In the mid 90s, a Kiwi girl named Petra Bagust became the hot chick of the moment with a large section of New Zealand’s disaffected but rising geek overclass. The TV show was Ice TV, pitched at 12-14-year-olds but rapidly winning a larger audience with older teens and twenty-somethings thanks to the odd and often absurd wit of Jon and Nathan, the other presenters, and particularly their willingness to openly mock BH90210 which screened as part of the show. Alongside Jon and Nathan was Petra, who was pretty, smart, and frequently able to keep up with the boys in the madness stakes. Every 90-degree-er’s ideal girlfriend, in other words.
(Petra has since fallen from the early glory, and now presents a host of lifestyle and travel programmes that completely fail to tap into the lunacy of those early Ice shows. She’s growed up, one supposes.)
Most of you reading this will have heard of Leon, fellow nomad, boy of the bread, old and trusty friend, the donkey to my moose, and the guy i set out travelling with 16 months or so ago. Well, one afternoon, in the late 90s, Leon was with friends at a museum in the south of New Zealand, and he stumbled across Petra. She was filming a segment for whatever TV show she’d landed on – this was in the waning days of Ice, when the other options were just opening up – and naturally, Leon went up and had a chat. Like most Kiwi personalities, she was perfectly happy to chat away. She even co-operated above and beyond when Leon asked for a signature for me – she wrote me something akin to a short letter, complete with sexual innuendo and a secret piece of information that “no-one else knew” (and no, I’m still not gonna pass it on). I was stoked. It made me laugh.
Leon is currently working backstage on ‘When Harry Met Sally’ in the West End, starring 90210’s Luke Perry (everything connects!) and Buffy’s Alyson Hannigan. (Luke was in the Buffy movie! Everything Connects!!!)
I’ve been a Buffy fan since the start, watching the first ep broadcast on the brand-new NZ channel 4 on the advice of Phil Wakefield in the Evening Post newspaper. I wasn’t convinced by it at first – good, sure, but missable – and it was only as the weeks rolled on that it became apparent what show creator Joss Whedon was doing.
What he was doing was making one of the best TV series in the history of the medium. Seriously. It is narrowly beaten by Freaks and Geeks in my personal list of modern greats, edging out Homicide and Twin Peaks.
Key to that success was the performance of Alyson Hannigan as Willow, nerdy sidekick and audience-identification figure. At least, she was in episode one. She changed a lot over the show’s seven seasons, to say the least.
Hannigan also found a measure of fame as Michelle, the flute girl in American Pie, a good film that became a huge success based solely on one killer line she delivers with great style.
And so I spoke to Leon. “Do with Alyson like you did with Petra and I shall make you like unto a GOD!!!”
So he did.
So now I’ve got to make him a God.
Where’s my prize?
I picked 14 of 19 correctly in my Oscars picks. 15 if you cut me some room for rooting for Keisha against all the odds, and count my second choice of Charlize.
I was outfoxed on Tim Robbins over Benicio, LOTR’s screenplay win over American Splendor, LOTRs costume win over Pearl Earring (I stand by the choice, Oscar likes the period dramas), and LOTR’s editing win over City of God (boo! City of God shoulda won that one!).
Yay to all the Kiwis involved. What a massive number of trophies coming home to New Zealand this year… cool bananas. I can only imagine the good vibes swimming around Wellington right now. Good on ya mates.
—
Some Amsterdam writing up has occured in my travel email. If you haven’t subscribed, well, you should. It’s hardly a high-traffic email list (about one every 2 weeks last year) and you get more of ME! Which can only be a good thing. Subscribe by sending a blank email to morgueatlarge-subscribe@topica.com, and you’re done.
—
Crufts was just on TV. It is wrong. Dog shows should be about dogs running around sniffing things and jumping up at things and splashing through things and generally making chaos. That is the fun! Show dogs are not fun.
—
Actually got off my behind and submitted Fell Legacy to a real live publisher. Worth a shot, anyway. More news as it comes to hand!!!!
Morgue Cubed
When Alien 3 came out I insisted on calling it ‘Alien Cubed’. I still think of it like that sometimes.
This is in Rotterdam, btw.
[morgueatlarge] The Nether Regions
[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent March 2004]
Long time no email, but the reason is that little has happened. As Europe starts to thaw, though, the travel bug starts to kick in, and that means some emails should be swinging out from Edinburgh in the nearish future.
Cal and I are just back from 4 days in the Netherlands. We hopped across Saturday morning to Schiphol, the only destination in Europe served by Edinburgh’s airport – quite an education to see how many places trains from Schiphol can reach inside of an hour. But we were heading to Amsterdam.
