Heck of a week to be off the grid. Out of cell range and internet contact while the terror raid evidence was leaked, and a half dozen other notable things took place. However, the beach was lovely.
There is comment to come. In the meantime, here is a link to the final animation project of my friend Julian Legge, ‘Clean and Green’. The linked page shows the design buildup and explains the process, as well as linking to a small and a large version of the animation itself. It’s about a frog and a crab on a beach. I did a little work on the script for him, so my name’s on it, but it’s 95% his script and 100% his ideas. I think it’s a great piece of work. Do check it out.
Friday Linky
Best thing I’ve read all week on the Urewera Terror Raids: Stephen’s overview (part one, part two) of the complex situation. This is how he sets the tone:
I think the biggest source of confusion for me is that there are lots of different serious things in play here. Here’s my little outline:
* The Terrorism Suppression Act and its pending amendment
* Civil liberties and human rights
* Violence
* Maori sovereignty
* Race relations
* The NZ Police force
* Protest and politics
* Administration of justice
On some of these heads, eg the Terrorism Suppression Act, I feel fairly confident that I know what’s what and that I know where I personally stand. And some of the others are in play and I’m not prepared to commit until I feel I know what’s going on.
It’s a great account of all the crazy stuff caught up in this issue. Non-Kiwis won’t have heard that the Solicitor General has refused to give leave to prosecute under the Terror Suppression Act, which is good to hear, because it implies there isn’t actually a group of terrorists in this country. But bear in mind the words of the clockwork fish:
It occurs to me that the SG’s comment that the activities of the activists were worrying was based on the uncontested evidence of the police. He may have had a different view if the activists had been able to put their side of things.
Instead he pretty much said they were guilty but the cops wouldn’t get a conviction. This gives the activists no right of reply except in the media.
Via the other moose, Project Censored’s most-censored stories of 2008. Always, always worth reading, especially for the surprising fact that the FBI’s most wanted profile of Bin Laden doesn’t mention 9/11, because they don’t actually have enough evidence to link him to that. Go see.
Via mytholder, the Holy Tango of Literature, in which Francis Heaney finds anagrams of the names of poets and playwrights, and then writes in the style of the person using the anagram as a title. So, for example:
AH, MY YAK ROAM
OMAR KHAYYAM
I
Behold! I tend a Herd of woolly Yak
That wander o’er the Hills in one great Pack:
But Lo! the Yak have vanished in the Night,
And God alone knows if they shall come back.
II
Dreaming on the Hillside where I lay
I heard a soothing Voice within me say
“Fear not, my Child, if you will leave them be,
The Dawn will bring them as it brings the Day.”
III
And, as the Cock crew, Light did reach my Eyes
And silhouette my Yak against the Skies.
They lumbered down to meet me at the Lake,
Their Tails behind them, swishing at the Flies.
There is much there to enjoy.
Are We Big Brother?
Interesting article from Salon.com, an excerpt from a book by Michael Massing: We are the Thought Police. It suggests that Orwell’s dark future is enabled not by oppressive totalitarian control of the media message, but by the audience’s reluctance to engage with certain kinds of challenging messages:
In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.
It’s a great article and worthy of serious consideration, but I don’t entirely buy it. I think, first and foremost, that the role of the media-audience is not a static and passive one. The audience as discussed by Massing sounds challenge-avoidant and change-resistant. The desire to avoid challenge leads to the desire to avoid information; fair enough, this is quite a dramatic formulation but there’s a lot about it that makes sense.
Massing seems to be arguing that the audience cannot change in any fundamental way; that they will always switch channels to watch the cat being rescued from the tree rather than the horrors unfolding in their war.
If I’m reading this excerpt right and he is arguing this, then I think he’s wrong; in fact, I think that’s precisely where the top-down control via the media takes place. A responsible media that was intent on serving the public rather than on advertising revenue would continue to play an unpleasant war, slowly acclimatising the audience to the kind of content it wishes to share. Audience tastes can change. If the media stuck with this message, it would slowly become more and more acceptable.
However, there is no incentive for mainstream journalism to take such a road at present. The audience that exists now is not acclimatised and there is little money to be made in changing this. So the same cycle perpetuates – the media plays it safe, and the populace rests easy with the same old mythology.
Anyway, go read the article, it’s great and anything that references Orwell intelligently earns brownie points from me.
