From The Morgue

Blimey. After having it on my shelf for the better part of a decade, I’ve finally taken down Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van) collection to read. I don’t know if I’ve ever come across a more compulsive bit of writing. The damn thing is impossible to put down. It’s sitting about six inches from my hands right now and I’m trying not to pick it up and read more about Sharon and her da’. Should come with a warning label.
(Note: this is not the Barrytown in New Zealand with the mad guy who teaches you how to make samurai swords.)
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Those who have known me for any significant length of time will know of my deep and abiding love of the Alien movies. Those who share this affliction and are in New Zealand should be aware of The Alien Saga, going out free-to-air on TV3 tonight at 11.30pm. This is a feature-length behind-the-scenes doco from 2003 that got fantastic reviews from those who bought it from Amazon or commented on IMDB. Set your VCRs.

Great piece by Paul Krugman in the Rolling Stone (is it me, or is that magazine starting to regain some of its old-time journalistic chops?) on the concentration of wealth in the US. Some startling stuff in there. Check this image out:

The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income — the richer they are, the taller they are.
Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line — representing those Americans living in extreme poverty — is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.
Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle — the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn’t changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

Of course, the US is a particular and special case, and its situation doesn’t generalise to the west. (Krugman: These days, to find societies as unequal as the United States you have to look beyond the advanced world, to Latin America.) But there is important stuff to think about even so.
Krugman points at the way the current inequalities were once prevented by “the outrage constraint” – the public just wouldn’t stand for it. Now, Krugman argues, thanks to years of ‘greed is good’ PR from a network of right-wing thinktanks, that old cap is gone. We in NZ may not be in the same situation economically as the US, but we absolutely are part of their cultural sphere, and that PR spin to legitimise massive wealth discrepancy is absolutely present in our society. We harbour a similar set of comforting myths to disguise the systematic growth of the wealth gap in NZ.
The way in which work, profit, and wealth-sharing are discussed and carried out in the United States influences how these things work here. It is important to remember that the US economic experiment has been a failure, and the failure is rapidly compounding. We must not be seduced by attempts to drag our country further along that dangerous, inequitable road.
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I’ve enjoyed all the Great Little Moments in Cinema shared in response to Monday’s post. Do take a look if you haven’t already. I have just added another one myself.

I’m housesitting again, back in Tirohanga but a different house with a different view. Lovely. I can see the Hutt River empty into Wellington harbour, looking straight out past Matiu island across the harbour and through harbour mouth into the Cook Strait and away into nothingness. It really is quite nice to bounce into a new physical environment semi-regularly, and see how my life responds – you only recognise how much you are created by what is around you when you have a chance to settle into lots of different places in succession.
On the other hand, I have effectively been living out of a bag for about sixteen months now.
On the other other hand, I haven’t paid any rent for about sixteen months now.
Plugging ahead with Ron the Body, which is proving challenging in the very best way. RtB has four parts to it, and the aggregate comments of several readers pointed out quite correctly that parts two and three weren’t doing the right job. I’ve finished a re-envisioning and re-writing of part two now, which feels good; it, in fact, feels more like it’s the book it should be. Some quite major changes to the first version (no journey to Iran, for one) reflecting a narrowing of focus in order to more properly explore the characters and themes that are the true centre of the book. All those subplots were just distractions, in the end. I’ll save them for another project I suppose.
I’m sure this new draft will create a bunch of new problems even as it solves the old ones, despite my careful planning and thinking through and so forth. Such is the writing life. I’ll deal with them when I know what they are, and hopefully they’ll be much more manageable in scale than the current issues. That’s the revision process, I suppose – each draft you swap larger problems for completely new smaller ones; keep going until the problems are so small no-one agrees what they are or you just can’t bear to think about it any more…
A more serious series of posts about the graft of novel-writing can be found over at my fellow mooseblogger Ungulating Ungulate. He knows whereof he speaks. One, Two, Three.
And while I’m linking there, I’ll pass on a link he circulated: The Brainsturbator Library, a bunch of .pdf downloads of all sorts of interesting stuff, including Military documents, wireless info, neuro-linguistic programming stuff, lucid dreaming guides, and so forth. Of special note are some books by Derren Brown, whose TV show I adore. Warning: these pdfs aren’t hardly optimised, and there’s no warning how large the file is before you click; and I would not vouch for the legality of distributing these titles…

Something for folks in Wellington to attend. This was circulated to me via hix and I’m more than happy to give it some light, especially as I know one of the designers. Futuna Chapel is a fascinating place, a fusion of Maori and Pakeha architectural approaches. Wikipedia, that noted authority on all matters, says It is generally regarded as the most significant New Zealand building of the twentieth century and it’s definitely in the running for that title. I hadn’t realised it has been neglected somewhat over the last decade – it would be a shame if it was allowed to deteriorate.

