From The Morgue

The Christmas lights came on in Edinburgh tonight at 5.45pm. The ferris wheel started to turn. The German Market opened its gates. Princes St Gardens was transformed. Less than a month until Christmas.

Christmas is the single biggest event in our cultural life. As it rolls around, you’re either caught up in it or – much harder – you’re avoiding it. While still a spiritual/religious occasion, Christmas’ cultural importance is largely secular, crossing as many cultural divisions as possible.

The secular meaning of Christmas is an uplifting one: it is a time of goodwill and generosity. It’s pretty hard to fault these principles. The world could do with a lot more goodwill and generosity. Of course, Christmas as enacted in Western culture often falls short of this.

In fact, our biggest cultural event is also our most compromised and unsatisfying. There are enormous problems with many aspects of Christmas: the massive consumerism that underlies the occasion is a very obvious example.

So do something about it.

Fix Christmas.

(Now here’s the breathtaking revelation. I bet it is so startlingly clever no-one reading this has ever thought it before!)

Christmas isn’t something mandated by the world outside your door. There are no Christmas police checking up on your adherence to evil Capitalist principles. Christmas – here’s the kicker! – is something you and your family can do your way.

Okay, so it isn’t a huge revelation. Most people have had these thoughts before. Well, start turning thought into deed. Have a conscious Christmas, one that celebrates the values you cherish and denies the values you don’t. Why not now?

Here’s my request of you all, then: this Christmas, think about how to fix next Christmas.

Over on Musical, Cal talks about a bunch of ways to do Christmas differently. Check them out. We’ve timed our posts to appear together for a reason, folks.

Over here, I’d love to hear from people who’ve already adapted Christmas to suit. Tell people what you/you and your family/you and your friends have done to make Christmas a time of year you savor. Let this comments section be a big ideas bucket.

After all, our biggest cultural festival should be a good time, shouldn’t it?

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This, of course, ties in to the greater goals of the progressive movement that I’ve been rabbiting on about the last few weeks. We want everyone to be more aware of the cultural forces acting on us, and the hidden paths we are constantly skipping past unawares.

You and your family, or whoever you celebrate with – your Christmas is one small thing. But: journeys, single steps, think global act local, etc etc etc. In other words, it matters. Actually, it more than matters – it’s the whole point.

Matt’s comments on the previous post.
I’m not gonna reply yet. Because I’m well busy at the mo. But it’s great stuff. Go read.
Matt, with lovely wife and little ones, is in India. There’s lots more fascinating stuff on their own site, too.
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Also, if you haven’t read my livejournal lately, you aren’t yet in the know about Santa Rhymez. You should correct this immediately.

The Progressive movement stared into the abyss two weeks ago.
On November 3 the United States of America had a chance to correct its course, the first chance since things began to go out of control.
But the United States of America re-elected the Bush Administration.
In that moment, the struggle changed. You can see it all over the internet, all over the opinion media, all over the grassroots networks. If you look, if you read, if you listen you can see it happening. This is how it begins.
The election has become a symbol of what we face.
We are using the symbol to transform ourselves. The progressive movement is changing. It is realising that it must do what it hates to do: it must go to war.
A war of justice, for their culture is built on exploitation.
A war of truth, for their culture is built on deceit.
And a war of survival, for they want to wipe our culture from existence.
There is no room to negotiate – what would we negotiate away? Our belief in social justice? Our belief in the vulnerability of the environment? Our belief in human rights? We are past the point of negotiation: this is a war.
This is a culture war. We have fought these before, and we have won. We will win this time as well. Their culture must be shattered.
It will not shatter itself.
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Allow me to deflate my own rhetoric here. I know I’m speechifying. There’s a lot of it going around – it’s a sign of how things are changing, right now. Anyway, I’ll step down from the rhetoric.
Getting real: we’re all ordinary people with lives and commitments and responsibilities and nuanced understandings of how the world works. The question I ask in the title remains: where now? What can we do?
You tell me. Put a message in the comments, or a link to suggestions elsewhere you found useful. (Lurkers especially welcome – I know you’re out there.) This blog is one tiny bit of a very big network. But it’s part of that network. Lets see what we come up with.

