His tutor told him off for devaluing his own art. No one, he was told, would take him seriously as an artist if he was going to give it away for so cheap. Never mind the prices were part of the art (and this has happened once or twice before); never mind that the artworks could be read as questioning the use-values and exchange-values of overlooked tools, and of art itself.

Don’t question the value of art, boy; uphold it. Make products and make money and keep your mouth shut and nobody gets hurt.

“The culture of capitalism has reduced paintings, as it reduces
everything which is alive, to market commodities, and to
advertisements for other commodities.”

- John Berger, art critic and novelist, UK

“…an artist first gains a foothold in the market by accessing
exhibition space at a dealer gallery. As a rule and by virtue of this,
the artist will automatically gain a degree of credibility.”

- Warwick Henderson, veteran art dealer, NZ

I was surprised to find I liked Warwick Henderson’s book, Behind the Canvas: An Insider’s Guide to the New Zealand Art Market. It was so matter-of-fact: people like art and so they buy it (if they can afford it – that big but silent “if”). Sometimes they also hope to make money off it.

Here in Aotearoa, buying art is a mum-and-dad investment. Cosier than Mighty River shares, it is an owner-occupier investment, like buying a home. The resale value is only one of many possible reasons for choosing one property over another.

Behind the Canvas treats artworks as commodities. It can be easy, relaxing – quite a relief actually – to think of artworks solely as products, sometimes lovely, sometimes thought-provoking, like books or movies or one-off pieces of designer fashion once owned by a movie star. Unless you’re wanting to leverage your artwork’s financial value by taking out loans against it, the most important questions when buying seem to be: 1. whether you can live with the work, and 2. whether it will give you the particular kind of social respect and cultural capital – fairy dust – you’re looking for. At this point, the pieces you own are advertising you.

The closest that Behind the Canvas comes to art theory is talking about “x-factor” in an artwork, which apparently a novice collector can’t identify but expert dealers can. I for one would certainly take the advice – or at least, the information – of an art dealer over that of a random great uncle, were I buying art. But I would also try to remember that the livelihood of my guide – their ability to pay for their nice airy gallery at their prominent address, their ability to keep up appearances of hushed luxury – depends on their selling me something. They might pretend that sales don’t matter, but that’s part of the sales pitch. (Call it, après sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “interest in disinterestedness”. One could add “the dealer” to US museum commentator Paul Werner’s Museum, Inc list: “The curator, the connoisseur, the aesthete, all end up sounding like Proust’s Swann, a brilliant sensitive man who doesn’t have a clue why he’s drawn to the flowers between Odette’s breasts”.)[1] At least one New Zealand gallery has a sales script and a sales steps system, reported on weekly by staff. Step 1: successfully obtaining a visitor’s email address, step 2: getting a reply to an email, step 5: sales nirvana.

It’s tough for galleries out there. They’re genuinely working hard. Apparently 25 dealers have gone out of business in Auckland in the last seven years. Does this affect the survivors’ perception of the “x-factor”? Presumably, when dealers are judging whether or not an artist is worthy of a dollop of credibility in the form of exhibition space, they aren’t just asking themselves “is this good art?”, but also: “will this sell?”

[Cue 19^th Century Punch-like cartoon, of a man and his crinolined wife:

Husband: Could those be the same question? Is good art the same as art that sells?

Wife: Don’t be silly, darling; good art is art that sells for a lot, and then resells for more at auction.]

Ha, ha. But seriously, folks. What happens to artists who create good art which won’t sell? I’m not saying that such undiscovered treasures are two a penny, but there are trends. And there are difficult personalities. And, as Henderson points out, there are buyers with smaller and smaller apartments and artists who make big works (perhaps they should try Alan Gibbs?). These factors have nothing to do with the quality of the painting or sculpting or multi-mediating, but they will presumably impact on a dealer’s decision about whether to open the peeling gates to the artist or not.

