From The Morgue

Splendid Wellington February continues. As I write it’s another glorious clear-skied sunny day without wind. Its nice, and also a bit sinister. Wellington’s wind is a major part of its character, and we’ve been without it for weeks. Where the heck has it gone?
And every year Wellington packs in more summer parties. On Saturday there were no less than three major events around town – the opening of the new Dowse museum in the Hutt, complete with big free concert with some great performers; the Island Bay festival, with its own free concert with some great performers; and the Fringe Picnic, with a wonderful free concert with some great performers. Truly spoiled for choice, we Wellingtonians are. It’s bloody marvellous.
Saturday night Cal and I stopped in at the bar/foyer of the Paramount movie theatre where a free Fringe thing was going on, the Chit Chat Lounge. Styled like a late-night talkshow, with guests along to plug their fringe shows and give short performances. It was a lot of fun, with a happy atmosphere and some nice wit on display. The final guests when we dropped in were percussion outfit Strike, who finished up a fun interview with a blistering set on an array of Rarotongan drums. Wild.
This reminds me of plans I have been developing off-and-on for some years. Wellington could sustain something like this long-term; a regular night where folk would turn up to drink some drinks and engage with some cool new kulcha. Hosts would banter and develop running gags over weeks and months; guests would come out to plug their albums/plays/novels/clubs/etc. Some of Welly’s enormous creative output could be put on stage (music videos from the Handle the Jandal competition, short films from any of the various short film competitions). I’d schedule it on Friday night, starting at 11pm, somewhere where the bar starts slowing down at 11 as people head off to the more late-night venues. There’s loads of people sifting about in Wellington around midnight on a Friday, looking for something to do that isn’t dancing, karaoke or a late movie – an untapped market. It would totally work.
It would also be a heck of a lot of work to put together, and you’d be relying on a portion of bar receipts to fund it, so it would be a tough challenge. Unless it could get sponsors or advertisers, or go out on “Wellington’s TV station”. Of course it would be webcast live.
Someone should do this. Go on.

Sometimes the way someone expresses him- or herself gives me much pleasure. This is one of those times. Someone named Terry Eagleton on the limitations of Richard Dawkins’ atheism is worth a read for this very reason – it’s beautiful stuff to read, and certainly on the money with regards to the limits of Dawkins’ comprehension of his pet subject.
Samples:

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist… He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

To say that [God] brought [the universe] into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need.

Jesus… was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris.

It’s wonderful, and it made me read it when I really should be working on stuff. You should go read it too. Here’s the link again. All this via Making Light which you should all be reading by now but I know you aren’t.

Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and ****ing. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

– Warren Ellis
Wikipedia has more detail on the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, but it’s wikipedia, so it might have been written this morning by some Warren Ellis fans as a joke.
(obscenity asterisked out for people’s work filters, in case you were wondering)

Yeah, I do this every year, and every year my prediction accuracy gets worse and worse.
But I can’t help myself. (No, I haven’t seen any of the films. Well, Children of Men and Borat and Superman Returns and The Prestige and Cars. None of the *real* ones.)

