From The Morgue

Had a sweet day yesterday. Nice work – did good stuff, fairly chilled out, played some wicked basketball at lunch. Massive goodness there, best bball workout I’ve had since leaving home. Workmate Russell loaned me a couple of CDs, including one of his own (he DJs on the side) – very cool – and lovely bosswoman Teresa loaned me a couple of recent BBC History magazines.
After work, tripped into Ephelant House to do some writing. Last week I sat down and started writing the second draft of Ron the Body. Two hours later when I put my pen down, I realised that I hadn’t got it. I knew right then. It was not working.
That is a terrible thing to feel. Instant doubts: am I not good enough for this book? Am I in that rewriting hell where nothing ever seems to work? Will I spend the rest of my life rewriting the front chapter?
Shush, self, I thought. Leave it. Come back. Try again.
The first chunk of Ron is all first-person, from the point of view of a woman named Cass. Last night, when I sat down again and straightened out a clean page and wrote ‘Ron the Body – 1 – Cass’ at the top, Cass came to the party. All is good.
Then Cal and I swung around the corner for a nice meal, headed home to dump our stuff, and hopped buswards back into the middle of town for the Salmonella Dub gig.
SDub are a Kiwi dub outfit, ‘world famous in new zealand’ as the saying goes. They deliver great dancefloor sounds. Cab Voltaire was full of Kiwis, unsurprisingly – the gig sold out with a queue at the door hoping for late returns. And the guys came out and played a burning set. I lost my connect a little early on, but when they swung into a more hip-hop flavoured second half I got right back in, fast. Some magic moments.
Some observations, partly from the downtime early on when my mind was wandering through this stuff:
* a Kiwi band playing to a Kiwi crowd in another country just needs to say Aotearoa and the room erupts. I cringed, I admit it.
* all the usual gig-denizens: the smelly natty-dreaded white guy who dances like a maniac even when the music isn’t on; the skinhead shirtless sixpack boys in the middle of things; the guy with the singlet vest and flat cap huffing vicks and flipping out right at the front; the Steve Stifler guy who doesn’t dance but puts his fists in the air and shouts the name of the band now and then. Heh.
* fashion really is different over here. The audience last night coulda been scooped off Cuba Street, and the it was a shock to realise how unfamiliar it was to see everyone wearing T-shirts and earthy colours; skirts of sensible length (but mostly jeans or trousers); not much makeup, not much cleavage. Less of a meatmarket, in other words. Mainstream young people clothes in New Zealand but scruffy and alternohemian on this side of the world.
And finally home after 2am. Sleep was good. (Waking up, not so good, but this is the price we pay.)

I still haven’t figured out what, if anything, I’m going to post on my LJ as opposed to posting here or sending out in morgueatlarge emails. So many channels! Anyway, you really should read the story of me and BBC Radio 4, which can be found on my livejournal here.

I recently set up a LiveJournal account. LJ is a blog service with a bunch of added extras that encourage networking among LJ members. I signed up primarily so I could comment on the blogs of my LJ friends and come up as an identity, as opposed to a strange anonymous guest. Also handy was the LJ friends system.
An LJ friend is basically someone you want to read regularly. You put them on your friends list, and then every time they add an entry it turns up on your Friends page. (Here is mine.) So you have a one-stop shop for reading all the LJs you follow. Very handy.
Anyway. I read LJs belonging to friends here, friends in NZ, and people whose work I follow – comics madman Warren Ellis, for example. I have put Warren on my friends list. Warren has about 2000 LJ readers who have done the same. 76 of those readers are on Warren’s own friends list – the people whose LJs he reads.
This is going somewhere, I promise. In fact, here’s the point now…
Roleplaying pro Mike Mearls first came to my attention writing the OGL conversion of Godlike (non gamers: just nod and smile) a few years back. He was the first guy to really throw caution to the wind and see what could be done with a great new toy. He’s carved out a freelancing career, and very recently signed on at Malhavoc Press as their first staffer who isn’t surnamed ‘Cook’. I read his LJ because he’s got interesting stuff to say about the industry. Also, he’s a funny guy.
So I made Mearls my friend. And now I’m his friend, in return. He seems to be the friend of everyone who friends him.
Why is Mearls my friend? Because he’s just a big-hearted guy, I guess.

So at the last week of our first year of ORC (Ottakar’s Roleplaying Club) we had 20 people in attendance. Not bad for starting with literally no-one. Still growing as well – *five* new people today, our biggest single new-person hit ever. Groovy.
A bunch of apologies from other regulars, too. We’re a good we club, we are. Four tables today, two running Dungeons and Dragons, one running a freeform made-up-on-the-spot horror game, another running cool indy gem Shadows. Yep, we’re a good wee club. Of note: none of the people running games today had ever played before they came along to join the club.
In other words, everything is going according to my most optimistic plans.

My sister got engaged.
Proposed to on top of the Empire State Building.
Congratulations to her and Matt! I will see them soon, of course, because they just left NZ for a couple of years…
…so a long engagement is planned, one assumes?