If we keep thinking of art as just a commodity, then this conundrum about good artist/no sales goes away. Because clearly, the artist should just adapt their product to suit the market. If, in a painting,  “a Maori chief looks pretty angry and nasty, people won’t pay as much for that as they would for a happier chief,” says [auction house head] Dunbar Sloane Snr. “It’s funny how little things like that make a big difference. If I try and sell a picture of a graveyard, it’s bloody hard going. People just don’t want to hang a graveyard in their house.”

Tips for new artist-players: #1. Don’t paint graveyards. #2. If you’re going to paint a Goldie forgery, make it one of the non-threatening ones.

You know what else goes away if art is just a commodity? The need for free public galleries. The justification for public support of the arts – apart from as a leg-up to a potential export. The need to question the judgement of the Minister for the Arts when he complains that “there is too much gloomy art in New Zealand. There is not enough light and frivolity.” The need to care that all the fine art we see in approximately 99% of the country’s dealer and public galleries has been approved, somewhere along the line, by at least one rich white person.

Tip #3. Don’t paint poor people (unless they’re exotic and picturesque).

Ah the relief. That’s several weights off my shoulders.

*

As carefree as that vision of disappearing worries might be, alas, art is not just commodities. Most artworks are commodities, but they’re also more than that. Art is supposed to do magic things. That magic might be whisking the individual viewer away on a transcendental experience in the form of aesthetic ecstasy or absorption (the Romantic, conservative explanation). Or it might be offering societal critique, a different way of approaching the world (the progressive explanation), or revealing some insight into the artist’s psychology (some collectors hope for this, particularly if the artist is a sexy bit of rough). Or… [insert your own definition here, about the art techniques, about anything, have fun making it watertight!] [2].

Hamish Keith knows that art is more than commodity. Sometimes I learn from reading the old rascal and sometimes I don’t, and this time he’s got me gleefully annoyed with his foreword to Behind the Canvas and its pompous bestowing of honour and importance upon the virtuous art market. “The art market entirely underpins the visual arts,” he declares. “It is the point where artists and their public meet and engage. Without it, the visual arts would simply struggle, fade or bloom, unseen.”

It seems, then, that art has to be for sale to be seen. That market: such a supporter, such a martyr, to the arts. Thank God for money and Adam Smith and buyers. Without them, the art market wouldn’t exist and therefore neither would visible art. And that would be a tragedy because, as per above, art is more than just commodities.

Oh wait. The art market “underpins” the visual arts in that it has them pinned down like butterflies on a dartboard.

The issue with art is not that it is commodity, and not that it is supposed to be magic, but that in practice it is supposed to be both product and magic at the same time. It is magic contained within a market system. “…[A]rt has given up the job of enlightenment and gone into the titbit business,” wrote Guardian art critic Waldemar Januszczak in the 1980s, “providing consumers with tasty morsels of spirituality, a rare and expensive commodity in a materialistic world, as recent art prices show…. The madly flaying young artists are trying to tell us that there isn’t enough spirituality in our materialistic world. Their dealers, seeing the gap in the market, are supplying it, to those that can afford it.” They’re supplying buyers not only tasty morsels of spirituality but also a petit air of cultural enlightenment (particularly if buying a work made by an artist whose ethnicity is not your own), a frisson of daring. Sales nirvana = nirvana sold.

There are of course extremely good artists producing exciting work within the dealer system, which is to taste for particular buyers, buyers who might even buy graveyards. There are even exceptions who make it into the public system without dealing with dealers at all – people like performance artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila. (Not that the public system is a paragon of squeaky virtue. Museum, Inc again: “the American art museum shores up its authority by, while, and in order to demonstrate that the values of free enterprise are coterminous with the values of art.”) It would be nice if there could be more exceptions like ‘Uhila; if more art could be non-product, if more artists without dealer-bestowed credibility were recognised, if we could have more forums where artists and their non-buying admirers could “meet and engage” – and not just non-market forums as auxiliaries to the dealer system, where artists are hoping to get noticed by the gatekeepers.