Listening to ‘Dazed & Confused’, the first track on Marxman‘s second album ‘Time Capsule’, delivered into my hands by the illustrious Malcolm Craig mere weeks after I mentioned I was searching for it. I had been on the hunt for seven years and it took him two weeks. Blimey.
Damn it’s a good track. Oisin made it available on the internet a few years ago so I’ve got the mp3s, but it was taken down sometime in the last nine months – there might still be copies floating around the P2Psphere if anyone’s into it.
Malcolm tells me Marxman – a militant Irish Marxist hip-hop group – once played on Top of the Pops, to the confusion of the audience. Heh.
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Will there ever be, in the modern era, a leader with as complicated and compromised a position as Yasser Arafat? For every honour he rightly bears, there’s a crime; for every achievement there’s a failure.
Maybe not – but every political leader is compromised. That’s the conundrum of political leadership. Arafat is exceptional only in the extremity of his achievements and his crimes, not in the fact of their dual existence.
Of course, opinions differ as to whether his achievements outweigh his crimes, or vice versa. This is as it should be for so complicated a figure.
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Finally took Brad’s box of books to the post office to ship to NZ.
*looks at overland shipping bill*
*looks at growing pile of morgue books to one day be shipped to NZ*
*feels nervous*
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Anyone interested in the interface of tech and media, and the possibilities of new forms currently unfolding, will probably already be reading Warren Ellis’ writing on the subject.
If you’re not already, and you want a glimpse of the future, go read. The man is essential. He’s currently writing a fascinating series on ‘mind gangsterism’ that is bringing together a dozen strands of technological innovation and sewing them together. I’ve linked to his livejournal, which he’s winding up soon, but that’s where the action is right now.

Despite (or, perhaps, because of) his likely future of being bounced out of the UK for 6 months or longer, Leon’s Godhood remains secure. There’s a bunch of new testimonials and some more teachings.
For those who haven’t yet welcomed Leon into your life – well, there’s never going to be a better time than now.

Dec 4, Glasgow
It ain’t quite Public Enemy, but it’s damn close. I mention Public Enemy because bloody Siobhann who was a delightful dinner guest tonight saw the PE when they played here last year. Dammit. I missed them. Then they played in Glasgow months later and I missed that too. Grrr.
But: I’ma gona to the Beastie Boys!
I really need some sleep. Good night everybody.
(I only just realised Siobhann’s blog is Cankerous not Cantankerous)
(Also: Sesame Street – 35 years old! Happy birthday Sesame Street.)

Just back from a gig by NZ heeeeroes Pitch Black.
Now eating toast. Mmmm. Toast. With Vegemite. Mmm. Toast with vegemite.
Ahhhh.
Reminded of last time I saw Pitch Black play – at the legendary gig Freefall in, what was it, ’97? Where PB shared the stage with the Nomad, Salmonella Dub, Roots Foundation Sound System and of course the one and only Jet Jaguar. I remember it as the single best dance-music experience I’ve ever had. I pretty much danced non-stop from the first beat to the last – I wasn’t drinking in those days, so I didn’t need to take a break for, well, anything, and I was there alone so I had no-one to answer to but the music. Damn good.
Bloody hell, the site is still up.
Toast finished now. Er. It’s nearly 3am. I have to get up in 4 hours. That’s me, devil-may-care wild party animal that I am! Now, where did I put my slippers? Zzzzz

I don’t see any reason to believe BushCo stole the election.
Yet.
I do see reason to interrogate the shit out of the whole electoral process.
And for those Repubs who are bugged by the cries of ‘fraud!’ – all I can say is – that’s what you get for having such an amateurish electoral system.
Seriously. The left’s been pointing at the voting systems for two years now. To do nothing about it? Stupid.
I just thought of a new way of categorising voters:
* think USA best country in the world at pretty much everything: voted Bush
* don’t: voted Kerry

This post is devoted to me congratulating myself on being the rockingest man in Myplaceville.
So. I finally got my hands on a copy of Signs & Portents issue 15, which contains 9 pages of Morgtastic goodness in the form of Breakdown Control, an article for the OGL Horror roleplaying game.
Sweet.
Someone I’ve never heard of says “I love this article and would rate it as one of the best to come out of S&P yet.”
Sweet.
And Perhaps The Most Brilliantest Game Designer Dude In The World said of my pride and joy Providence Summer:
“I remember that and really liked it. :)”
Sweet.
See? Rockingest. Right here.

Continue reading Yay me! Like, really, yay!

Stuff I’ve been doing:
* running a wildly fun roleplaying thingy for Halloween. Steve and Brian and I put it together and recruited 8 lucky souls to the cause. It were creepy and funny and involving and a success! Huzzah. We’re currently looking at re-spining it to make it even better the next time we run it, which should be soon…
* eating meals at Monster Mash. Yum. Monster Mash.
* seeing movies. Like The Corporation (groove) and AVP (er).
* reading stuff. Like, finally, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By co-incidence, Apocalypse Now was on TV here the night before I finished it. Choice. Also: Michael King’s Penguin History of NZ, again, and Rory Stewart’s the Places In Between.
* buying stuff. I’ve been a bit of a retail fiend this past week. All comfort buying, I think. Stupid books! I don’t need more books! Gah.
* eating vegetables. Yum. Vegetables.
* writing lyrics for a hip-hop remix of ‘Mull of Kintyre’. No, I can’t share them, I’ve deleted them. Even as an exercise in deliberate badness they were too awful. And we shall never speak of this again.