Went to see high school comedy du jour ‘Mean Girls’ last night, on the strength of some truly average reviews from numerous outlets.
I was mildly surprised to find that these average reviews are far too generous.
Perhaps everyone is hoping desperately that writer-actor Tina Fey becomes the saviour of comedy, and by a massive emperor’s-new-clothes style collective act of will on this movie it will somehow come to pass.
Its an absolute mess. The zingy, sharp first half transforms into a lumbering and clumsy behemoth in the second half. Tina Fey delivers a painful Mary-Sue that should have been cut right out. Nothing remotely meaningful or memorable about any of the characters is established at any point. At the end you can see the kabuki hand of plot requirement pushing characters into life-changing wisdom and new friendships and romances without any plausible explanation.
Its just a mess, and frankly, I was disappointed. The golden age of the high school comedy remains the mid-to-late nineties. Mean Girls was never going to sit at the same table as American Pie or Clueless, but it doesn’t even earn a place near, say, Can’t Hardly Wait.
The physical comedy is good, though, if you like that sort of thing.

When I was making the bed today, I picked up the topsheet and stood beside the bed and flicked it out, and it landed on the bed in exactly the right position.
Then I picked up the duvet and with a flick of the wrist it seemed to launch itself over the bed correctly.
I felt like the James Bond of making beds.
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Portugal just knocked England out of Euro 2004. There will be blood in the streets of Lisboa tonight.
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More basketball today. Insanely good workout. Five menfolk and two womenfolk. Good stuff. (Note to self – stop hurling passes centimetres over the heads of shorter players – one of these days you will misjudge and break someone’s nose.)

So I got an email from a dude from Radio 4. He wants to record some Dungeons and Dragons gaming for a doco on the 30th anniversary of D&D.
Cool.
More news if and when there is any more news.

So said Tony Blair on Sunday, in probably the smartest move he has made in the two years since I started paying attention to him.
He has set up the debate over Britain’s position on the EU Constitution extremely cleverly. The critics and Eurosceptics are on the back foot, and if Blair keeps hammering this soundbite home, they’ll stay that way.
It is an incredibly clever phrasing. Of course, it helps that the facts are on his side this time. It also doesn’t hurt that the opposition – the ‘mythmakers’ – include in their number many at the racist end of the nationalism spectrum.
The debate is really about whether or not England should go it alone or should join the EU fully. For what it is worth, I think England would take a hit by joining the EU fully at the moment – the currency is incredibly strong right now, and that alone is a good reason to stay out. In the long term, though, it will be better if they do sign up. Certainly, as an internationalist, I think it will be better for the world if they do join, not least to weaken that awful Anglo-American alliance that is sustaining a lot of horrible situations in the world and undermining the UN. But from the perspective of a Brit, it is clear there are valuable arguments on both sides.
Its a tricky sell to the public, but Blair is going for it in exactly the right way. With this angle he’s got a shot. Wow. He almost earns some respect from me for it.
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Reality vs myth is at the core of so much political debate, especially with the very sophisticated manipulation of the media around the world. In America, of course, this is particularly clear.
(Although the culture wars that are dividing America are probably best understood as myth vs myth – a society split in two, divided between the contrary narratives served up by the massive PR operations of the two opposing forces.)
The Right-wing media machine is making great hay at the moment of Chris Hitchens, a left-wing commentator, tearing strips off Michael Moore’s new film Fahrenheit 9/11.
This fits into a decade-long effort to label Michael Moore as an extreme and unreliable propagandist – the left’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. A lot of people on the left have fallen for this; indeed, among a certain chunk of left-wing thinkers it is necessary to denounce Michael Moore before going on to attack the right with one’s credentials as a clear thinker established.
Be clear about this: Moore is not a left-wing Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh, along with the rest of the extreme right, tries to characterise their political opponents as dangerous and deluded people who can barely conceal their hate for right-thinking, ordinary Americans. Their political project is primarily about finding “proof” of America-hatred, and discounting any counter-evidence.
Any approach that fosters hate is itself hateful.
Michael Moore does not foster hate.
Nothing could be further from the truth. His political project is to expose as false the narrative presented by those in power.
The powerful, the Bush administration in this case, always present a narrative to the world that explains and justifies their actions. This narrative often bears little relationship to the real evaluations and value judgements going on behind the scenes.
This is why all the nitpicking sites that ‘debunk’ Bowling for Columbine miss the point. They turn elisions and normal documentary practice as misrepresentations, and shout that this invalidates the whole. It doesn’t.
This is why Chris Hitchens misses the point.
As I put it in a post on RPGnet, “Hitchens has valuable points to make. He buries them in irrelevant personal insults, straw man attacks, massive oversimplifications, false dichotomies, and an apparent inability to comprehend Moore’s intentions, let alone consider the validity of those intentions or his success or otherwise in achieving them. Ultimately it is shoddy evidence that doesn’t lead to the conclusion we’re asked to swallow.”
I guess I should put a conclusion here, but I’ve run out of thinking. Maybe someone else can do one for me. If anyone’s read this far.

This link actually comes from an article on Salon: Illegal Art.
Within are the overdub remix of the first Harry Potter film, Todd Haynes’ legendary Karen-Carpenter-biopic-performed-with-Barbie-dolls ‘Superstar’, and the Grey Album.
This is good stuff. It will be busy for the next couple days from the Salon link, but is worth bookmarking. Get yer guerilla culture right here goddamit.
Now if only I could find a copy of The Phantom Edit…