FUTUNA
Light uncovers the histories of Futuna Chapel.
Where: 15-17 December 10am-10pm
When: Futuna Chapel, 62 Friend Street, Karori
Designers Andrew Brettell, Sven Mehzoud, Amanda Jelicich-Kane and Andrew Simpson have created a site-specific video installation that presents the stories of Futuna Chapel. From 15-17 December 10am –10pm the public are invited to explore the Chapel, now haunted with video projection and a soundscape.
John Scott was asked to design a retreat chapel for the Karori retreat site in 1958. Being of Te Arewa, Irish, Scottish and English descent Scott produced the first building ever designed on bicultural principles in Aotearoa.
The Marists sold the retreat that was developed into townhouses while the Chapel was used to store lumber. Recently the Friends Of Futuna Charitable Trust have been campaigning to raise money to purchase the land Futuna Chapel rests on.
This installation is part of an effort to raise awareness of Futuna Chapel’s importance.
Along with the installation, at 8:30 each evening on 15-17 December Nick Blake will talk about the architecture of Futuna Chapel, including the story of Saint Peter Chanel: the first martyr of the South Pacific.
This installation is an exciting, vital way of presenting Wellington’s heritage. Projection is used around the Chapel to allow visitors to make surprising discoveries.
During our design process we will film an eke, a traditional dance, that was originally performed in penitence by the people of Futuna after the death of Saint Peter Chanel.

While I’m at it, Maire introduced me a while back to the No 8 Wire email newsletter circulated by the Wellington City Council; it mostly just compiles a whole stack of Wellington’s arts/creative sector event notifications into one email, but there’s other stuff in there too if you look. Definitely worth subscribing to if you’re in the city. To be added, or to submit info, contact arts@wcc.govt.nz and they’ll sort you out.

Ping-pong ball trick (Children of Men)
Revenge on the Easter Bunny (Mallrats) YouTube
String of saliva (Cruel Intentions) YouTube
Dance sequence (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion)
Chainsaw High Noon (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2)
Tracking shot turns out to be in mirror (Contact) YouTube
Wake-up speech (Aliens)
Intimidating the stoners (Brick)
Hey, kids! Why not add your own?

Census results are in.
On the ethnicity question, it was reported that:

The 2006 census results reveal 429,429 people – or 11 per cent of the population – called themselves “New Zealanders” or “Kiwis”. Their number increased five-fold since the last census in 2001 and they became the third-biggest ethnic group, behind European and Maori.

I mention this as a followup to two posts in March. I was concerned then about the fact that the campaign to get people to write in “Ethnicity: New Zealander” was going to lessen the utility of the census results. It has.
About one in ten Kiwis wrote in ‘New Zealander’; about one in eight of those ticked another box or two as well.
Take as a premise that some people of exact same background, within the same family even, can sincerely choose to indicate differing ethnicity – NZ European vs New Zealander. If we want an ethnicity question at all, we want to amalgamate these two responses.
It’s probably reasonable to stack those who ticked only ‘NZ European’ with the ‘New Zealander’ only results, giving us a total ‘NZ European’ category population. (Recall, in previous years ‘New Zealander’ was bundled with ‘New Zealand European’ by default.)
But what about someone who ticked ‘Maori’ and wrote in New Zealander as well? There were plenty of these, enough that they were mentioned by a Stats NZ spokesman in the print version of the Dom Post article linked above. Say two brothers exist – one sincerely ticks Maori and NZ European, the other sincerely ticks Maori and writes New Zealander. How on earth can we make the assumption to amalgamate this data? And if we can’t, how useful is the ethnicity question at all?
The ethnicity question was undermined by this campaign. In part, this was its purpose.
So why do I care? That, I’m no longer sure about. What do we get out of accurate ethnicity data? Arguments in March undermined my assumptions about the public health usefulness of this information – what other compelling reason might there be? Is simply knowing about ourselves enough?
Bah. I’m disappointed with the whole thing, because it means our ethnicity data becomes needlessly complex at best and misleading or opaque at worst; and because the whole affair emerged from some reactionary politics that were really quite silly.
I’m enjoying looking at the census results, anyway. Nice to see New Zealand get more diverse. We can handle it.

