From The Morgue

I saw 6 films in this years International Film Festival.
Naked Childhood
French cinema verite from 1968, with a non-actor cast following the life of a boy in foster care and the difficulties of the various relationships. It was incredibly engaging, but sometimes painful. The film cycled through the boy doing something horrible, then finding some measure of peace and engagement with his family, then doing something horrible again to mess it all up. The message, of course, being that the problems are going on a long way under the surface. There was a very old grandmother, nearly bed-ridden, who formed a special bond with the boy, and who everyone in the theatre fell in love with – she was just an incredibly warm and genuine presence. When she died, a pall fell over the place and you knew the boy was going to get himself in real trouble.
Also of note: I flinched when the boy hurled a military knife at his foster brother, embedding it in the door by his head; I flinched even more a moment later when I realised they hadn’t used trick photography or special effects, they’d just hurled a bloody knife at the actor’s head. *shudder*
Thank You For Smoking
Fun satire on the lobby industry, through the lens of big tobacco – following a lobbyist through his work undermining truth and exploiting uncertainty and patriotism. It was a bit too ‘adapted from a novel’ for my taste, big and sprawling but thinly-spread, clearly leaving out lots of stuff from the novel but not balancing that with a solid focus. It made me laugh a bunch and I liked it, but I doubt I’ll remember much about it in six month’s time.
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
Wonderful concert film, with lots of the very funny Dave Chappelle and a very genuine community-building underpinning to some great concert footage. The only problem I had with this film was, I wanted it to be a half-hour longer and have that half hour be concert footage. It was great. And I admit, seeing the Fugees reunite on stage was a pretty awesome moment for me – the Fugees live in ’98 was the best hiphop gig I’ve ever been to.
The Heart of the Game
This movie was a ridiculous and cheesy sports story, where a black girl comes to a white school and becomes the star of the basketball team, overcoming the prejudice of her friends towards her school and her school towards her, and under the mentoring of a wise and demanding coach she leads the team to success, until a massive personal crisis upsets everything, and the team has to unite around her in the face of legal and personal challenges, until finally everything is resolved in the final seconds of a championship match against their arch-rival team from the school across town…
…if it wasn’t a documentary I woulda walked out. Incredible. Very, very cool. And I’m underselling it here – there’s so much to this film, lots of very interesting stuff that is only briefly touched on due to time constraints. It’s no Hoop Dreams, but it’s amazing nonetheless.
The Host
Crazy Korean monster movie. Was sold to me as a horror movie, but when the giant creature comes stomping out of the river ten minutes in and goes on a rampage, its true nature becomes obvious. Lots and lots of fun, with one of the best reversals-of-expectation I’ve seen in any movie ever. Hurray!
Ten Canoes
Australian aboriginal folk tale. Wonderful, gently paced, full of wry humour and ravishing cinematography – Aussie swamps have never looked so good. This is one of those films that stay with you. The death dance sequence I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

I’ve had what feels like a very busy week. I think that means it actually was a very busy week, but I can’t quite be sure Huh.
One symptom: having lots of scattered thoughts which don’t coalesce into anything bloggable. (Not that I orient my internal mental life around blog-coherent thoughts, nosirree.) But I’m gonna blog a bunch of stuff anyway.
TETSUJIN28 AND ONLINE COMMUNITY
I used to spend a hell of a lot of time on RPG.net. It was my main online community, essentially taking over from the old Vic Uni BBS when that bit the dust. In recent years the blog-and-LJ community has become my focus, and time being short as it always is, RPGnet is just an occasional stop to lurk nowadays.
It was a shock to hear that one of the better-known members of the RPGnet community had died in a vehicle accident. Unlike the old Vic BBS and the new blog/LJ-crowd, the RPGnet people were only known to me online (with some exceptions, having met up with a fair number at different events down the years). So hearing that Britt Daniels, online handle tetsujin28, had died was deeply weird. He was a part of my community, but I find it hard to claim I knew him at all. He was a familiar presence with a familiar voice, but… hell, I dunno. All these questions of knowing and connecting through a text-only medium raise themselves again, the same ones that used to send my head spinning in ’94 on the BBS, the same ones that the world at large is wrestling with right now. We’re still in the earliest infancy of understanding what this new communications technology is doing to our understanding of community, of social relationships, of identity. It’s changing stuff, that’s for sure. Big things are afoot.
I like to point to the cellphone and say ‘this is the beginning of the new era’, and I’m deadly serious, even when I say it in a cheesy kinda way. The near-ubiquity of the cellphone *changes what it is to be human*. The digital revolution was huge, but that was the prologue; the cellphone is chapter one.
Anyway. Thoughts spinning out – I said this hasn’t remotely coalesced. I never much got on with Tet online, but he was a part of that community, and I’ll miss his presence every time I drop back in. I wish him peace.
WE SIT IN JUDGEMENT
At the film fest, I watched ‘The Heart of the Game’, a really rather good doco on a girls’ basketball team in Seattle. I might talk about it in a later post, as it provoked a lot of thought in different directions. One scene I want to mention now: a girl in the team ended up the centre of a regional controversy, and the documentary included some radio talkback where listeners called in to express their opinions on the girl and the decisions being made around her. It was a scene explicitly designed to get a rise out of the audience, and it worked: How could these people say these things? By what right can they pass judgement on this girl? Whatever happened to ‘judge not lest ye be judged’?
I was thinking about it later on, and it occurred to me that a feature of our current discourse is that we are constantly called to sit in judgement on others.
Media outlets, politicians and other public figures are constantly appealing to us, implicitly or explicitly, to pass judgement. This goes beyond just seeking our opinions – we are encouraged to act like the apocryphal audience in the Roman arena, marking with thumb up or down the fate of the defeated.
In fact, I’m beginning to think that’s a key part of the technology that structures current public discourse. We are encouraged to have an opinion, and because we buy into that, we walk right into the hands of the opinion-makers. The propagation of rhetoric would fall apart without an eagerness to pass judgement.
Where is the counter-value to this? Where are the voices in society asking that we not sit in judgement, that we seek better information, that we keep our minds open to different explanations for what we see? There are some, but they are meek voices, and they do not carry much weight. Is this inevitable? Is the eagerness to judge something fundamental to ‘human nature’ or a product of our current socialisation?
[I’m well aware that I’m here arguing the precise opposite of my argument in comments with Andrew a couple weeks back, where I said that holding back on passing judgement for more facts was a poor way of coping with the world. I still think that. I guess I’m containing multitudes again, or there’s some hypocrisy going on somewhere. Like I say, not yet coalesced.]
CLOTHES FOR THE TALL DUDE
Why is it so damn hard to find some casual trousers with long legs and a medium waist without going to a tailor? There’s a lot of us tall skinny guys around. What’s the story? I’ve had it with poor-fitting clothes, but I’m not seeing a lot of other options. (This is the true and actual reason why I wear jeans all the time. They come in a size that fits me.)

