"Death of a Jammer"

This from Jammer Paul: I want people to look at Dan's web site and get inspired.



Death of a Jammer.

I am the defacto leader of a group called the Melbourne Culture Jammers, which grew out of the work of Adbusters magazine.One of our hardest working foot soldiers - a stenciler, graphic designer, website maker and seriously hard working jammer, a guy called Dan Mckay, was taken from us on Friday June 23rd. Thanks to a wet road, a car and a tree.

Dan hated cars, rode his bike everywhere, it is a cruel irony that a car should be so brutal to him.Dan (known online simply as "why?") was also the guy who spent a lot of his time taping up sheets with the words "Why? Why? Why?" all over town. It used to give me a big smile seeing them covering ads on Bourke street or wrapped on poles in the CBD.

It took us a few days to find out what had happened. evildoom_bunny received a short email from Dan's account, written by his dad. It said "Dan was in an accident last night, and you won't be hearing from him again." There was the shortest snippet in the paper about a "young man was killed Friday when his car left the road near Wallen" - which was Dan's home town. Not good. Then stillbeing found a funeral notice in the paper. But right up until the moment I was handed a program for the funeral, which had a big smiling picture of Dan on the front, I was trying to convince myself it wasn't him. Of all the people in the world, why this talented, bike riding, staunchly anti-capitialist caring guy? I think I'm still struggling to believe it.evildoom_bunny, stillbeing and I made our way out to a tiny church in Wallan for the funeral on Friday. It looked like a small town from the map, and it really looked like most of the town where there. The chapel itself was full, the similar sized room behind it was also full, and people stood three rows deep at the back of the room and around the door. The saddest part was, as I mentioned, finally having it confirmed that it wasn't just a mistake on our part - we hadn't misheard. Seeing his entire family choking back tears was hard, but the hardest part was his little dog. They brought her along to the ceremony - a little mixed black and white mutt - and she looked the saddest of all, utterly perplexed and struggling to make sense of all the people. I gave her a quick pat on the way out.

Dan was in fact a far more interesting guy than even we had heard. It was actually really, really, really interesting to hear about the rest of his life. He was about to embark on becoming a child care worker, ran every day with his dog, madly followed a certain football team. And a had lot of friends in the town, all of whom looked utterly downcast. He was also quite a well known stenciler, not just on the streets of Melbourne or at the recent stencil festival.The procession to the cemetery was at least fifty cars long. Two of the local police came to the funeral - they looked like friends - and blocked the highway which passes through Wallen to let them all through. We took our leave at that point, headed east because we saw some mountains in that direction. We ended up in King Lake, and took some very curvy roads out of the hills back to Melbourne. It was actually nice to see some forest, trees and mountains after the sad ceremony of the early afternoon.Dan's site it still up, I recommend it: Ask Why Why?.We are still getting used to the loss.He was only 21... :-(