John Key and “Explaining Is Losing”

DomPost man in the Beehive Vernon Small: As National leader John Key is fond of saying: Explaining is losing.
I find myself forced to question this – does he really say that? Google sure don’t find any instances. Gerry Brownless said it in the house a year ago, but that’s about it. So does Vernon Small really testify that Key says this when off-mike? That’s a hell of a bean to throw, if so, because it comes from the arch-demon himself:

“Explaining is losing.” This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything — anything at all — and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.
– from a summary of ‘Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George Bush Presidential’

Speaking of election advice and strategy, Nicky Hager’s continued that unfamiliar “journalism” thing with a report on how John Key and the National core have enlisted extensive multi-year support from despised election dirty-tricks experts Crosby, Stills & Textor. As usual with Hager’s stuff, his story is then picked up and covered mostly in terms of “who does that Nicky Hager think he is” and “how is he getting all this information” rather than actually paying attention to what he’s dug up. But that’s the way things are done now, sad to say.
(Hager is a special guest at this Thursday’s Drinking Liberally in Wellington. I’m gonna be there.)

Walking Around Wellington

Saturday I decided I needed to reconnect with Wellington. For months now I’ve had very little contact with my beloved city; spending days hidden in an office on the hill, rushing home for food and sleep, occasionally passing through town for this or that specific purpose. Its not the best way to interact with Wellington, a city that rewards more considered immersion.
So I slung my bag on my back and strode off into the town. It was a gorgeous day, which was a bonus, and I couldn’t help smiling as I wandered about. So many small treats in this city, like the fascinating old houses throughout Newtown, and the way I can short-cut through the lovely (and semi-famous) Basin Reserve cricket ground, and the way the town belt tracks green alongside me all the way from Newtown to the waterfront.
I stopped off in the Spacething zine shop, chatted briefly to the lively crew there who were all enthusiasticly talking about bands they saw or will see or belong to. I diverted into Te Papa to see the art connected to the World Environment Day event Welly hosted a few weeks back, and liked most of it and was absolutely staggered by one piece by a Venezualan photographer. I trooped along the waterfront and curled around lower cuba, and there were plenty of people enjoying coffee or glasses of wine. I even treated myself to a chai latte and feijoa muffin at the library cafe, scribbling in my notebook and watching people pass by.
Basically I walked all over the city for about four hours, and then I walked back home. It was great. I think I needed to remind myself what it all was like.
(I walked back in a few hours later to go and see Incredible Hulk. Surprised myself by really enjoying it. Good wee film, seriously.)
(Also, my beloved Cal gave me the new edition of D&D as a gift. Thank you beloved Cal!)

Linky Gotta Linky

Horn o’ plenty, right here, that old horn filled up with the linky delight!
Neil Patrick Harris continues his Shatnerian rebirth with an Old Spice gig and a starring role in Joss Whedon’s new weirdness (clip here)! (h/t to talula and Craig Oxbrow for these). He’s not even decrepit yet!
Graphic design heads will love this view of all the covers of French magazine metropoli.
Webcomics – a detailed history, covering Argon Zark, Sluggy Freelance, Dilbert, PVP, Megatokyo, Sinfest and many more. The web has given a huge bounce to the comic strip format. If you’ve never gone digging through the delights on offer, you should. Garfield it ain’t. (Literally, in some cases.) (h/t to Draw for this one)
I was gonna linky to this great site where you could create your own Star Wars Opening Crawl, but Lucasfilm dropped a cease and desist so it is over.
Sugar Bush Squirrel. I can’t explain this one, you have to see it for yourself.
Jason Lutes (who did Berlin: City of Stones, reviewed here a couple years back) got permission from James Kochalka to host Kochalka’s delightful four-page Hulk story. This was from that short but delightful period when big comics companies were luring the wild indie kids and giving them space to play. Heady times, and probably a last chance of some kind for mainstream superhero comics.
And I’ll leave you with this incredible Salon article about Korean breakdance crews. Every new paragraph surprised and delighted me in some way. And it links to footage of nailbiting championship battles at a huge international contest – I could only watch the first half of each battle before the feed died but man, what I saw was jawdropping incredible!
(Okay one last linky while we’re on the subject: The AV Club actually watches Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and finds it… good?!)