Friday night, I stayed at the auld family hoose, and in my old bed, the bed I slept in throughout the Todman St years.
Man…
…it was way less comfortable than I remember.
—
Speaking of sleeping on furniture in Todman St, and it isn’t very often one gets to make that segue, old-skool Todman St visitors may be bemused to see my wonderful long couch appearing in an ad for alcohol moderation.
Which is sort of appropriate.
Looks like the end of the Pigphone party to me, 271KB pdf.
The couch is currently making a living in wee sister’s flat, performing much the same function there as it did in Todman St.
—
I was in the Hutt for the jubilee for my old school, St Bernard’s College. Was good fun, actually, though it would have been nice if the SBC first XV had managed to beat arch-rivals St Pats in the banner rugby match Saturday afternoon.
Highlight was chatting with old teacher Elsabie Prasad and her husband, about all sorts of stuff. Was good, that.

Today, 29 July, is the traditional date on which members of the Church of Daffyd celebrate the birth of Daffyd.
This year I have chosen to mark the celebration with a fierce dance along the Terrace, howling Daffyd’s praises into the night sky. Also, alcohol.
I have sat at the right hand of Daffyd for over ten years now, and man, it kicks all kinds of ass at those inter-religious quiz nights to say that my deity can pwn the lot of them.
Happy birthday, my lord.
———
[David is the originator and host of the additiverich blog collective as well as being a deity]

(1)
The first novel I wrote was called in move. It followed four guys through their last year at school. I came up with the personalities of these main characters when I was still in school, scribbling them down in the margins of my schoolwork – I still have all those notes, and the final versions who turned up on the page many years later are essentially the same characters.
(The creative process I actually used was to lift key character traits from friends and acquaintancs, and mix them up. I wanted the characters to remind me of people I knew, but to be different enough that the stolen personalities wouldn’t be obvious. What happened was, as soon as the writing started the characters became entirely themselves. Still, I can point to any defining personality feature on each of the main characters and tell you who in my school was the model for it.)
(2)
I came back to in move relatively recently, and figured out some deeper parts of the structure (my ignorance of which had been hampering the story in previous arrangements). I plotted the four characters on a diagram. They were differentiated in two ways. They had either trait A or trait B, and also either trait X or trait Y, so the characters were AX, AY, BX and BY. I can’t remember what names I used for the traits right now. (I think confidence vs insecurity was one pair, and control vs no control was the other, at least at one stage of thinking about it.)
(3)
Now. A few nights ago I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars again. I’d previously got two-thirds through it, and was enjoying it rather a lot, but decided against taking it on the plane when I left NZ in 2002. I figured I’d finish it in three hours and then have a big chunk of paperback taking up space in my bag. So now in 2006 I picked it up again. I decided to re-read Part 4 and see how my memory jogged. I chose Part 4 because it’s really short.
Part 4 is about the first psychologist on Mars, coming apart at the seams as he provides support to the first Mars colonists. He tracks the colonists on two axes, introvert-extrovert and labile-stabile (basically, labile means moody and changeable, whereas stabile means of a constant mood). He cross-references these two axes and discovers he’s recreated the Greek model of four temparaments – sanguine is extravert/stabile, phlegmatic is introvert/stabile, melancholic is introvert/labile, and choleric is extravert/labile.
The text has a diagram. When I saw it, I reacted with shock, because I recognised it. It matched my in move diagram.
Which is when I realised my four characters fit the model pretty much exactly. When I was scribbling notes at age 16 I had, unwittingly, created archetypal examples of the four temperaments. (Scott – choleric. Richard – sanguine. Adam – melancholic. Dennis – phlegmatic.)
(4)
Then it gets a little freaky.
Way back when I wrote the second draft of the book I wanted to play with the symbolism a bit. Following instinct, I related each character to one of the four alchemical elements, earth, air, fire and water. Pure instinct. I just knew which one fitted which element.
Well, turns out I got them right. Choleric goes with fire, sanguine with air, melancholic with earth, and phlegmatic with water.
That kinda blew me away. Typing this now, it’s still blowing me away. Me, now: away, blown. It’s incredible how deep these symbols go inside our heads.
Think on it for a second: these patterns and structures used to conceive of the world in operation thousands of years ago in a very different culture, they come bubbling up out of the subconscious of a pretty ordinary Kiwi kid in the now. There’s no real mystery to it, but there is amazement in what it says about us, about our minds and our cultures and how they all work. There is wonder. I think it’s wonderful.