Or is my real issue not the fact that artworks are products per se, but that they are products beyond the financial grasp of most people? Unlike music or literature – which are iterable, ie multiple copies of each artwork can be sold and distributed, and therefore each copy is sold for less than a unique object would be – all of the art dealers’ target audiences are people with a lot of money. Oh sure, you can build a collection on a postal worker’s salary, but postmen not the target audience, they’re not who the art system has in mind when it decides on its exhibitions for the year. Music companies and book publishers are doorkeepers who’ve found their doors demolished by digital production and the internet. In fine arts, is it time that the artificial scarcity of limited edition prints made way for time-based art on YouTube?

An artist: someone who sweats blood into an artwork and tries to sell it to make a crust. They get excited when rich collectors show up at their shows. They are cynically knowing about the game, they hate it, they love it, they always come back to it. Do they have any other choice?

An artwork: the embodiment of an artist’s deepest thoughts, their best visual ideas or [insert your definition here]. For sale to the highest bidder.

Everybody: the target audience for all artworks, as supposed by public gallery visitors.

An art collector: the actual, unspoken target audience for all artworks, as supposed by art dealers (and by many who avoid all galleries). Most are intelligent and well-informed, and presumably many are lovely people. But these characteristics are not the main reasons why they’re respected, why their decisions about what to hang in their study or put in the portfolio influences what’s on public gallery walls and in storerooms.

Socialist art critic John Berger is a dude. He’s my new hero. He hates the “false religiosity” surrounding artworks, which is “usually linked with cash value but always invoked in the name of culture and civilisation”. You can see him 40 years ago on Youtube, his open-necked ‘70s attire and curly locks at odds with his aristocratic lisp.

His book called Permanent Red now seems all retro-revolutionary:

I now believe that there is an absolute incompatibility between art and private property, or between art and state property – unless the state is a plebeian democracy. Property must be destroyed before imagination can develop further.

So grand, so bold. (I would say that art always being property is problematic.) Anyway, just like that, with one sweep of his hand, Berger dismisses the entire art industry, not only buyers and sellers, but scholarly hangers-on also:

Thus today I would find the function of regular art criticism – a function which, whatever the critic’s opinions, serves to uphold the art market – impossible to accept.

The book is the first to document these many projects: acts of protest, improvised community constructions, artworks (both legal and improvised), bars, cafes, temporary stadiums, shopping centres, and much, much more. Most of the projects are realisations of simple ideas – a place to play sport, a theatre production, a shop, a bar – but they bear witness to a profound time in this city’s history: in the threads that link the whakapapa of these projects, remarkable lessons are to be discovered.

It’s also something of a how-to manual, aiming to contribute to the intelligent and creative rediscovery of Christchurch City.  This book is both archival and political. It’s designed to both document and incite.

Designed by one person, edited by three, with assistance from around seventeen, and support from another fifty or so, the book emerged in a fashion typical of projects in a transitional city – with a speculative vision, lots of discussion, a ridiculous deadline, supportive local businesses, and with commitment long before funding was realised. The book – as an artefact itself -  is a transitional project.

There are many narratives emerging from Christchurch. The transitional is just one of them.  Even within the transitional there are many different and overlapping stories, and one of these is the problem of facing such emptiness in an urban environment. This strange sense of being in the middle of something, yet being surrounded by nothing more than the odd unbroken tooth and a collection of fading memories.  And in this desolation emerge uncomfortable moments of optimism and inspiration. The introduction to the book discusses this:

You can’t stand in the middle of Christchurch CBD and not feel the chaotic reality of life – its movement and transience. You cannot stand there and feel untroubled. It is profoundly unsettling to see these streets, buildings, and memories shaken into small parts by the twin forces of natural earthquakes and man-made economics, loaded up into trucks and dumped into great mounds near new subdivisions.  In Christchurch, a famously insular town with strong creative undercurrents, we are more aware than ever that cities are, like life, always transitional. We have been offered an extraordinary opportunity to embrace this impermanence and find original, economic, and appropriate solutions to the very real challenges we all face.’

