw at you, to see how you respond.
  R: Okay, let’s do that. Sounds like fun.
  A: Do you have a power animal?
  R: Do I have a power animal?
  A: Yeah. An animal you think of in tough times, to get you through.
  R: I usually think of… wolves.
  A: A wolf?
  R: Yeah. My power wolf.
  A: That’s cool. Mine’s a dolphin.
  R: Oh, really? Dolphins are awesome!
  A: Yeah! They remind me of freedom, and I can just escape to that world and pretend I’m swimming in the ocean with my dolphin-friends.
  R: And they’re intelligent.
  A: Yeah, exactly! And I’ve heard they really like sex.
  R: They do like sex. They’re totally.. they’re awesome. They’re the closest to ‘us’ in the sea.
  A: Okay. How do you feel about baked beans?
  R: When I grew up, baked beans were essentially something you associate with poor families. You know, if you were poor, you got baked beans. So when I went to London for the first time and had the proper English breakfast, which includes baked beans, and I was like “whaaat? Why am I eating poor people food?” Which is a horrible thing to think, but that was just my programming. Now I really like them! It totally makes sense to me. I actually enjoy baked beans. It’s really weird.
  A: It’s a bit of a staple here in Australia as well. It’s not really associated with poor people, it’s just like a breakfast snack.
  R: Yeah, exactly! It’s not a poor people food at all here. It’s normal people food.
  A: What is your ideal breakfast?
  R: My ideal breakfast is probably the Swedish breakfast. It has sour milk, which you can’t really find anywhere except Scandinavia. And muesli. And toast, with fish. And you pull herbs right off of a little bush and have that with the fish.
  A: Whoa.
  R: Yeah, it’s pretty weird. But it’s a great breakfast and I always feel really good after eating it.
  A: You seem to prefer the cold breakfast over the hot breakfast.
  R: It depends. Sometimes I feel like eggy-weggs. But for me, cold breakfasts are a little more efficient than a hot breakfast. Those are more involved. The hot breakfast is something you sit down with and really HAVE the breakfast. Whereas if it’s muesli and soy milk, or yoghurt, you can just take it with you and eat it. You don’t feel like an asshole.
  A: Yeah, you can eat it in front of the computer, or whatever you want to do.
  R: Exactly!
  A: Whereas the hot breakfast, I associate that with, say, reading a newspaper.
  R: Yeah, you take your time. When you have time for breakfast – have a hot breakfast!
  A: Do you read newspapers?
  R: I don’t. I read all my news online.
  A: Me too. Did you ever read newspapers?
  R: I never did. I tried to, but I couldn’t get into it. I know people who just love to crack open that newspaper and smell the ink, but I just found it unruly. Every time I open up a newspaper, I just feel like doing a bit with it, like a gag. The sound of rustling paper – I just want to keep doing that perpetually, and never find whatever I’m looking for, and keep folding it endlessly. To me, the newspaper is more of a ploy than an actual informational tool.
  A: Would you ever date a blind girl?
  R: I would date a blind girl. Yeah. Why not?
  A: If she was a total babe.
  R: Absolutely. Yeah!
  A: What about a deaf girl?
  R: A deaf girl would be great, too!
  A: Do you think you could accurately portray your personality to a deaf girl?
  R: Absolutely, because a deaf girl can see. If she was deaf AND blind, then you’d have a little bit of a problem. But I’d probably hug her a lot, and she’d probably really respond to that.
  A: Yeah, she’d be really into touching. The tactile.
  R: Yeah. I guess I’d just have to find a new way to relate to someone. But human beings are pretty adaptable.
  A: Right on. If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do today?
  R: If I knew I was going to die tomorrow.. (speaks slowly) I would probably get.. like, a bunch of heroin, and do that, and then just talk to people on beaches, and have girls come over. Or something like that. (laughs) And have someone record it all, and then have someone remix it later.
  A: I took a look at your Vimeo page, and I saw that you’re getting into uploading videos on there.
  R: Yeah.
  A: Are you recording anything while you’re here in Australia?