Today, July 23, was supposed to be Burn The Beehive Day.
Today was intended to be a new national holiday when all New Zealanders could put aside their differences and gather together, metaphorically and literally, to enjoy the burnination of an iconic loved/hated NZ building, and thereafter commemorate it annually with a long weekend.
But this promising new celebration isn’t going to be held this year. No, too many New Zealanders feel strongly about the buildings being destroyed in the Middle East to smile at the destruction of a building here. And how, in this atmosphere of international tension, will it be possible to emphasise that BTBD is an apolitical expression of mutual respect as well as the sheer joy of burnin’ stuff? The possibility that BTBD would be co-opted by one political pressure group or another is too great.
And so, with sadness, but with confidence that this is the right decision, it has been decided that the first BTBD will wait for next year.
Then, crowds will gather together in the courtyard of New Zealand’s parliament, and holding their little waxen Beehive candles they will watch as fires are lit in the Beehive. Children will clap and parents will smile and teenagers will look up from their cellphones for a moment. MPs will stand with labour unionists and business roundtable members, all united. All of New Zealand will join hands and, together, sing for our unity, our communal goodwill, and our mutual appreciation for burnin’ stuff up real damn good.
Next year.

Fragment One:

(one of many pamphlets scattered today in the quad area at Auckland University of Technology)
Fragment Two:

Photo caption: Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006.(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
(Via This Modern World )
Fragment Three:
Israeli deaths: 29
Lebanese deaths: 300
(Via today’s BBC news article)

I don’t get irritated too often. However, some things do rub me entirely the wrong way. My pet peeve, as anyone who has seen me negotiate the sidewalks of Edinburgh during Festival season will know, is bad walking. I dislike it even more than bad driving, maybe because it’s so much less potentially fatal. (That makes sense in my brain.)
Here, then, is a rare Proclamation of Religious Truth from the Holy Church of Leon (God and true-King-of-France).
Venal walking sins:
Scenic walking
The sinner is more interested in looking around himself than in looking where he’s going, and he isn’t trying to minimise his impact on other pedestrians. Scenic walkers stop unexpectedly and generally move slowly, which can cause minor traffic disturbances on a low-usage pavement and severe clotting on a busy pavement.
Text veering
The sinner is so busy texting that she doesn’t realise she’s moving in a diagonal, until she does, when she overcompensates and starts moving in the other diagonal. Repeat at unpredictable intervals.
Jittering
The sinner is weak of spirit and freaks out every time he realises there are other human beings also walking in the same area. Can be counted on to move the wrong way when approaching someone, to pause an inordinately long time when turning a corner into someone’s way, and generally to make everything hard for everyone by trying not to bother anyone.
Mortal walking sins:
Slow-downing
The sinner is walking along at a reasonable pace, and then she slows down a bit. Then she slows down a bit more. Then she slows down a bit more. Then she finally comes to a complete halt. Throughout this entire exercise, she never once looks behind to see if she is inconveniencing anyone. On a busy pavement, where overtaking can be difficult, being stuck behind a slow-downer is very frustrating indeed.
Erraticising
The sinner is all over the place. Changing speed, changing direction, turning unexpectedly and without checking for other people. This sin combines unpredictability with a complete disregard for other pedestrians. Erraticisers are the leading cause of pedestrian collisions, which you’d think would teach them to stop their erraticising, but somehow this doesn’t happen.
Wide Pavementing
Taking up the entire width of a pavement without being aware of people moving faster than you is walking’s greatest sin. Usually this takes a group of people, but narrow pavements can be occupied by one person with a bag.
This sin is most often committed by the slow. A particularly frequent sinner formation is the husband-and-wife wide-bottom no-awareness pair, but also common are the three-blind-old-ladies, the seven-clueless-teenagers, and the two-arrogant-bastards.
If anyone ever has to step into the road to get past you, then you have committed this terrible sin, and you WILL go to hell.