Continue reading Oscars 2K7: Criswell Predicts

Back in 1998, or perhaps ’99, a friend of mine told me a story that blew my mind. He had been up late, he said, watching Jerry Springer, which at the time was omnipresent on one of New Zealand’s TV channels. The subjects of the episode were self-confessed satanists, and proud of that fact.
Jerry Springer’s controversial talk show specialises in the more extreme end of the subgenre where guests confess things to each other before a cheering/howling studio audience. It has achieved a great deal of notoriety, and even spawned an opera which was shown on British TV. It’s the kind of show where proud satan worshippers are par for the course.
(It would be a mistake to assume these satanists were the serious, studious types who adopt the methodology of Anton Lavey and use the idea of Satan as a symbolic reference for human instinct; this was Springer, so these guys would have worn upside-down crosses, listened to death metal music, and killed puppies for Satan.)
My friend was watching this episode, only half paying attention, when one of these satanists said something extraordinary. Virtually without exception, Springer’s guests are from poor blue-collar parts of the American midwest. Odds are good this Satanist was too. And what he said, that made my friend suddenly perk up with interest, is that he and his Satanist friends derive their power from Satan’s spiritual strong point on earth: Havelock North, in New Zealand.
Not just New Zealand. Havelock North in New Zealand.
Let me explain, for those not from New Zealand, about Havelock North. Located in the sunny Hawkes Bay on the northerly east coast of the North Island, Havelock North is a small, wealthy enclave so near its neighbour Hastings that they were formally amalgamated. Havelock North is more or less the nice, well-off part of Hastings, with a population of less than ten thousand people. It’s popularly known for its excellent wines, its distinctive peak, and its reclusive rich folk.
So when my friend told me this, I was dumbfounded. My friend hastened to add that he wasn’t certain this was what was said; at the extreme, he might have been dozing and dreamed the entire thing. But he was fairly sure he had heard right, and some Springer-guest satanists were sticking devil-red pins into maps of New Zealand.
My friend and I instantly decided there was only one thing for it: a Satan-hunting mission to Havelock North.
—
We never made it on our Satan-hunting mission, but I have revived the idea a half-dozen times with various potential Satan-hunters. Once we got as far as arranging leave from work, but it all fell through before it happened. The last time I was up in Havelock North, slightly over a year ago for a friend’s stag weekend, I kept my eyes peeled for Satanism but, of course, didn’t spot any.
Every time the idea came up again, I would dutifully jump on the internet, and plug [“Havelock North” satanism] into altavista or yahoo or google, and each time I came up with precisely nothing. As time went by I became satisfied that my friend had got it wrong; he’d dreamed the whole thing, or at the very least he’d drastically misheard it. None of which dampened my enthusiasm to go Satan-hunting in Havelock North, of course.
—-
A second thread.
In the mid-90s, I heard another incredible tale from a friend, which by coincidence related to Hawkes Bay as well, this time Hastings itself, Havelock North’s ‘bigger brother’. This particular friend was studying religion at Victoria University, and told me one evening of a New Zealand connection to one of the most renowned occult societies in history.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in the late 1880s and, over the next twenty or so years, became major force in the then-burgeoning occult scene in the West. Its pedigree was impeccable, with founders drawn from the Freemasons, Freemason offshoot the Rosicrucians, and from the Blavatsky-driven Theosophy schools. The Golden Dawn drew together a large number of different strands (such as alchemy, tarot, astrology, qabbalah, etc.) into a single coherent mystery tradition, and their work was massively influential in the Western occult movement thereafter.
Among the membership of the Golden Dawn were two well-known names; W.B. Yeats, the Irish Nobel Laureate (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”); and Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed Great Beast (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”). (Lovecraft enhthusiasts will also note Arthur Machen in the ranks.)
The Golden Dawn, in sum, are perhaps the fulcrum of modern occultism, and occupy a central place in the hidden aspect of Western culture.
Given this status, I was surprised – to say the least – when my friend told me that when the Golden Dawn split, one faction left the U.K. and came to New Zealand. To Hastings, in fact. He had gone up there over the break, and located the house the Golden Dawn had used. It was spectacularly strange, he said – there was a huge basement temple, which the current occupiers were using to store bicycles and old magazines. They’d been quite happy for him to come in and search through the place.
I thought to myself, wow. Wouldn’t mind seeing that some day. And every now and then over the next few years, I’d tell the story of the Golden Dawn in Hastings, and the house with the temple in the basement, and wonder just what the truth of the matter was. And then I’d fire up the internet and plug in [“Golden Dawn” hastings] and see what I got. Which wasn’t ever much of anything, back in those primal pre-Google days.
—
Recently I recalled the Golden Dawn basement temple in Hastings, and I thought, I bet the internet knows the truth by now.
It does.
Wikipedia has an entry on the Stella Matutina which was one of the three factions emerging from the Golden Dawn when it split in 1903; it was London-based. In 1910, the leader and founder of the faction, Dr Robert Felkin, went to visit New Zealand at the invitation of a small group of liberal Anglicans who encouraged mysticism in their services. Arriving in 1912, Felkin and his wife decided to stay. They set up the Smaragdum Thalasses temple of Stella Matutina in their house.
The house was called Whare Ra, meaning house of the sun. (Other Golden Dawn temple names use Egyptian mythological references, so the fact that Ra is both the Egyptian sun god and the Maori word for sun would have been irresistible to Felkin). It was specially built for them by architect J.W. Chapman-Taylor. It does indeed have a great temple in its basement. It has its own Wikipedia page with photos of the exterior.
Occult work continued in Whare Ra until 1978. Then the house was sold, and forgotten enough that the residents when my friend visited didn’t know much about the house’s history.
—
When I started clicking through the net recently, I was struck by two things.
First, the fact that Whare Ra is in Havelock North, not Hastings. In other words, one of the major occult groups in the world ended up with a major stronghold in Havelock North. Now, think back to the Jerry Springer satanist – is it possible, perhaps, that this guy had read something about the Great Beast Aleister Crowley? And this reading referenced the Golden Dawn, and spoke of how one faction of that society made its way to Havelock North? To be sure, the Havelock Work (as it is known) was not Satanism, but isn’t it possible that a connection could have been established in some wannabe Satanist’s head? I think it is possible. Perhaps that guest told Jerry Springer exactly what my friend claimed. Perhaps he did say, on American TV to an international audience, that Satan’s power is centered in Havelock North, New Zealand.
Second, the fact that all of this was in Wikipedia. I didn’t need to search for it – all I needed to do was think to ask the question, and the answer was right there to be found.
Wikipedia alone has 1.6 million articles in English. Think about that number for a while. Sure, at least 100,000 of those articles are about Star Trek, but it’s still a phenomenal number, making wikipedia – and by extension, the rest of the net, which so heavily links to and from wikipedia – an amazing repository of information.
This, then, is the so-called Web 2.0 in action. Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and all it really means is this: the web is now driven by participation, not publication. This isn’t even a massive change conceptually – the early internet, pre-web, was almost entirely participant-driven, and the period when it was publisher-driven will probably appear only as a short and curious blip when the history of the web is written.
So just think of all that information at your fingertips, right now, as you read this. And understand that this is just the beginning of what is coming. The problem of information access is almost entirely solved. The problem of understanding, however, is more pronounced than ever.
—
And that’s the end of this story. Those curious about what we’re in for with Web 2.0 should check out this amazing video, by the way. It’s pretty damn cool.