Going to Amsterdam is like going back to University. You enter a world that is entirely set up to provide you with excuses to get very drunk, very stoned and very laid. The bare facts of sex, drugs and, er, more sex and drugs are treated so matter-of-factly that you might as well be living in a hostel. And the whole red-light district is really not that different from half-price cocktail night at Zebos. (Non-wellingtonians – Zebos is a prime haunt for underage drinkers in NZ’s capital city. At least, it was two years ago. I might be out of date.) There’s even some serious stuff going on (museums) which you can drop in on for a couple hours each day, before the fun starts.
Of course, University wasn’t like that for most people. For most, as far as I can gather, it was kind of like walking through a carnival with hardly any money, seeing all the banners and watching all the rides and occasionally splashing out and trying something, like say taking a look at the monkey with the head of a fish, an having an even chance it was way less interesting than the huckster out front made it seem.
Where was my point again?
So. Amsterdam. I’m not gonna talk in this email about the prostitutes and drugs, mostly because I didn’t try out either. Suffice it to say that everything you have heard is true, and that no matter how many times people tell you that everything you have heard is true, you won’t quite believe it until you go there and see for yourself.
Instead I’ll talk about the Anne Frank house. (And he changes the tone of the email with a single giant wrench!)
—–
I’ve still not read Anne Frank’s diary, but I was familiar with the contents – family in hiding, Nazis discover them, horrific ending that is hard to summarize without seeming inappropriately flip. Anyway, in preparation for this visit I read a little bit about it, still not the actual diary (though I plan to, still, yes, I know I know) but quotes and notes, enough to know what was going on and who the people were.
I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.
The queue is long, and the place is full. It’s like a mourner’s procession, or gawkers slowing at an accident, but it’s both more profound and more sinister than that. The participation in the Anne Frank House experience is an integral part of its nature – it is a shrine, now, and Anne’s sad fate has become a conscious and conscientious symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust, and indeed the horrors of human nature. As you pass through the narrow rooms it is impossible to forget that this is what Anne’s diary recorded, above all – the nature of living, as a human, in a difficult world. People getting by, morning turning into night. Her account is both all-encompassing, because it is about every human, and devastatingly unique, because of the specific circumstances in which she wrote.
From my journal:
“I spent the whole time feeling as if my heart had turned to wood and was trying to float to the surface. A strange jolt to come through a door and see the room Anne lived in, all the images of film stars still glued in place on the wall. It won’t be easy to forget. A good thing.”
A horrible place. Another reminder of the black rents the Nazis carved across the continent just a few short decades ago, rents that will take a few more generations to heal – if they ever do.
—-
Some travel irony for you:
Hotelier in Rotterdam: “I think all Europeans should learn their mother tongue and English. It is stupid that some don’t! I hate the fact that we all have to learn so many languages. It’s those peoples like the French, they are so arrogant, only wanting to speak French!” Name of hotel: Hotel Bienvenue.
—-
I may not have sent out a morgueatlarge in a while, but I post on my blog every few days now. Getting the hang of it, slowly, although still prone to longwinded political-type rants, so fair warning of that. Currently at the top (March 3 entry) is a photo of me in Rotterdam, if you like that sort of thing.
Blog is at: http://www.additiverich.com/morgue/
Go read it.
—-
Happy birthday to my dear papa!
Peace to you all
~`morgue
Back, alive
Any city where it’s easier to find drugs and prostitutes than chocolate is a city with its priorities seriously screwed up.
More to come.
The Amsterdam Wink
When you tell people you’re weekending in Amsterdam, they give you an odd sort of nudge-nudge-wink response. All of them, regardless of age or class, feel compelled to shake their shoulders and cock their eyebrows. Its sort of charming, really.
We’re landing at 9.30 tomorrow morning Netherlands time. Monday morning we plan on heading on to Rotterdam via the Hague where we want to see the international court of justice. Everyone says Amsterdam is wonderful. I look forward to plenty of happy walking-around, but I also expect it to be cold. I have no idea what to expect of Rotterdam.
This will be my first time out of the UK since July. I am thoroughly excited. It’s been a long period of bedding down, and this is the first sign of coming out the other side.
—
Like all movie geeks, I follow the Oscars despite knowing its all a sham, a farce, etc etc. Find the funniest coverage on the net at www.fametracker.com, “the farmer’s almanac of celebrity worth”. Seriously worth a look.
Wicked Minds
(More politics. Man, I’ve gone all political this week. Some non-political stuff will come soon, I promise.)
A couple of commenters have pulled me up for not making clear that the either/or rhetoric isn’t exclusive to the political right. It isn’t, of course, and it was remiss of me not to make that a bit clearer. However, I do identify the creation of false dichotomies as a major current rhetorical tactic by the political right, all over the world. I also think it is far less common in the rhetoric used by the political left. Both sides use it, but it fits the right’s agenda more.
This is not to say that the left use less rhetoric than the right – just that this one tactic turns up more on the right than the left.
