From The Morgue

I’m living somewhere new again, on the Terrace in central Wellington, in my brother’s apartment while he does a Euro-mission. Internet will be infrequent while here as he has no phone line, but right now I’ve found an unsecured wireless connection to leech off. It wasn’t there yesterday so I’ll take advantage while I can.
It is damn good to be back in Wellington and able to walk places. This is my habitat; I get a little pleasure rush walking out the door and finding myself in the heart of the city. Now all I need is an affordable plan to live in similar locale long-term. Hmm. This dissolute bohemian life has its complications.
On the Terrace reminds me that I read Maurice Gee’s Blindsight the other day, and enjoyed it very much. A crucial piece of action in that book happens on the Terrace. Blindsight is a novel inspired by now-deceased Wellington street personality, ‘bucket man’. Now Wellington has a new street personality, ‘blanket man’. I approve that Wellington’s homeless person has a Wikipedia entry.
Finally picked up Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon again. Despite enjoying it very much, I stalled out on it a couple months ago around the 450-page mark. Now it’s back on the table and delivering reliable laughs once again, even if it is too clever by ‘alf. I think I was vulnerable to stall-out because of the complete lack of narrative momentum – the story isn’t going anywhere at all, and it takes its sweet time to not go there. But it’s just so much fun to read.
In a flurry of creative energy I started writing a short story last night. I crashed out on it only about an hour in, with the heavy-lidded thing going on – too little sleep the previous night. Nice to have popped something new, though; making space for the new has been tricky as I’ve tried to be so diligent about resolving the old. Even that’s disingenous, of course, since this is a riff off an idea I had some years ago, but it feels new, which counts for something.
Life continues to deliver interesting times, but I feel I have my footing back and everything is as it should be. I’m starting to run the show again. Getting things in their correct alignment; everything takes longer than expected but it’s worth it to get things right. Perhaps I should resume some kind of meditative practice to set this pattern in? Or perhaps I will simply voice that thought in this blog as a simple alternative, recording intent and thus absolving self from action. The mind is a terrible thing to second-guess.
Also, considering the number of times in the last couple of weeks I have had to negotiate Complications arising from communications failings, it occurs to me that I am not speaking much to people at the moment. I would suspect myself of failing to heed my own advice if it wasn’t so clear that it’s working for me. Do ye as I say, not as I do.
It is an apartment with a balcony. There is no cat here.

Tonight I spent a couple hours in Krazy Lounge nursing a coffee, listening to a jazz quintet and reading last year’s John Ralston Saul book on globalization.
Finally, I felt like a fucking citizen.

Over in Edinburgh, the lovely coffee lifeform devotes many hours to the charity Pass IT On, which passes donated computers on to those who need ’em. It’s good work, and the kind of thankless low-key toil that stays in the background of our big ol’ society.
It took a step into the foreground this past week, with a fundraising concert organised by the caffeinated one (at the cost of god knows how many hours of her time, and a cigarettes-and-coffee bill running into the thousands of pounds), which she reports raised an astonishing seven and half thousand pounds. Blimey. And, by all accounts, it was a tremendously successful night of entertainment to boot.
I know a lot of people who sink energy into community projects and groups – lots of little things here and there, and occasionally big things like this. It’s nice to give a shout-out to a particular moment of success, but really this just reminds me how much respect I have for all people who put some time to make a difference just because they believe it’s worthwhile. You are all amazing.
Nice one Cat. Seriously impressed over here.

Care of Scoop:
Two of New Zealand’s largest battery hen producers have bowed to pressure from animal advocacy organisation SAFE following calls for mandatory labelling of egg cartons, and say they will label their battery eggs…
Good. About time.
Battery farming of hens is one of the most depressing examples of animal abuse in the name of increased profit, and the fact that it has taken this long and this much campaigning to even get eggs labelled effectively is a sad indictment of industry practices.
Of course, for corporate industry, the profit motive trumps all else, and it can be no other way. Profit is what companies are for. The only real check on the profit motive comes from consumer ability to make informed purchasing choices. For this reason, food and produce labelling continues to be a massively important battleground. At stake isn’t just animal welfare, but every aspect of food production in our society, and the attendant impact on our health and well-being.
There is no good excuse for opposition to effective labelling. Companies fight it solely because they know their customers would be unhappy if they were better informed.
My unscientific impressions from travelling are that New Zealand is well behind the rest of the developed world in terms of food labelling. I hope this development is a sign of pending improvement.