Also good from Salon: a short article about the US-Iran belligerence:
The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. Let’s repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America’s political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq….
Inland Empire
Just watched the new David Lynch film, Inland Empire, which is on general release here for a very short time.
It was three hours of intense semi-coherent Lynchian madness. I enjoyed it. I believe that Lynch has a narrative that locks it all together; I don’t believe his is any more valid than yours or mine, because he has talked about more or less making it up as he went along.
In a sense, it’s the same movie as Mulholland Drive, only longer and more incomprehensible.
(FWIW, today I think the crying girl and Nikki were both real. I think the crying girl imagined herself in Nikki’s life as a way of resolving her problems, and then the real Nikki experienced the crying girl’s milieu invading her life. Also, Rabbits.)
[mediawatch] Compare and Contrast
I recently wrote about Venezuala and Chavez’s government there. Some recent action there has been in the news all over. Compare and contrast:
From the BBC:
Venezuelan troops have used tear gas and water cannon to disperse thousands of students in the capital, Caracas…The students are demonstrating against constitutional reforms proposed by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez… The students want a December referendum on the reforms to be postponed, to give voters more time to study the plans.
Violent clashes took place yesterday between opposition students and the police when students tried to break police lines near Venezuela’s National Electoral Council building… Several thousand pro-Chavez students gathered in a counter protest in support of the reforms… the opposition students carried banners and placards openly calling for violence… When the opposition protest arrived, the CNE directors received a delegation from the students, giving them drinks and cake as they handed over their document. However, on leaving the student delegation attempted to chain themselves to stair well in the entrance of the building before being removed by the National Guard.
The protest then turned violent as the opposition students attempted to break through the police security cordon to get into the CNE, throwing rocks and bottles and setting fire to trash cans, trees and street poles. The police and National Guard then responded with teargas, water canon, and plastic shrapnel to disperse the crowd.
And while I’m on the compare and contrast tip:
A cartoon in the satirical magazine The Onion, October 27 2007:
Halloween: what is it teaching our kids?
* Everyone deserves handouts!
Fox news talking head Sean Hannity, October 31, 2007:
Halloween is teaching our kids to be liberals. Because we’re teaching kids to knock on other people’s doors and ask for a handout.
We are living in the land beyond satire.
[mediawatch] Gangsta NZ
[EDIT: added link to the article in question]
In 1992 I scribbled some notes on my pad about a story to write. The name I wrote down was “Gangsta NZ” and it would be about the adoption of US gangsta culture in New Zealand, about how teenage guys who were fascinated by the ghetto lifestyle depicted in hip-hop would claim its vocabulary and behaviours, with tragic consequences down the line.
I never wrote that book. (That note, in fact, was the starting point for what became ‘in move’, which I did write and may let you read if you ask nicely.) Even so, it was a response to a trend I saw playing out around me, where hip-hop music seemed to have potential as structure for violence. Many of the young Polynesian kids in state housing found a something inspirational in gang stories. Boyz n the Hood and Chicano gangsta epic Blood In, Blood Out were the must-see films. But it was all pretty harmless at the time. Indeed, a much bigger force in youth culture then was derisive dismissal of wiggers, white middle class kids who adopted hip-hop culture in an attempt to be cool. You were allowed to listen to and like the music, but unless you had at least some claim to an authentic hard-scrabble life, the NZ version at least, then the youth parliament would round on you fast.
Things seem to have changed. The Sunday Star Times yesterday had a big feature called “Little Boys Lost” which claimed that gang emulation among the youth of Auckland has reached a tipping point in the last few years, and is now a genuine problem. Since October 2005’s murder of Iulio Naea, another nine deaths have been associated by police with the gang culture.
Article writer Tim Hume obviously has some sympathy for the kids he’s interviewing, and the complex mix of pose and sincerity at work in their lives, and makes a good fist of engaging with what’s driving this subculture.
The SST subeditor isn’t as sensitive – the article’s lede calls it “an increasingly entrenched subculture of random violence which has middle class New Zealand very afraid.” (The article doesn’t actually have much to say about middle class New Zealand; occasionally gang violence catches some nice, ordinary SST-reading middle class types in its path but mostly it’s low-decile gangs being violent against each other.) The reliably Tabloid Police Association head Greg O’Connor is quoted with similar apocalyptic nonsense: the “biggest threat to New Zealand society is LA-isation of our mostly Polynesian youth.”