Here are six projects that tell part of this little story:

Tati/Playtime

Photo: Barnaby Bennett

A design competition was run by Gap Filler and the winners were asked to construct a temporary cinema to show films by French director Jacques Tati over 2 weeks. The final design was based on the night club scene from the film Playtime and featured an actor opening an invisible door to a cinema constructed of reinforcing bar and pallet seats, and a painted red carpet.

CCC Temporary Street Furniture

Photo: F3 Design

As the central city opens up, the Christchurch City Council is inhabiting otherwise reasonably dire streetscapes with colourful and engaging temporary street furniture. The suite has movable planters, seating and bollards, which clearly show their temporary nature, are cheaper than permanent equivalents and are largely manufactured of recycled materials. Design and construction of by F3 Design.

Best Demo

Photo: Reuben Woods

A paste up award for the quality demolition of the Crowne Plaza.

Pallet Pavilion

Photo: Maja Moritz

The Gap Filler Summer Pallet Pavilion project showcases some of the possibilities temporary architecture holds for Christchurch post-quake. The aim is for a visually engaging, dynamic and evolving space that is a delight to spend time in. The Pallet Pavilion project was conceived to bring life back to a vacant site in the city and function as a space for live music, community use and events. The design process for the pavilion aimed to be collaborative and serve as a learning experience for recent graduates of architecture and landscape architecture.

Luxcity

Luxcity: Etch-a-sketch by Auckland University Students of Architecture (Photo: Douglas Horrell)

LUXCITY, the opening event for the Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA), was a city made from light for one night. Over 350 architecture and design students from across New Zealand designed and constructed 16 installations that used light to create spaces for pop-up functions: bars, cafes, live music venues, theatre and a gallery. The whole of Christchurch was invited to return to the vacant city centre on to enjoy and experience this unique urban atmosphere. Between 20-30,000 people turned up to the first major event in the central city since the February earthquake.

185 Empty Chairs

185 Chairs (Photo: Barnaby Bennett)

A temporary art installation by Peter and Joyce Majendie. reflecting on the loss of lives, livelihood and living in our city following the earthquake on 22 February 2011. One hundred and eighty five square metres of grass depicting new growth, regeneration. One hundred and eighty five white chairs, all painted twice by hand as an act of remembrance, each one different. This installation is temporary – as is life.

Barnaby will be talking about the book, the projects, and its impact on the city at the Writers & Readers festival on Sunday.
You can buy the book here.

“Because of the people in the book?”

“Particularly one or two.” She speaks unhurriedly, in a deadpan and faintly theatrical tone. “One who I was worried about I actually gave her the rough draft, and she read it and was okay, but my brother is the one I’m really worried about, because he’s come out a bit villainous.”

It’s true. He does. “So he knows you’ve written the book?”

She looks contemplative. “He knows I’ve written a book.”

“He doesn’t know that he’s in it?”

“No.” She doesn’t sound perturbed. “I gave it to my other brother – only one brother appears in the book, and he’s an amalgam of one brother and a made-up brother, and I gave it to the other brother to read and he quite enjoyed it.” She tilts her head up slightly. “But he’s not actually in it.”

And her brother, the one who’s in it – is he coming to the launch? “I’m not sure,” she says. “I suppose I have to invite him.”

Prefacing Who Was That Woman, Anyway? is a disclaimer:

All these events are inspired by real-life
events. Some details happened in real life,
some did not. The characters are fictionalised
and given fictional names.

“It’s funny,” she comments, “I just read Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories and she says, ‘they’re autobiographical in feeling, if not entirely in fact.’ I should have said something like that.”

It’s this kind of insatiable longing – this gentle, magpie-like engagement with the world – that characterises her book. Written during her MA year at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Who Was That Woman is a series of loosely connected episodes offering candid reflections on what it was like growing up in New Zealand in the 1960s and beyond – as a lesbian, as an academic, and as a passive, resentful daughter caring for her mother. We follow the central character, Ngaio, through summers spent working at an ice cream factory and, later, at a psychiatric ward in Nelson, where her experiences are both a damning commentary on our early healthcare system and a disarming tale of sexual discovery. She moves to Oxford to study, but reluctantly returns when her mother has a stroke. She marries. Travels. Teaches. Drinks. It’s an incredible history, both personal and political, and like the writer herself, is frank, fierce and darkly funny.