  R: I might. Sometimes when I travel I feel like recording a lot. But so far I haven’t really felt compelled. I’ve taken some little videos with my phone that I might upload at some point. Sometimes I get really addicted to uploading. But I’m better at uploading photos, I definitely put photos up all the time. Videos are a little bit more involved. They take longer, it’s not as fun. Whereas a photo I can take it and upload immediately. And a video is just like (groans) “ughhhh”.
  A: Do you play video games?
  R: I do like video games. But I don’t have a lot of time to play them. What usually ends up happening is that I find a video game and I just play it straight, for like a week, and then I’m good for a year. The last game I played – which they’re making another version of, I can’t believe it – it was an amazing, amazing game called Mass Effect, for the Xbox. If you like science fiction, especially 70s-style science fiction.. it’s futuristic, but it has a kind of Eno-vangelist sci-fi soundtrack. The plot is heavy, and deep, and the characters are amazing. It’s a really incredible game.
  A: So you prefer sitting in front of a TV to play games, rather than handhelds?
  R: Handheld’s alright. I have a DS. It’s good for travelling, but I would prefer to be immersed in a projected game. I’m going to get some HD head-mounted display goggles, and hook the video game console up to that so I can be really immersed. Just lay back on the bed and go for it!
  A: God damn, they make those?
  R: Yeah, they’re actually pretty cheap! You can get some high-def ones for $800 American dollars. Pretty fuckin’ cheap.
  A: So you’ve tried it out?
  R: Yeah. They’re great, they’re really light-weight. You wear them, and you have the stereo vision because there’s a separate monitor for each eye. It’s great.
  A: That’s awesome. Do you play poker?
  R: I don’t. I don’t like poker.
  A: You’ve tried to play?
  R: I’ve tried to, but it’s not fun. When everyone’s betting, it just seems overly, unnecessarily complicated. I would play poker just as long as I could make fun of poker the whole time. If I was allowed to, if people weren’t taking it too seriously. It’s such a silly game. Everyone’s monitoring each other. I understand that people are into the strategy of it, but at the same time, it’s just ridiculous.
  A: Yeah. It seems a pretty funny thing to devote your life to, being a professional poker player and learning how to watch other people play.
  R: Yeah. There’s an art to anything, but when I look at poker, I just think (groans) “Oh god.”
  A: “You guys are lame.”
  R: Yeah! “You guys suck!” (laughs) I don’t think that, it’s just funny to think about what people take seriously.
  A: Do you think people take you seriously?
  R: Probably not! I think they take me seriously in that they believe that I exist. But.. some people do. It depends on the context. When I have a conversation with someone, it’s pretty real, but when I give interviews and I’m in a weird mood, I might just fabricate a lot of things. But let the interviewers in on it. Just because I find that amusing.
  A: If you couldn’t rock an afro, which hairstyle would you have?
  R: I would probably do a mohawk. Some kind of weird, shaved-on-one side, spiky-on-the-other future punk-rock look.
  A: A giant mohawk? Like three feet high?
  R: Not quite a straight mohawk. It’d have to be something a little weird.
  A: Is there such thing as a free lunch?
  R: Absolutely. I have them all the time! (laughs)
  A: Who is your favourite Looney Tunes character?
  R: That’s a hard one. I don’t know if I’d want to be him, but the Tasmanian Devil is pretty hilarious. I guess the most.. intellectual of the characters would be Bugs Bunny, so I’m gonna say that even though it’s pretty generic. He was the most balanced, and in control. He tricked people. I like that about him.
  A: Do you think that the bunny or the devil could potentially be your back-up power animals?
  R: I think that the devil could definitely be a back-up animal (laughs) He’s kind of like Animal from The Muppets. Basically, when he stops, he’s Animal, and then he just turns back into a brown tornado.
  A: Do you think he’s schizophrenic?
  R: I don’t think he’s schizophrenic. He’s just got a lot of energy. And he’s got a caveman mentality.
  A: How’s your hotel?
  R: It’s an awesome hotel! It’s very civilised. It has a laundry machine, and a dryer, a microwave, a little kitchen, and a nice shower.
  A: Is Trent [Barton, Zero Hour Collective] taking care of you?
  R: Oh yes. He’s a professional.
  A: So he’s not letting you wander out of his sight, so you can go and explore Sydney’s slums?
  R: No, not yet. I’m sure that will come in the future. As they all get more successful, I’ll get worse living conditions.