Deniers and Doctrine

Those who doubt the reality of anthropogenic climate change have rejected, en masse, the descriptive term “denier”, claiming that it insults them by comparing them to Holocaust deniers. (Cut and pasted example of this claim: “Global warming activists deliberately use the word “denier” to liken a sceptic to a Holocaust denier”.)
This is an audacious claim. I don’t think “global warming denier” has any significant relationship to “holocaust denier”. I think the only relationship that exists is the one that was put there by the climate change scepticism campaign (excoriated yesterday by James Hansen – see Hot Topic’s coverage). I think, to be honest, that the “stop comparing us to holocaust deniers” riposte was birthed in a coal-funded spin doctor’s lab somewhere in the United States. It’s an attempt to manipulate how we talk about this issue, and we’ve pretty much let them get away with it. Maybe we had to, maybe you just can’t win when the other side are whining away like that. Regardless, I think its nonsense. I think someone who does not recognise that the evidence for human-caused climate change is overwhelming, at this stage in the game, is in a state of denial. And someone in denial has earned the label, denier.
But that isn’t even what sparked this post. What incenses me is that I can’t call Ian Wishart a denier, not without being accused of intellectual high crimes, but Ian Wishart can strapline his foetid magazine with the accusatory phrase “climate change doctrine” and all those deniers out there, the same ones who pull out the holocaust line to show how unreasonable and vicious I am, nod and accept this as a fair description.
My only comfort, apart from having the support of the dictionary, is that this is the behaviour of a spitting, cornered cat. Among people who matter, the argument is over and has been for a long time. The deniers will be overridden and forgotten by people who can face the coming challenge. They will be forgotten like all the people in history whose fear of change prevented them from facing reality. They’ll be just another footnote.

Under The Mountain (1981)

Over the last few weeks Cal and I worked our way through classic Kiwi kidult series, Under the Mountain. Consisting of eight 25-min episodes, on its ’81 broadcast this became one of the defining TV experiences for NZ kids. It is available now as the first release in a new line of TVNZ Classics DVDs.
Under The Mountain was a kids book written by NZ literary legend Maurice Gee. It concerns two twins, eleven years old, whose psychic potential is unlocked by a friendly alien and who join in a war against a family of degenerate, destructive monsters.
And these monsters are truly monstrous. Their appearance in episode one is chilling – a slow reveal as something barely seen out at sea, then a strange shape in the dark, and finally a terrifying full-body shot as they menace the twins. The costumes aren’t anything special but they’re lit and shot well enough to work – strange lumpy, slimy menaces straight out of Lovecraft. (In fact, it is easy to imagine Gee was paying homage to Lovecraft, with the shoggoth-like monsters and the sick, Innsmouth depravity of the strange Wilberforce family; not to mention the weird cosmic amorality of it all.)
Warning: It gets heavy. Not all the sympathetic characters survive. The eleven-year old twins have to grapple with failure and hopelessness as well as more prosaic threats; they argue about the morality of trying to kill the monsters. The whole thing is very deeply felt, and all the more impressive for it.
In fact, I’m surprised to see it marketed here in NZ as “children’s classic”. It is definitely for adults as well as kids, and apart from not talking down to anyone, its actually quite scary. There are some great jump moments, some bits of real suspense, and some unnerving body horror mixed in with the sheer b-movie joy of the monsters themselves. Add in the deeply creepy set design (clearly inspired by H.R.Giger’s work on Alien) and it’s no wonder this gave rise to so many nightmares in this country.
UtM was the first of NZ’s celebrated run of “kidult” dramas, followed by Children of the Dog Star, The Fireraiser, and others. (The genre reappears now and then, e.g. Mirror Mirror in the 90s and Maddigan’s Quest in the 00s.) For a while, there was a lot of pride in our kidult productions – they crossed over the young/old audience barrier and were internationally successful, perhaps our most successful televisual exports ever?
The supremacy of the “kidult” drama disappeared in the 90s with the coming of commercial television, and its a shame – all the more so considering how well UtM stands up today. The acting, sets, effects, and staging are all far better than I had any right to expect. Sure, it bears the marks of its era – the acting is often a bit stagey, the effects are dramatic but not exactly convincing, etc. – but overall it is a great piece of craftsmanship.
Its also obvious that a lot of money went into it – not just from the effects and giant, fascinating sets, but also the direction and camerawork. It was all shot on film, not on tape, with heaps of location shooting. There are little touches that surprised me – a shot that started looking at the kids on the beach, that then turned right around to follow them as they left the beach and finally craned high above their heads to track them as they went into a nearby house. For a shot that doesn’t have any particular significance, that’s a lot of trouble to go to – and its indicative of the care that went into the whole production.
The DVD has no extras, which is a real shame. Still, I’m just pleased its available. The picture quality is okay, nothing special but not poor – for some reason the clips on the TV ad are much fuzzier than the actual release. The episodes even have the cuts to and from commercial breaks left in, apparently there aren’t any clean copies of the episodes left in the archives! Its also a Region 0 release, which as all right-thinking people know, is the best region to be – it plays anywhere in the world.
Cal and I invested in Under the Mountain for the nostalgia value, but it deserves far more respect than that. It’s a genuine classic, in fact I’d go so far as to call it a triumph. I’m as surprised as anyone to be saying this, but here goes: my highest recommendation.

