Thanks Louis! I could present an entire paper about the Mashd N Kutcher remix and the 'get on the beers' meme – I'll just attach too more images of it here, both from the LL, one with the potential to be a very mobile part of the LL (following Jackie Lou and Adam Jaworski on wearable texts). It's fascinating to see how this silly meme about Daniel Andrews' turn of phrase – originating in March 2020 – has morphed into a much larger, more complex phenomenon as Melbourne was plunged back into lockdown and then made its way out of it. It's affectively quite complex ... especially when it comes to explaining how a humorous meme about drinking beer became a song that packed dancefloors across Australia, and then not one but two epic Christmas light shows in two distant suburbs with very different socio-economic profiles! Your tip about the song by The Twilight Sad is such a good one, thank you! That image was actually sent to me by a colleague who found it in an inner north suburb – I had honestly just assumed it related to covid. It makes me wonder how much it really constitutes data for the study? I had honestly just cast a very wide net for all instances of love, support, etc. but it seems clear that this must actually date from before the pandemic. There's certainly a lot of love in the landscape and there are lots of varying reasons for that. I lacked the time to cover this but I'd really like to engage with these questions of time/space a bit more, perhaps with reference to the notion of 'chronoscape' that Gilles Baro has written about. I'm not really sure what to say about how these kinds of signs are emplaced, enregistered, reentextualised and recirculated. It's especially interesting that the affective resonance of these words can shift so much, from dour to hopeful (in my interpretation at least). Lots to think about! I have been thinking a little bit about rainbows, too. Maybe I'm an outlier in the LGBTQ community for saying this, but I think it would be really INappropriate to argue that children could be 'appropriating' a sign that indexes a natural wonder that has existed since the dawn of time? To my mind it's a somewhat nasty idea of ownership, with regard to a symbol less than a century old, for a pride movement that has existed for far longer. However (getting off my queer high-horse) I think there's a lot to be unpacked about how the rainbow is seen as an almost universal sign of hope and overcoming adversity – a way to index LGBTQ pride, but also to reassure kids that this tough time will end one day. Like Dolly Parton once said in a song for children, "to make a rainbow you must have rain"!
Thanks again for your comments :-)