I ask if she had considered rewriting the scene featuring her brother – the one she’s particularly worried about. “I did,” she says, “But I quite liked it, as fiction. It has to be like that. It just has to be. If you took him out it’d be a much duller chapter.” She quotes from Jeanette Winterson’s recent memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, which marks a stark return to the subject matter of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: “She says: Dysfunctional families have a code of silence, and the one who breaks that silence is always going to be the villain. And I certainly have – the brother who has read it already, I gave it to him because I know he thinks our family was totally dysfunctional, whereas my other brother and my sister actually think the family was alright.” She sounds vaguely bemused.

*

She didn’t set out to write autobiographical fiction. “The reason I went to Wellington,” she explains, “was because I’d written a novel, which wasn’t me, which wasn’t autobiographical, although it was sort of lesbian-feminist-academic. It was the same world as I came from. And it had been rejected by all the publishers so I went down thinking, ‘They’ll teach me how to write a proper novel!’

Everybody in the class was asked to write a short piece about themselves, to share on the first day, and she wrote about being a student, at Oxford, in 1966. “And [my supervisor] Damien said, ‘This is great! This is real history! And it’s magnificently written history.’ Well of course, once he said that, I had to go on.”

The challenge with autobiographical fiction is that you’re rewriting your life and deciding which parts are worthy – what makes a good story – and which bits need padding. “Looking back on one’s life,” she says, “it would be fiction anyway. I can’t remember half of it, and one or two of the stories I have about my life I’m not quite sure that they’re true, or whether one time they seemed like a good story and now they’ve become truth because I’ve told them so often.”

“I’ve had lots of experiences of people telling me events and I have no recollection of them whatsoever. It’s that Virginia Woolf thing – you have great periods of cotton wool. You look back on your past and there’s all this cotton wool and suddenly you have this moment of being. That turn of phrase – ‘moments of being’ – that’s the thing you put in this book. The rest of it’s just fuzz.”

*

There’s a moment in Who Was That Woman where Ngaio is encouraged by a nurse to talk to her mother. “She needs to try harder,” she’s told. So back home, she turns the TV off and presses her for the stories she remembers being told as a child, of what it was like living in Chicago as a girl. “Didn’t you say you heard Bessie Smith sing?” she persists. “Tell me about the speakeasies and the gangsters and the blues singers? Tell me about the prohibition?”

When she had told my brother and me about her life in America, years before, it had seemed so unlikely. This plump woman with her hair in a greying bun, in suburban Auckland – could she really have led such an exotic life? Our father, we knew from experience, was a liar, so we thought perhaps she was following his example. We had felt embarrassed. It was as if she had said she had been a cowboy, or an Indian, like the movies we saw every Saturday afternoon at the Crystal Palace where the Lone Ranger would call out ‘Hi-yo Silver’ and as he galloped away an observer would ask, ‘Who was that masked man, anyway?’

This is where the title of her book comes from. “It’s that idea of memory – who was she? Was it me? And I like the anyway, too. That sense of: it doesn’t really matter, anyway.”

*

There’s also the issue of her and her central character’s  name. Born in 1940, Aorewa Pohutakawa McLeod does not have Māori heritage. As a child, when she asked her parents about her name, they said they looked it up in a Māori dictionary. “I don’t know if they did or not,” she says. “I don’t know where they got it from.” She’s never been able to find it in any dictionary or list of names. “I wrote, in fact to the librarians at Auckland University and Waikato, and asked if they’d heard of the name and they said no.”

“Looking back on it,” she says, “I feel that I’ve been surrounded by silence. People don’t talk to me by my name. They say hello and go on. I think it’s made me think of my identity a lot more than if I had been called Mary, or Jan – I mean, God, there are so many Jans!”