Those Dastardly White Men!

Left-wing politics lost the working man the moment it started caring about women and minorities.
In talk about Obama/Hillary I’ve seen the above claim a few times, never spelled out, but sitting there under the text. And I have to confess, it has a certain explanatory appeal.
But I am not a history expert, and I am suspicious of this claim that seems to imply that prejudice is endemic among working-class white men. I don’t think that’s true.
So, people who read this blog. Is that claim in italics nonsense? Or is there enough truth in there that it is of some value?
(Dastardly is a tremendously good word. I want to use it more often but the opportunity rarely presents itself.)

On My Knees

Last few blog entries, and this one, composed in a few minutes and hastily posted. This is, safe to say, not my blogging golden age. Thank heaven for the friday linky that keeps you all coming back, I suppose…
Doco season chez morgue + cal has continued. Watched Rats in the Ranks a few weeks back, splendid nailbiter about a local body election in Oz. And Jesus Camp the other night, great wee film, Cal and I talked most of the way through it which is usually the sign of a good doco for us. Much I could blog about it but I won’t just now. Anyone out there seen either of these gems?
Sad that George Carlin died.
I am currently in the habit of kneeling, instead of sitting, while working at my computer desk.
(It occurs to me that I studied for exams in high school standing up.)
Make of this what you will.

After Democracy

Saw Toi Whakaari NZ Drama School’s second-year production of one-act plays by Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, which they group-titled ”After Democracy”.
It’s a good series of pieces all with political subjects (per the title). Pinter’s Mountain Language opens, which demonstrates military torment of an occupied people; and Pinter’s Party Time, in which the glamourous elite smarm while trouble brews in the streets, finishes.
Between is Churchill’s oddly-formed Far Away, which itself has three parts (so loosely tied it took some googling after the fact to work out the same characters were in each part). The third of these took me out of the show completely; it pushes too far into absurdity with tales of animals and professions choosing sides in a complex global war, and came off much like an unused and typically overlong season five Monty Python sketch. It was made up for by the second part with the hatmakers, which is probably the piece I’m going to remember for the rest of my life – excellent stuff.
Nevertheless, the whole piece was a fun and intriguing time, making good use of space and a large cast. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re up Newtown way. On until Weds at 8pm.

Friday Is The Linkiest Day

I am outlinkied by my colleagues this week.
talula linked up to famous photos remade with lego – this may be the weirdest thing I’ve seen in ages.


Clayton Cubitt, photographer/designer, happened to be passing through NZ when Warren Ellis linked to him. He took some incredible photos. Start here, in the Air NZ lounge at LAX.
Heaps of good stuff at the brother Moose blog, like the prank collection and the 1910 farmer’s manual, Farming With Dynamite.
This just released into the internetosphere: the U.S. special forces counterinsurgency manual, explaining how all that stuff in El Salvador etc. was orchestrated.
And finally, relax and enjoy this comic from 1950, Astra, Girl of the Future