I have never lived with a cat before. Thus, I don’t know how much of the following is idiosyncratic to this particular cat, or typical behaviour of the species; I suspect it’s mostly bloody typical.

• There are two important times of day for a cat: morning food time and evening food time. Morning food time begins when the human awakes and ends when actually fed. Evening food time begins as soon as morning food time ends, and ends when actually fed. Then evening food time begins again and continues until the human goes to sleep or, absentmindedly, feeds the cat again (whereupon, I imagine, a third evening food time would immediately begin).
• Cats like to be friendly and companionable, except when you are not about to put food in their bowl.
• If you spend a great deal of effort getting a roaring fire going in the fireplace, then leave to fetch a rewarding cup of tea, the cat will have appeared in whichever spot you intended to use to enjoy the fireplace and have your cup of tea. It will be asleep, but not so asleep that it cannot produce claws.
• If a cat puts a mouse on the floor before you, it means ‘you’re the boss’. If it keeps the dead mouse in its mouth and glares at you while blood drips on to the floor, it means ‘you’re next’.
• If it’s howling wind and rain outside, the cat will want to be let out the door to see for itself. Then it must be let back in immediately. The cat door is at the other end of the house and thus of no use at all in any way.
• Cats really don’t understand why we do anything we do, which is a good prompt to remind ourselves that, usually, neither do we.

I am enjoying living with a cat.

Once again I have the healthy. This is good. Being unwell was a real nuisance. The constant muscular ow was really driving me barmy.
I had a blood test the other week to try and figure out what was wrong with me. This was a minor personal milestone – the last time I had blood extracted was a very long time ago, fifteen years or more, and it was horrible. They couldn’t get blood out, jabbed me multiple times, veins collapsing left right and centre, all very frustrating and mildly traumatic. It didn’t give me a phobia or anything, but it certainly dampened any enthusiasm for donating blood… but the blood extraction this time out was quick and simple and painless, so that was cool.
Anyway, better now. The downside is I am now entirely well enough to work, so any slackness in the personal discipline goes straight and undiluted to the guilt centres. Curses.
I also learned something about masculine health etiquette, viz: How many days must one cough up blood Like A Man in order that going to the doctor becomes Acceptable Down The Pub? (Answer: Only two days.)
In other doctor-related news, I watched episode three of the new Doctor Who series last night, and it was bloody good. K9!

On Tuesday I play Ultimate. I’ve alluded to it a couple times on this blog, but this is the first time I’m saying it outright – I have become a player of Ultimate.
Ultimate is the sport with the frisbee. (Frisbee is a brand name, so technically it’s the sport with the flying disc, but that genie is never going back in the bottle, so.) It’s not quite like any other sport I’ve come across in a number of important ways. Most importantly, it has no referee. From a game design point of view this is very interesting.
How it works:

• Players call their own fouls or other violations; if the call is disputed, the disc is flipped to provide a 50/50 decision. The game is then got on with. (There’s a bit more to it than that, but this is sufficient summary for now.)
• Play stops when the frisbee goes out of bounds or hits the floor. To restart play, a member of the team winning possession grabs the frisbee from wherever it lands, taps it on the floor, and play begins immediately.
• The only breaks in play occur after points are scored. Then, teams can take time-out for discussion, and freely switch around players with their bench. When both teams signal their readiness to resume, the team who won the last point throws the disc to the other team and play begins.
• The only aspect of play external to what is happening on court is the clock; this ticks down the game time and never needs to be paused or reset. Its alarm signals the end of the game.

