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…
Welly People: Futuna Haunting
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.
Great Little Moments In Cinema
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?
Return of the Ethnicity Question
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.
Stealing Green
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.)
One Of Welly’s Secrets Is Out
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.
[mediawatch] Rilstone on the Daily Express
International treasure Andrew Rilstone has been writing regularly on the dire UK paper the Daily Express. He has a particularly good line in dissecting the rhetoric to get at the transactional impact underneath.
In this post, which I’ve been meaning to link to here for several weeks, he digs into the 2006 installment of that hardy Christmas perennial in UK journalism, Political Correctness Has Gone Mad And Is Stealing Our Christmas. It is a classic example of Rilstone’s biting, deadpan analysis and bitter humour, but then it goes the extra mile in quite a surprising and splendid way and puts the whole thing in a broader context. Check this out:
I think that the Express is engaged in a pretty transparent attempt to radicalize the White community. It is systematically running news stories which conflate Christianity with Englishness;and that equate Islam with foreign-ness. If the English can be persuaded to use Bibles, Stamps, Prince Charles, Silver Crosses and very occasional church-going as signifiers of national identity, then they will start to perceive themselves as part of White Community. If they perceive themselves as part of a Community, then they will also perceive themselves as different from members of the Veil-Wearing Community. If ‘England’ is defined as ‘a Christian Country’ and dark skinned people are defined as ‘Muslims’, then dark-skinned people are outsiders, full stop.
If you are in the UK, go read the whole post, and then bookmark Mr Rilstone and read him regularly. You won’t regret it.
(If you are not in the UK, you really should do exactly the same thing. It’s just that good.)
Review: Borat
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.
[mediawatch] Curmudgeons
International readers will be in ignorance of the interesting week in NZ politics. Don Brash, the leader of our right-wing opposition party National, resigned. (To my immense satisfaction; I’ve sent hate in his direction before, more than once, mostly for his eagerness to deploy racial division as an election strategy.) His resignation was clearly a pre-emptive response to the pending publication of a book he had tried to suppress, and which was widely expected to bring down his leadership. Brash claims the events are unconnected, of course.
(Aside: claiming the events are unconnected is an interesting demonstration of the Bush-junta style of spin – just come up with an alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely it may be; the objective isn’t to actually convince anyone, it’s to give a narrative to people already on your side. If you already have a narrative, you resist a damaging counternarrative much more easily.)
The book, indie journo Nicky Hager’s ‘The Hollow Men’, does appear to contain much damning revelation about activities within National. What first intrigued me, however, were the accusations leveled at Michael Bassett, an ex-politician and newspaper columnist, that he was secretly advising and stagemanaging many of the things Brash did that he would then put over in his newspaper columns as evidence of supreme common sense. Hager’s accusation is that Bassett was claiming to be an independent and impartial analyst of current events in his column, when secretly he was hip deep in the political machine.
Even if true, I’m not sure how damaging a claim this is. (The fact that Bassett denies it strenuously suggests that it is quite damaging.) Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to going over the accusations in a bit more detail and I’m childishly excited by the possibility that Bassett will get slapped down, hard.
I don’t like the man, not at all. He’s a horrific example of the ‘curmudgeon’, that species of opinion writer so beloved of New Zealand’s/the world’s print media. And this event gives me the motivation to dig up and present a blog post begun but left unfnished back in February or so. Here it is:
Curmudgeons. Why do newspapers have these people? You know, the grumpy old male right-wing voice of ‘common sense’, whose opinions often turn on thinly veiled bigotry and usually amount to no more than that?
Karl du Fresne’s column in the Dom Post is even named ‘curmudgeon’. He’s not the worst offender – Michael Bassett and Frank Haden both fill the same role in the same paper on different days. Bassett even had a full day’s editorial piece devoted to defending him from criticism after he wrote an incredible column about the lower class’s habit of irresponsible breeding. He ‘asks the tough questions’ or some such nonsense.
(Aside: Tired curmudgeonry is never a ‘tough question’. It plays to people’s stereotypes and bigotries. Anything that encourages reaction without reflection is the very opposite of a tough question. The liberal movement in society in the last few centuries has been built on asking the actual tough questions. The banalities of curmudgeons and right-wing pundits the world over can only be spun as ‘tough questions’ because they are so out of step with the difficult, complex, intelligent questions at the heart of liberalism. What they perceive as horror at asking a question so challenging is in fact horror at the degree of wilful and damaging ignorance on display.)
Okay, I know why newspapers have these people. They get people reading. They get grumpy curmudgeons to say, “hah! That’s telling it like it is!” And they get idealistic lefties to say, “oh noes! Why is he brimming with such hatred?” And so everyone reads. And no, I don’t want all newspapers to become voices of the One True Liberal Way, etc etc. But the reification of the grumpy old man columnist to become the Grumpy Old Man Columnist Position is, I think, of note. There’s a self-awareness to it that didn’t used to be there when Frank Haden was pissing me off ten years ago.
Newspapers have created these little performance spaces, and the curmudgeons are more than eager to throw a little moronic bile around to live up to their billing. It’s a vicious cycle in action, and it makes me a bit sad.
And, yes, it does make me a little sad. There is a lot of prominent media space given to the curmudgeon voice; precious little given to any other voice than the grumpy old white man. (The presence of Tze Ming Mok in one major paper is so unusual that it only serves to show up how pervasive this trend is. That the only other prominent young woman with a voice is the curmudgeon-in-a-mini-skirt Cactus Kate rather undermines the whole enterprise, too.)
Oh, for a world where the barmy curmudgeons would be fenced in with all the lunatics in the letters to the editor, where they rightfully belong.
Thinking About Work
I have been thinking through a lot of tricky writing stuff lately.
Currently writing issue 6 of Amazing Triple Action, the superhero roleplaying game zine released by Adamant Entertainment. It includes a bunch of fairly tricky character set-ups, in terms of the rule systems I need to master to represent them right. It’s kind of pleasing to find that, where I’ve encountered grey areas and other difficulties, tracking down the word of the original designer usually confirms my suspicions. It’s good to be solving problems the same way as the joker who set the whole ball rolling – suggests that I know my oats on this stuff. It does get pretty technical.
It’s also just stupidly fun to sit around riffing off comic books – inhaling that pop culture subgenre so intensely through my childhood has given me the beef for it, that much is clear. Issue 6 will feature some very silly stuff indeed, and I love it to pieces.
Also working hard on Ron the Body – well into the actual writing now, as opposed to the preparing-to-write phase that took so damn long. I have become much more sensitive to the shape of the book, the way narrative rises and falls and takes the reader along, the way mysteries are suggested and questions are answered and tensions heightened. I was stuck on a particularly tricky Chapter 8 for a while, which seemed to be doing everything the plot needed and wanted but just felt way, way off. Then I realised, in one of those moments of sudden comprehension that you get, that Chapter 8 was actually mostly still Chapter 7. So now I have a beefed-up but well-shaped Chapter 7 and a Chapter 8 that doesn’t feel like it’s doing too many things at once. That’s fun, that is.
And yesterday while on the train home from netball I scribbled the final page of script for issue 3 of The Beast, a comic story I’ve been working on at odd moments all year. It’s six issues, each 16 pages of story, about a bunch of friends who start organising a series of late-night parties that begin to get out of hand. The final page of issue 3 is the mid-point twist, and I enjoyed writing it – I have the entire series broken down into page-by-page plot development, so it was cathartic to finally hit that point. Now I just need to find someone who wants to draw it…
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By the way, those who missed Billy’s comment, there was a followup to the V at the White House article, with photos of many Vs. Cool.