I once received two separate gifts of the novel Moby Dick. These two editions of the novel sat happily on my shelf for a number of years before I finally picked one of them up to read for the first time. I selected as my reading copy the Oxford World’s Classics edition, a hardback with the nice dustjacket and the prestigious imprimatur of the Oxford University Press.
The less-prestigious paperback Wordsworth Classics edition sat on the shelf.
So I read Moby Dick, and I enjoyed it a great deal, and when I came to the end I thought, well, what an ending! And then I thought – hang on, what about Ishmael? Moby Dick’s opening, Call me Ishmael, is among the most renowned in literature. Surely the novel couldn’t end with Ishmael from the first line going unmentioned for the last hundred pages!
Luckily, I had my Wordsworth Classics edition to hand, and I pulled it out and found that the prestigious OUP had somehow managed to omit the last part of the book. They forgot to put the ending in. Whoops.
All of which demonstrates two valuable lessons which we can henceforth generalise into everyday life and apply to our every endeavour:
(1) you can judge a book by its cover (the Wordsworth said ‘complete and unabridged’ on the front, and the OUP did not)
(2) sometimes insignificant differences turn out to be quite significant after all.
For those also in possession of the OUP edition, I reproduce the omitted section below the jump.

Continue reading Moby Dick vs. Moby Dick

How busy have I been? I have been so busy that I have had a comic in my bag for ten days and still haven’t read it. I’m even blogging instead. But I’ll read it before I finish this post, then write about it, how about that?
Today Cal and I spent ninety minutes wandering through Toi Te Papa, the NZ art exhibition at the national museum. It was time well-spent. There was a cornucopia of material on show, and it was good to see so much incredible work by names that are legendary here – Ralph Hotere, Rita Angus, Colin McCahon being three whose works made predictably big impressions on this viewing. There was a degree of incoherence in the exhibition, cramming photography and pottery and sculpture and historic carving and painting and more all together; the point is obviously to gather all our artistic output together into one narrative, but in practice I felt that it didn’t do justice to any of the disciplines but the dominant one, painting. But this is a small point – it’s an accessible and fun exhibition with some real heavyweight stuff.
However, the thing that slowly sunk in as I wandered was how much the artworks resonated with me because, on a deep cultural level, I understood them. I didn’t need the references explained. The landscapes, the colours, the motifs, most of the politics, almost all of it was familiar or transparent to me. I actually felt at home in this exhibition as I never have in an art exhibition before, which was a surprise, because I came to love trawling art galleries while in Europe and I never appreciated the extent to which I was an outsider there. Here I was suddenly an insider.
It was a surprisingly rich experience. It reminded me of how when I first arrived in the U.K. I noticed countless tiny things that I had internalised as a child, reading British comics and watching British TV shows. These were things that I had never even registered as culturally specific until I was there and seeing them repeated in front of me. All of that pop-art I had inhaled as a kid suddenly became richer and more powerful in hindsight, because I saw that it wasn’t pulling its references out of thin air, but was instead part of a thick cultural context. Things were that way for a reason.
—
And with that deft segue into comics…
Wisdom issue 2, written by Paul Cornell, drawn by Trevor Hairsine. Amusing Warren Ellis pastiche with spotty storytelling but high on mad ideas. English town comes to life and stomps about while everyone has wacky dreams. Points for including in the team a shapechanging alien who was also a Beatle, and as a comics geek I appreciated the nod to the 1961 story in which the alien species first appeared. Points against for just being a bit too twee, a little bit too earnest, and a little bit too character-thin for me to care. I’m done with this one.

January was crowded. I think for Christmas I would like a January with more January in it, because this year’s one just wasn’t large enough. It was hard going some of the time.
The Alligator has departed New Zealand – I spoke to him less than an hour ago and as I write he is on a plane from Auckland to Hawaii. Sad to see him go, but glad to see him embark on new adventures and start getting his future into gear.
My sister and her new husband also departed NZ back to the UK on Friday, but they’ll be back in a year or so, which makes it a bit easier to handle. A year isn’t a long time now.
Wellington’s summer has finally arrived, perhaps, cross fingers touch wood. I think this blog will soon turn back into what it was last year. I know at least one reader has been worried that the cute pandas and the sex jokes of recent weeks mean I’ve crossed the rubicon…
But in the meantime, here is a complete illustrated catalog of ACME products.
I like the ACME Instant Girl. Convenient!

If you are P Diddy, you can say this:
“My girl right now is very happy. As meticulous as I am with my work, I’m even more meticulous with my lovemaking.”
However, if you work in an office, you cannot say the above thing.
This is one of the mysteries of famousity.
—
In case you were wondering, my lovemaking is also extremely meticulous. Sometimes it is so meticulous, a magnifying glass is necessary.