Inspector Jason Hewett, charged with addressing South Auckland’s gang problem, comes across extremely well as someone who has really thought about this stuff. He has seen the shift from Crips-and-Bloods aping kids who were just a silly nuisance, into something much more serious. After Naea’s killing, the problem escalated dramatically, and the article says he “blames extensive media reporting of the issue for inspiring the formation of a slew of copy-cat gangs.” (A case of middle-class fear creating its own nightmares?) He acknowledges a large number of posturing wannabes, but feels the actual problem has calmed a lot over the last year – 2006 was the bad year. The numbers seem to point at a fad-culture now in decline. However, featured gangster ‘Gucks’ thinks differently: he sees “gangsterism” a a subculture that is now so deeply entrenched that it can’t now be shifted. He thinks it’s Bloods and Crips for life from now on.
The heart of any such story as this is disaffected youth in poor circumstances. New Zealand’s poverty and deprivation are in a whole different league to hip-hop’s US exemplars, but they are real and crippling nonetheless. The article does pay heed to that fact with a boxout devoted to the poverty in South Auckland. The story’s key paragraph, though, is buried in its middle:
The adoption of foreign, music-oriented youth cultures by local teenagers is nothing new, with each successive pop cultural movement importing antisocial aspects to greater or lesser extents: hippydom’s drug culture, punk’s nihilism, Goth’s morbidity [sic]. But none, save perhaps the virtually extinct youth tribe of racist skinheads, has proven anywhere near as pathological, atavistic and violently antisocial as gangsta culture. While gangs, too, have long been part of New Zealand’s social landscape, never has their lifestyle been promoted through such an influential mass culture medium.
This is a lot more nuanced a claim than the traditional “pop culture is training our kids to be evil” that we’ve heard since Elvis. (Actually, since earlier than that, but y’know.) It’s an interesting point and one I find I can’t easily dismiss. Certainly, much of mainstream hip-hop depicts an aspirational lifestyle and one in which violence is normal or even celebrated. Certainly, NZ youth have always looked to foreign trends to copy and embrace. Certainly, NZ society has always had gangs filling in the social gaps in its poor quarters. The article seems to argue that these three trends come together in an incendiary way to make this problem; and if this equation is true, then Gucks will be right and the Crips and Bloods will be around for some time to come.
What do I make of it? I don’t know. I hope this is a spike that will soon resolve itself. The level of violence that is recounted in this article wasn’t part of my youth, and I would be very sad indeed if that was where NZ was headed.
—
I’m going to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire tomorrow night at the Paramount in Welly. Contact me if you want to come along.
Guest Blog: Swiss Election Outcome
I was interested to see reports in the media that the Swiss election had resulted in a substantial gain for a very right-wing party running on an anti-immigration platform. The New York Times had run a piece on the Swiss People’s Party, and I’d been shown the ad that offended so many people – a piece of very clever design carrying a clear stealth meaning.
So there was only one thing to do – contact Kiwi In Zurich to throw down some wisdom in a guest post. KiZ, take it away…
A foreigner living in Switzerland doesn’t get the right to vote. Foreigners (except for the extremely wealthy ones) do however get the right to pay tax at a higher rate than the Swiss. Both of these points miff me a bit, but when you are a guest in someone else’s country you put up with much more than you’d be prepared to put up with in your own country.
The weekend before last witnessed the Swiss parliamentary general elections, and despite not being able to vote, I was nevertheless drawn into the elections. This year was always going to be an interesting election as the SVP party (the right wing Swiss People’s Party) managed to polarise the electorate through its anti-foreigner (http://www.ausschaffungsinitiative.ch/), cult personality advertising campaign and its stated intention to become the dominant party in the Swiss parliament.
The results on the weekend unfortunately (to my mind at least) partially bore out SVP’s success in playing the always populist anti-foreigner card with SVP attaining an historic high. The ‘historic high’ has to be taken in context however. Although the SVP received 28.8% of the vote, which hasn’t been equalled by any single party in the Parliament since 1919, what I find more interesting than SVP’s success, however, is that the single biggest winners were the two Green parties (the ‘standard’ Greens and the Green Liberal Party). The Green parties attained at the cost of SP (the left socialist party) a staggering 9.5% of the vote and are now trying to wrangle a seat on the Executive (in Switzerland the Executive, unusually, is made up of all the largest parties in parliament).