What has impressed me the most about the game is how efficient it is at delivering fun and avoiding ill-feeling. Every rule in the game is geared towards getting people out there throwing the disc with minimum time spent on anything else.
It’s a very elegant ruleset, and I have come to admire it greatly. I expect some of my own game design efforts will be affected by it in due course…
I choose this week to make a post about Ultimate because the Tuesday just gone, the team I’m in ‘Happy Creature’ posted a draw with top-of-the-table ‘Not 2 Serious’. It was a hell of a game. I didn’t play my best but I didn’t suck either, and I realised that I actually know how the play the game now – I have the basics down, I can see how the play comes together, I know how to work situations and set up defence. Of course, I don’t do all this with any great ability yet – mostly this knowledge manifests in ‘these are all the ways you royally screwed up this week’, but it feels good to know what the hell’s going on out there and it feels very good when I do stuff right.
So I have a new sport. It will never unseat the hallowed basketball in my personal sports pantheon, but it’s a mighty good time nonetheless.
(Oh, and for those few readers who were there that time years ago when we knocked Jon(not Gav) unconscious trying to play Ultimate – yeah, I can conclusively say it isn’t meant to be played like that. Poor Jon(not Gav).) (Edited because, um, I’m a dick with a bad memory basically.)

I woke up after three hours sleep to the news that I was a monster.
Well, that I was going to be playing the monster, at least. I was somewhere between excited and perturbed by the thought – all the good points (the acting, the make-up, the dramatic death scene) were remarkably similar to the bad points (acting, make-up, dramatic death scene).
But first I had to find a mannequin.
The Mannequin
At the Rumpus, good buddy and god Leon provided us with some mannequins, shop window dummies, which we used to good effect. They’re old possessions of Leon, dating back many many years. So when we were writing our script a short time after the Rumpus, I confidently said, yes, we can get a mannequin, let’s script one in. So we did. The monster now had a friend.
Except Leon didn’t have the mannequins any more. In classic Murphy’s Law style, precisely a week before the first time anyone actually needed the mannequins, he’d tossed them. Argh!
But, I thought, I’m a resourceful chap. I can do this. I fired up the old cellphone and sent out a blizzard of Saturday-morning text messages, asking for leads. Fairly soon, one of them came up trumps – the lovely Mrs Hall-Hall, who used to work in a clothing shop in Petone and gave me a name to ask there.
So I raced off to Petone, sauntered into the shop, and discovered that the person in question didn’t work there any more.
Stupid mannequin! But all was not lost. I gave them my spiel, and my most trustworthy manner, and was duly entrusted with a shop mannequin to take away into the bush. Success!
The mannequin story isn’t that remarkable, really. I know lots of our team were pulling off similar feats in order to get crucial things or make stuff happen. It’s part of the coolness of the 48 – you don’t realise just how much you can achieve in 48 hours until you get stuck in and do it.
This Morgue, This Monster
I arrived up at the rainy location, stomped through sticky mud, and wondered if we three writers were going to get lynched for writing an outdoor shoot. Luckily spirits were up, and they stayed up for most of the day (although it got a bit rough towards the end as we were losing daylight and rushing to get shots done).
I helped out with a few things, then was sat in a chair for the big make-up experience. Norm drizzled hot waxy substance all over my face and hands, and once it dried carefully painted it a grisly mix of fleshy oranges and bloody reds. This took somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, I think – I was sitting with eyes closed much of the time. Late in the process, the cast and crew arrived for lunch, and the yelps of horror and awe at my visage were a great comfort to me. Finally I was able to see myself in the mirror, and, well – I looked pretty damn horrific.
Not too long after, I was called to set and we shot the finale sequence, where the monster hunters confront the monster. There was a bit of physical stuff in here, some wrestling, some shambling, and a lot of looming. Some roaring and wailing was involved as well. I had to be muddied up, so enjoyed the attentions of a bunch of helpers gleefully smearing my bare chest with cold, gritty mud. Yerk.
I vividly remember the struggle between the monster and monster hunter Robin Slade (Luke Walker), where I had my arm wrapped around his neck, and we were both struggling to keep our balance on the edge of a very slippery mud bank. The shot of this moment in the final cut reveals Slade’s hand reaching around to gain secure purchase on my monstrous upper thigh. It was to help us stay upright, but it does seem quite a… tender moment.
So I roared, and wailed, and flailed, and raged, and finally I bring about my own end in what turned out to be a very successful death scene – it never fails to get a reaction. And then I was done, and stomped back to the cabin to de-monster.
But, before I did that, I wandered along with Fraser to meet a couple of wee ones who were keen to see the monster for themselves. Their eyes when they saw me were enormous. I told them this was what would happen to them if they didn’t eat their vegetables. That’s me; socially responsible monster.
So that was the end of Meltyman. We ended up shooting another scene the next day, a quick stunt where the monster tackles Nick, but I wasn’t in full make-up for it. I wasn’t too happy with the tackle – I was a bit lame with the physical stuff there, I think. But all the rest I’m happy with. I decided that if I was going to be a monster, I was going to really be an awesome monster. Following in the footsteps of Boris Karloff and Kane Hodder, I went for it, and it all turned out well.
The Fate Of The Movie
We didn’t make the finals. We did, however, make an awesome short film. I look forward to getting hold of a copy so I can show it off to some people.
Meltyman happy.
Face Of A Meltyman
There are better photos of the make-up than this, but this is the best one currently online:

Went to see X-Men 3 over the weekend. Don’t know what possessed me. (Actually I do – a good friend I don’t see often enough invited me.) It surprised me by being surprisingly entertaining with a wealth of nice moments. It didn’t surprise me by being utterly incoherent, by featuring some jaw-droppingly odd storylining (let’s kill off major character from first two movies off-screen! And only refer to it in passing later on!), and by completely failing to dramatically or thematically resolve any of the numerous interesting issues at the core of the film. It felt akin to those movies where misfit kids save their summer camp from a nasty developer by pushing the developer in the lake during an exciting canoe challenge – action (a) somehow delivers result (b) despite there being no conceivable reason that it should.
Man, I remember after I saw X2 I was so stoked I went out again the next day and watched it again. Sometimes the movies get it right. X-Men 3 is not one of those times. Skip it.
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Went on a Queen’s Birthday Weekend road trip yesterday, up the coast. It was a nice day for a drive. Our road trip posse visited the controversial Market Gardener statue in Levin and the windmill in Foxton, and conducted a scientific experiment on Foxton Beach. We also did some balancing.
Posse included a the very stylish big geek, plus three new arrivals in the land of blog: Mr & Mrs Hall-Hall and !(Kate). Also Anna, who still survives blogless. These three are now on the growing list at right, along with old-friend-rediscovered Matt Wong (stick) – who was, incidentally, the primary motivation guy behind those Aliens weekends, for those of you who remember them.
I was pleased to note that my Edinburgh family went on their own road trip. They, being classier and more organised than I, and also being determined like bastards to make me miss them terribly, have a short film of it up on the web. I love the bit where the Scottish invade.
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Today’s lesson in the realities of freelancing:
This morning I visited the dentist to have the work done identified at the other week’s checkup. This morning I also received notification of my first royalties from my first sole-credit project.
Dental bill = royalty check x 40
*sigh*

Today I want to a funeral for Frances. I didn’t know her, not in any real sense – one meeting, a couple of emails exchanged. I do know her husband Bruce. It was strange to be at a funeral and not feeling the loss directly; to learn about someone secondhand. As the order of service said, today was a celebration of the life of Frances, and it had that feeling to it. Friends and family lined up to speak of her, lovingly and with enormous humour, and through the laughter I learned a lot about her. Laughter was fundamental to who she was, that much was clear. Heck, any person who decides the music as their casket is carried out should be My Ding-a-ling… well, that person knows a thing or two about making people smile.
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When I was younger, I remember feeling certain that there was beauty in loss, beauty in suffering, and we couldn’t see it simply because we’re stuck in the pain and anguish of it.
That’s a romantic view. I’m still a romantic, I guess, because I still sense beauty there, in some way I can’t directly grasp. Loss has its role to play in life. I don’t think we need to seek beauty; I don’t think we should even try to seek something as abstract as beauty when there are real people suffering. But it gives me comfort to think that it is there, if only we look from just the right angle, at just the right moment.
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Lyrics from another song from the funeral:
“We dont have to live in a world where we give bad names to beautiful things
We should live in a beautiful world
We should give beautiful a second glance”
– Beautiful, by Marillion
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Enough of this week. I’m past ready for this one to be over.