A counterexample would be the left’s tendency to demonize the right. A great deal of leftist rhetoric revolves around revealing the ‘true motives’ behind a political act, and pointing out how abhorrent the motives are. This rhetorical strategy is appeals to the left’s people-base, because lefties almost by definition tends to view acts in terms of the purity of their moral intention. It is used by the right, but much more so by the left.
A great deal of this commentary is vacuous. (Especially at the extremes, where David Icke-alikes construct ever more absurd conspiracies around what are often fundamentally sound insights.) It’s an effective rhetorical strategy playing to the converted or the wavering, but it is rarely legitimate. Ultimately, it’s too reductive – it reduces complex human beings acting in complex systems to units of simplistic motivation. This is the irony of this talk from the left – the side that prides itself on its humanity is constantly dehumanising its opponents.
A subset of this is to characterise the mass of rightist voters as dupes of the wicked minds of those pulling the strings, along the lines of the old Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’. This is a rhetorical strategy too, but I am not as quick to dismiss it as vacuous.
While too simplistic, I believe that there such a thing as ‘false consciousness’, after a fashion. I believe that the mass of all people are not ‘self-aware’, in the sense that we do not truly comprehend the implications of our own actions or the meaning of the words we speak.
In fact, I think that this is scientifically and spiritually undeniable. It’s also a pretty tough-sell of an idea.
Hmm. There’s more, but it can wait.
Either/Or
It seems to be an overwhelming tactic of the reactionary right – to structure all issues as an “either/or” choice.
This means that any challenge to their position “x” is taken as proof that the challenger supports position “y”. Instead of defending “x”, they attack “y”.
It is an old, old, old rhetorical trick.
Most recently it has been used, in a bunch of forms, by those who sought to garner support for the war in Iraq. Any challenge to the invasion of Iraq is instantly met with “but the Iraqis are better off!”, as if the choice was between “x” an invasion where lots of innocents died and “y” Saddam Hussein running his totalitarian state unchecked.
The whole point of opposition to the war was that there was *another way*. There were many, many other courses of action that were vastly preferable and at least worthy of exploration but which were completely ignored. They continue to be ignored, because it suits those who went to war to use that simple rhetorical device of “either/or”.
The media do not make this clear. The media, print media especially, seek balance through “quote/counterquote”. So someone says the war was unjust; the counterquote is “but the Iraqis are free”. Nowhere in the mainstream media is the illegitimacy of this argument made clear – it is left to the columns of left-wing pundits, if it is even mentioned there.
Yet this is the most important thing we need to know about the debate over the rightness of the war – the proper parameters of the discussion.
It is not an “either/or”, but the media portrays it as such. Recognise this, and you have a disconnect. A step along the road.
—
And while I’m thinking about the war, and disconnects associated with it, how come no-one has pointed out the most damning fact to come to light in the whole Hutton inquiry, namely this: Downing Street sought to make the dossier as strong as possible in order to garner support for the war.
The only conclusion one can reach from this is that they had already decided to go to war on grounds other than WMDs.
If they already had enough evidence of WMDs to go to war, they would not have needed to strengthen the dossier.
(There is another possible conclusion, namely that the PM had been convinced but didn’t think his backbenchers would be. This is hardly any more flattering for those involved.)
It’s a logical puzzle and there’s no way out of it that doesn’t make the government look bad. However, the mainstream media has done nothing to point it out. That’s why you’re reading it here in a blog by a New Zealander instead of somewhere more reputable. But hey, don’t take my word for it – do the sums yourself. If they were trying to strengthen the dossier, then they’d already decided to go to war based on reasons other than WMDs.
Maybe this just proves that the real reason they went to war was to liberate the Iraqis, after all. Silly me.
Private Eye and Osama
Further to the rant on disconnection yesterday, Cal and I have been getting the Private Eye this year. It’s a great little satire-paper that comes out ever 2 weeks to rip into all the latest nonsense of the media and government and law etc. I’ve known about it forever, you can pick it up in several mag shops around Wellington, but it really makes a lot more sense when you’re in the UK. It’s even more dense in references to a specific social context than the brilliant sarcastic tech-geek journal Need To Know.
Private Eye is the closest thing I’ve found to the kind of disconnect-encouragement I was talking about. It isn’t exactly right – it’s more about pointing out hypocrisy and manipulation of all flavours rather than illuminating readers as to the ways in which the pop media is limited – but it’s better than nothing. Of course, it’s all very upper-middle-class and wry and arch, so much
so that I suspect it’s pretty much integrated into the whole system here, like a court jester.
Anyway. I like it. Is fun.