Predictably, the media characterised the results in the most sensational way possible, describing the elections as a move towards right wing extremism in Switzerland. This is hardly the case. It is true the Socialist Party (SP), the major left party did lose a significant share of their vote, but it is not the case, nor would one expect it to be the case, that those left voters simply decided to vote right rather than left. Rather, what actually happened is that a significant number of voters moved further to the left and voted Green. Where the media is concerned, I guess it just isn’t terribly sexy to talk about a dramatic move to the left by the otherwise conservative Swiss.
I draw three things from the results:
• The environment and green politics are a significant concern to the Swiss electorate (hardly surprising with the glaciers melting)
• The SP party have not successfully picked up the environmental agenda and have failed to inspire the electorate generally, thus fragmenting the left
• The SVP managed to play the politics of personality, fear and populism in order to successfully increase their share, thus polarising the electorate
Just to complete the picture, the SVP historic high was attained at the cost of the various independents who lost a total 1.4% of their votes. Given that independents are not members of any major party, it seems a bit rich to me to describe this as a move to the right.
The German newspapers describe the election as been the end of kuschel-politik (politics of consensus) in Switzerland and this is perhaps the most interesting development this election may represent. By ‘kuschel politics’, the Germans are referring to the Swiss tendency towards moderation and consensus, rather than the confrontation that characterises almost all other political systems. The polarisation seems partly to be caused by SVP being the only truly right party of any size and its in many ways utterly xenophobic and unrealistic policies which the well educated and moderate Swiss electorate and politicians have up until now been able to respond to and moderate. If the dramatic strengthening of the Greens who are in their own (but much nicer) way as intolerant as the SVPs is not only a result of the raised environmental awareness, but also as response to the extreme politics of the SVP then perhaps this will herald the end of the Swiss cushion politics. My guess is that it won’t. The Swiss tend to be a remarkably moderate group of people and I don’t see the politics and culture of consensus being eroded anytime soon as it is this very consensus that makes the country as stable and successful as it is.
P.P.Geddes
Percy Patrick Geddes, my grandfather, died five years ago, almost precisely as I write this. I think of him often. I carry his surname as my middle name, and claim membership in Clan Gordon rather than Clan Davidson to honour his lineage on my mother’s side. I see his influence in the best parts of who I am today.
Five years ago, I was newly on the road, starting my travels. I wrote about this then:
In the first minutes of All Saints Day my grandfather, Percy Patrick Geddes,
passed away.
He´s one of the reasons I´m travelling. Growing up, it seemed to me that he´d been everywhere there was to go. He and my grandmother Felice drove all over New Zealand, all over Europe, to so many places. I was always finding out about more places he had seen and I´m sure there are plenty more that I still don´t know about. He loved to travel.
He was a great grandfather and a great friend and a great role model. I guess I idolised him without even realising it. He did living the way it was meant to be done.
Good Communications
Two websites to waste your time when you should be working:
Passive Aggressive Notes.com – communications from your disgruntled flatmate/cowo/neighbour who doesn’t want to outright confront you.
My Right-Wing Dad – what the crazy right-wingers in your life are emailing to each other, and sometimes to you.
—
Just watched some Alien 3 documentaries from the Aliens Quadrilogy DVD set. Wicked. Wish I still had my Cinefantastique June 1992 issue on the making of Alien 3 – now that was some quality movie journalism. (Hmmm… maybe I can.)
Unearthly: Cosmic Heroes
Another of my roleplaying game books has been released from Adamant Entertainment.
This one is called Unearthly: Cosmic Heroes. It’s the first of the replacement books stepping in after the Amazing Triple Action line fell over. It’s for the superhero RPG Mutants & Masterminds, and is a sourcebook for cosmic-level adventures. No formal reviews yet, but the few comments that have turned up on discussion forums or in emails to me have been positive.
The .pdf is currently on sale for US$6.95 (down from US$12.95). You can also get a print copy via Lulu On top of that, for the entire month of November, Adamant has a special offer to celebrate their birthday: anyone who purchases more than $10 worth of Adamant Entertainment product will be entered into a drawing for a new iPod Nano, the proceeds from which are given to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa.
So if you have been meaning to buy my supers RPG books, now is the moment to strike! The three issues of Amazing Triple Action are all available here for $5.95 each – buy one and the cheap Unearthly, and you go in the iPod draw.
This ends the advertisement.