  A: You’re here for six weeks, aren’t you?
  R: Yeah, I leave on the 11th or 12th of June.
  A: You’re involved in the Sydney Festival, right?
  R: Yeah, Vivid Sydney. It’s kind of confusing, because there’s three things going on: Vivid Sydney, Smart Light Festival, and Luminous, the Eno festival. It’s a little confusing. I think next year, they’re gonna have to work on their branding. I get what they’re doing artistically, because I spoke to the directors recently, but I shouldn’t have to think about it. But whatever, it’s going to be a great festival. Their intentions are pretty humanitarian.
  A: Sweet. Do you Google yourself?
  R: I do, all the time. I use Google Alerts.
  A: Oh really? That was my next question. So you’re down with the technology.
  R: Yeah, man.
  A: You know what’s being said about you.
  R: Yeah. I’ve always loved communications technology. I’ve been rocking smart-phones since the first smart-phone. I’ve been using organisers since the concept of organisers came out. Commodore 64s, scientific calculators.. I’ve always had some kind of a computer or storage device, and once networking became online, then I was totally down with that.
  A: So when this interview is published online, you’ll be the first to know about it through Google Alerts.
  R: Yes! It’s fascinating. It’s a good thing, because there’s so much stuff out there. I think everyone should put an alert out for their name.
  A: When was the last time you cut yourself while shaving?
  R: Man, the last time I shaved was a long time ago! I would say, maybe, seven or eight months ago.
  A: Did it hurt?
  R: Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it doesn’t, you know? (puts on British accent) If it’s a light graze, then it doesn’t hurt as much. (laughs) I don’t know. Probably not. No. I’m going to say no – okay, yes, it does, it hurts. Sorry. (laughs)
  A: Do you believe masturbation is a sin?
  R: Well, I grew up Catholic, so probably at first, I did. But not for long, it didn’t really stop me as a kid. I was pretty.. haywire, as they say. But I don’t think so. I think it’s necessary! (laughs)
  A: I just can’t get how those devoutly religious people do it. Or don’t do it, in this case.
  R: It’s just about self-control. That’s all. Why else would someone deny something that happens naturally? It’s like if you wanted to start a religion and make up arbitrary things that people can’t do. Like, “you can’t pick up coins from the ground”, or “you have to avoid low-hanging branches”. Things of that nature, and then people accept it – “yes, of course!” – and then you give these stupid reasons for why you shouldn’t. And some people might start to believe that. It’s just the power of belief that gives the strength to limitations.
  A: Alright, I’m done with the stupid questions, so I might move onto some more serious ones now.
  R: Alright.
  A: Is that okay?
  R: Yup.
  A: Okay. At what time of day are you most productive?
  R: Sometimes it’s late afternoon, sometimes it’s late at night. So if I had to give you an hour, it’d be 9pm.
  A: Do you stay up late?
  R: Yeah, I usually go to bed at around 3am.
  A: Cool. Me too.
  R: Yeah. It’s the best time.
  A: Are you a procrastinator?
  R: Definitely.
  A: How do you deal with it?
  R: I hate it, sometimes. I just end up getting in trouble, being late, or not completing something.
  A: Have you gotten better?
  R: Yeah. It’s an ongoing battle with myself. The best way to deal with it is to just be on time. Keeping a timely manner is the best way to avoid it, but it’s hard for me, because I like waiting until the last minute. It’s just my personality.
  A: Did you go to university?
  R: I went to Cornish College Of The Arts in Seattle, Washington, for about two and a half years. I studied Jazz Voice.
  A: Did you leave your assignments until the last day?
  R: Of course. Always. Sometimes I didn’t even do ’em.
  A: You procrastinated so hard that you didn’t hand it in.
  R: Exactly. Which then moves beyond procrastination..
  A: Into, what would you call it.. failure?
  R: Yes, failure. (laughs)
  A: When someone meets you for the first time, how do you describe yourself?
  R: (pauses)
  A: Or do you just assume that everyone knows who you are, instantly, because you’re a mega-celebrity?
  R: No, no! That would be horrible to constantly assume that. “Don’t you know who I am?!” I don’t know, I guess I call myself an abstract musical comedian.
  A: So when you tell people you’re a comedian, do they ask you to tell them a joke?