—-
Cal and I went to see ‘Osama’ last night, about a girl posing as a boy in order to get work in Taliban-run Afghanistan. Harrowing. Most reminded me of ‘Bandit Queen’, a similar catalogue of a society’s systematic abuse of women. I have a strand of political indignation running at the moment, though, so one strong reaction was ‘all those who supported the invasion/bombing of Afghanistan will use this film to justify their position, and they have no right to do so’. Grrr.
I’m also grumpy because of the increasing tendency of US liberals to denounce Michael Moore in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of US conservatives. Moore’s sins are tiny and his positive impact huge – denouncing him only serves the interests of the those you claim to oppose! Grrr again.
And grr to the row of people who talked through the first half of Osama, and harrumphed with indignation when I told them to shut the fuck up. Grrr.
—-
Enough grr. Love instead. Love to you all.
Especially love to Leon. Verily, he is like unto a god. But more on that later.
[mediawatch] The Power of the Disconnect
(warning: this will be a long train of thought about media and politics and stuff. there won’t be a joke at the end. skip it if this stuff bores you.)
So one of the things I got out of the Palestine event was another angle on the same issue I’ve been messing with for years: the role of the popular media in perpetuating injustice.
I think now, more than ever, people are aware that the mediated presentations of political content can be deceptive. Everyone knows that you can’t trust the media – or at least, everyone says they know. Unfortunately, it continues to be clear that most people aren’t nearly as good as they claim to be at identifying and managing media slant.
There are dozens of ways in which the workings of big media obscure issues, and most of those ways are seized upon and actively exploited by the savvy PR people who are an essential part of the entourage of anyone in the public eye. I’m not going to go into those right now. There’s plenty of other places to read stuff like that.
What we as a society need, then, is a way to take this notion of media-awareness and make it an actuality. And a key tool in that mission is the disconnect.
Everyone has experienced this at some point. Something you know about or care about has turned up in the newspaper or on TV, and you’ve watched/read the coverage and been taken aback by it. Maybe it angered you; more likely it just made you realise how far their portrayal was from your experience.
That is the disconnect.
The disconnect is powerful. Most of us don’t encounter personally-important things in media coverage often enough to experience the disconnect. But I suspect that if someone was to have enough disconnects, in short enough timespan, they would start to identify the patterns behind the disconnects. Their claims of media-awareness would become actual instead of notional.
Consider the marketing goal of imparting the value of a brand or a product through impressions. If I remember right, something like seven impressions (advertisements, people mentioning it, seeing it on display) are needed to convince someone to buy a product they didn’t start out looking for.
So there’s a target for us: as many people as possible, seven disconnects in a year.
Why do we want to do this? Because society is manipulated. We are all caught up in an echo chamber that repeats its truisms in our ears over and over, and the most dangerous thing isn’t that we’ll believe the truisms, but that we’ll forget there’s a lot of other important things that aren’t even being talked about.
The disconnect is when you realise that media coverage is *missing the important point*. No, let me rephrase. The disconnect is when you realise that media coverage is *answering the unimportant question and ignoring the important one*.
How to encourage disconnects?
That’s tricky. My first idea was a regular article in a mag like New Zealand’s Listener, a left-leaning current affairs & TV listings journal that’s utterly part of the mainstream and seems quite unique in the western world – I’ve certainly never encountered anything elsee like it. If they spent one page a week tracking media coverage explicitly – quoting articles, identifying issues, watching the process of media spon – if this was delivered in an attractive visual package, bringing to light the groupthink and caution and quid pro quo that hamstrings mainstream media – I think disconnects could be given on a regular basis, article after article after article.
The blogs are doing this, but it’s piecemeal and caught up in political firestorms. Worthy feature articles on all parts of the political spectrum are likewise doing it, but it’s always long after the fact and always issue-focussed. These approaches are around, if you keep your eyes open. But the problem with the current state of affairs is that the media itself is never the subject. Something needs to alert people to the media as a process and a system, not just a window.
I have other ideas about ways for this to work, but they remain as blue-sky as magically appearing an extra page into the Listener each week. And this entry is long enough for now. I’m gonna leave it there. Turn some ideas over in my head for a week or so. One immediate problem: once people have been ‘disconnected’ from the media feed – then what? What would happen to these people? The only options I can think of are to become massive info-grazers like most of the political bloggers and internet junkies, processing masses of data points from all over into an ‘average’ that hopefully bears some resemblance to what’s true or important; or focusing on one media outlet that seems to share your perspective and letting that be your filter (kiwis could do worse than idiot/savant’s No Right Turn); or just giving up. None of these options appeal to me as a general answer. Is an alternative media a prerequisite for mass-resistance to current mainstream media systems? I dunno.
I’m also wondering whether people should have state-sponsored PR support dished out to the needy public like legal aid. To even the playing field a bit. But that might just be the Friday afternoon madness.
I hope that made sense, because I’m sure as heck not proofing it first. Please comment, too, if you’ve read this far. I might be totally missing some crucial point.