NZ’s independent news site Scoop featured this article which originated at Chicago’s Conscious Choice.
It looks at the shift in tone that has brought major companies to start Green initiatives and branding themselves as Green-friendly. GE, Wal-Mart, and BP all get a few paragraphs looking at how their claims stack up.
But what really appeals to me about this article is how it talks about the bigger picture. As it points out, it is unequivocally a good thing that major corporations are at minimum paying lip service to Green values, and in practice are taking some steps, however minor. The question becomes, how good is good enough?
It’s a corollary to the ‘We Won’ post I made a few weeks back. When the argument has been won, the result is that those who were on the other side colonise our side as quickly as possible. Part of being involved in progressive thought and the progressive movement is accepting that people you despise will end up espousing your position on things, shamelessly, as if they never thought any different.
Here in NZ, does it stick in your craw a bit to see the National party hasten to position itself in the Green sphere, after so many years fighting tooth and nail against any green initiatives and having a key role in scuppering our national response to Kyoto? (Although, it must be said, Labour did a fine job of scuppering that all by itself.) It should. But there’s only one response to the progressive crowd feeling grumpy about that: get over it. Let yourself feel like an honourable martyr, then let it go and get on to the next battle.
Because here’s the secret: winning doesn’t always taste good. Most of the time, those who fought the hardest don’t get to have a say in the future. Does anyone in NZ politics think this massive shift in our political sphere to welcome Green issues into the mainstream is going to undo decades of efforts to paint our Green party as loony eco-nutters? Nope. In fact, that’s going to remain an essential strategy: National and Labour, to keep votes that might otherwise go Greenwards, will claim to be sensible environmentalists, in contrast to the Green party who are loony eco-nutters.
If Wal-Mart invests billions in bringing organic food to the masses, does that make it a socially and environmentally conscious company? Only in part. They’ll still use mass-industrial methods of food production, and they’ll still operate massive and wasteful supply chains. One step up conceptually, and you have organic food supporting a consumer model that enthusiastically supports the destructive hypercapitalism that is messing up our entire global system.
But still – organic food at Wal-Mart! That’s a major achievement. There are other battles still to be won, but man, that’s good. That’s a step closer to the Another World that is Possible. I should feel happy about that, right?
Or is there another way of looking at it – that weak “successes” such as this sap energy from the movement, they are tactical maneuvers by the enemy to deny the moral high ground while changing little of consequence, and they are a sign of loss.
When you start digging into this, you quickly get down into some fundamental questions about human behaviour, about identity formation and habituation and rational vs. non-rational modes. Ultimately you’re talking about what human beings are, and that’s a very thorny area.
So how good is good enough?
(Oh yeah – read the article, huh? It’s great.)

It used to be a hidden thing for those Wellingtonians in the know. As recently as a couple weeks ago I sidled up, glanced left or right to make sure no-one was checking out, and demonstrated the secret to the Alligator.
The free photo email function hidden in the info kiosk on Cuba Mall is now official and out in the open. Right outside JJ Murphy’s pub, there’s an info kiosk with a touchscreen, and it used to be that you pressed a secret part of the screen and a hidden email thingy would pop up – you could snap a photo and email it to anywhere.
Well, you can still do that. Only now it’s out there in the open with a special entry on the main menu, “Photo Email”.
How uncool.
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Speaking of uncool, the online Achewood comic is not uncool. Thanks to Pearce, who was himself hooked up by Mike, I’ve finally succumbed to reading the whole damn archive. Man – this is the funny.
Read it. Begin at the beginning, which is here.

I watched Borat with Cal on the weekend. Borat, to those one or two reading this who don’t know, is a comic character created by Brit comic Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is extravagantly anti-semitic, sexist and racist, and his eager expression of these views sometimes draws similar sentiments out of his victims.
I was expecting a whole lot of this in the Borat movie, but it was not to be. TV Borat excelled at exposing the nasty prejudices beneath the surface of his targets, even if sometimes he seemed blind to the social pressures at work in the situations he engineered (classic case: the astonishing visit to a country bar where he engaged the whole room in singing along with ‘Throw The Jew Down The Well’ – hilarious and terrifying, to see a room full of good ol’ boys happily singing such a horrible song – but it would be simplistic and misleading to conclude that all those singing actually agreed with the sentiment).
Movie Borat does a bit of this, most memorably in a shocking chat with a rodeo producer which worked as effectively as the Borat creation ever could. But mostly, Borat was played for cringe humour, and the laughter came when you saw what horrible situation he would foist upon his next targets. A lot of people fooled by Borat have begun legal action against Baron Cohen – but with only a few exceptions they come out looking good.
To be honest, I was expecting a more cutting satirical exploration of what is going on in American culture, and what I got was a comedy of manners explored through the device of an idiot. My recommendation: wait for video.