  R: Sometimes, yeah.
  A: Does it shit you to tears?
  R: Not really. I either tell them that I don’t do jokes, or I just make up a really stupid joke that doesn’t make any sense. And they’ll be like “wow, I shouldn’t have asked that.”
  A: “This guy’s not funny at all!”
  R: “I don’t get it, how does he make a living?”
  A: I was watching the promo video on the Zero Hour site, where you explain that you investigate the absurd side of comedy. Does that come easily to you?
  R: I think so. It’s the way I’ve always seen life. I’ve always seen things as silly. Goofy. Even death, at times, can be goofy.
  A: I watched that CollegeHumor video of yours, which deals with a pretty humorous topic in a pretty serious way. Or at least it appears to be serious. Would you consider that video to be absurdist humour too, because it takes a non-serious topic into a serious context?
  R: Absolutely, yeah. It’s all about context and contrast. You take something serious and you expose how it’s actually absurd if you look at it through a different lens.
  A: From what I’ve seen, your act uses a lot of swearing. Does that come easily, too?
  R: I like swearing, but I like using it because it really gets the idea across. Or if you overuse it, then it becomes ridiculous. The audience wonders when it’s going to stop. It’s a fun thing to disarm people with, or to shock them into understanding that it’s not shocking. It’s just stupid.
  A: People get offended by certain words, and then if you overuse them to the point of absurdity, that says to people, “well, they’re just words, why are you getting so pissed off?”
  R: Yeah, you take the power away from it. And then sometimes people get angry because of that! “Oh, now we can’t complain about it, because it doesn’t mean anything!” Well, I’m sorry!
  A: “I’m sorry for being so clever!”
  R: Yeah. “You should have thought of it first!”
  A: How did the CollegeHumor [“What About Blowjobs?“] collaboration come about?
  R: CollegeHumor was co-founded by my former roommate, Jacob Lodwick. I met those guys through him. They’d come to my shows, and we’d explore the idea of doing something together. “What About Blowjobs” came about as a result of that. It was good!
  A: It was good. Do you ever experience gear failure on stage?
  R: Sometimes, yeah. But it’s just an opportunity to do something different, until it’s resolved.
  A: Because you’re all about spontaneous performance: “no two shows are the same”.
  R: Absolutely.
  A: Do you ever sabotage your own gear to put yourself at a disadvantage?
  R: (laughs) It’s kind of hard to do that. “Oh, I know who did that. I know what the problem is!” But no, it happens on occasion. It’s fine, I like it.
  A: When you go and see a show, what do you like to see?
  R: I like to see anything that’s really good. It can be serious, humorous, weird; dance, poetry, anything really, as long as it’s coming from a place of mastery. Of clear vision, or clear voice. That’s all that matters to me. Sometimes an idea isn’t fully developed, but it’s still great.
  A: Is your show an attempt to capture that clear voice?
  R: Kind of. The clear voice is the unclear voice in my show, but it’s a form of that, for sure. In my own way.
  A: What’s awesome about touring the world?
  R: Getting to know the world better.
  A: What sucks about touring the world?
  R: Not being able to stay healthy on the road, because you’re not living a consistent lifestyle.
  A: How do you deal with that?
  R: You don’t, you just try to do the best you can.
  A: Suck it up!
  R: Yeah, try to take a long vacation.
  A: Okay, last question. What do you fear?
  R: What do I feel?
  A: Fear.
  R: I guess I fear irrelevance, and dying from some stupid health condition.
  A: In what kind of way do you want to die?
  R: I don’t want to die at all, but I don’t know if that’s possible yet. (laughs) But along the way, I want to do the best to treat myself well, and limit the possibilities of death happening early.
  A: Awesome, great outlook.
  R: Thank you.
  A: You’re up in Brisbane this week. The band supporting you are pretty kickass, you should check them out. They’re called Yeo & The Fresh Goods.
  R: Oh, cool man. I’m definitely looking forward to it.
  A: Thanks for your time, Reggie.
  R: Thank you! Goodbye, sir.

  Well, I hope that was mildly amusing. It was fun to do something different, right? More about Reggie at his site. He’s on Twitter, too.

  1 Comment / Conversations / Andrew McMillen

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