There’s a short essay at the back of her book on the origin of her name. “People begin assuming that Aorewa is a ‘chosen’ name,” she writes, “and look a little shocked when I explain, ‘No, it’s what parents do to you. It was hell to live with as a child.’”

When I ask her if she wrote the book for the lesbian community, she says that it grew that way. “When Damien said it was kind of a history, I thought, well, you know, it’s gone. That community is gone. The seventies and the eighties and the nineties – and we lived through it and thought it was going to be there forever.”

At the same time, the book’s not cast in a nostalgic light. In fact, it’s wry, almost mocking. “I found that quite difficult,” she says. “To talk about the lesbian separatist community with its emphasis on therapy and therapy groups. I think it was a really genuine and important period in feminist history, but it’s gone now and it was difficult trying to get a balance between saying that it was something that had value and laughing at it. And I think if you’re writing fiction, you always have to laugh at it a bit. Otherwise it’d be really prosaic and people would say, ‘oh, that’s bloody boring’. I think most of the people who went through that time laugh along at it because we sort of realise how excessive we were being.”

On writing about a period in history that was hugely formative to the development of feminism, she says, “Lesbianism – you could say – came out in the seventies. Before that, everyone was closeted and hiding away, or just – in fact, there was no definition and I think that’s one thing I felt came out in the beginning of this book. You know – we were sitting around talking about what made us lesbians. What were we? And all we had were vague Freudian theories. Perhaps we had cold, distant mothers. And we all sat around and said, well, yes, we all did have cold, distant mothers, but in fact it was only when feminism came along that we were able to start defining what being a lesbian meant.”

“A lot of the things that now seem quite funny about the lesbian movement of the late seventies and eighties is trying to define ourselves, you know – when everybody went around cutting their hair short, and you didn’t wear make-up, and you didn’t have perfume and you didn’t wear high heels – it was all sort of an attempt to say ‘What are we? Who are we? Are we some sort of third sex – in between masculine and feminine?” And now that’s all kind of gone, but I can see why it happened, whereas now we can sit around and say, oh you know, there’s a continuum and we’re somewhere in between.”

On the night of the launch, The Women’s Bookshop is more packed than I’ve ever seen it and hums with the jovial atmosphere of a family reunion. I count two men in the room when I arrive. One of them is Fergus Barrowman of Victoria University Press, the publisher of the book, and the other is a young man squashed in a corner of the bookstore looking trapped. I wonder if it’s her brother, and if it is, which one.

Aorewa stands on the front counter to read, and through it there are murmurs of delight, of recognition. At the end, she takes questions from the crowd. One woman asks if she’s going to write a sequel. Aorewa pauses. “Another book,” she says. “But I don’t think I’ve got a sequel. Unless I write about the last ten years of my life. But they weren’t nearly as exciting.”

“Hey!” Fran, her partner, protests. The crowd laugh.

“They were calm,” Aorewa says quickly. “And happy.”

Another woman calls out. “Do you have a favourite character in the book,” she asks, “Apart from yourself?”

“That’d be me,” Fran quips.

“In fact you didn’t need to say that,” Aorewa says. “Of course it has to be Fran.” She names a handful of other people in the room who also feature in the book, noting that when she’d told one of them earlier that night, she’d immediately rushed off to buy a copy. “Of course,” she beams suddenly. “That’s what I need to do! I need to go round telling everybody they’re in the book.” She blinks. “You are all in the book, of course,” she says solemnly. “Versions of all of you.”

Aorewa speaks at the Writers and Readers festival tomorrow with other Remarkable Women Meme Churton, Jacqueline Fahey and Jolisa Gracewood.
You can buy her book here.

It was introduced to the House in 2003 by the Deputy PM at the time, Michael Cullen. Ever the perkbusters in the name of public accountability, Act called it “a nosy parker’s bill” and “the politics of envy” – a laughably dated view in 2013, when most of our television and existing print media is dedicated to seeing how over people live, and most of the Internet is predicated on the assumption that other people want to constantly see what we’re eating, seeing and doing.  “It would probably stop good people trying to become MPs”, New Zealand First warned – an impediment they subsequently strove to overcome, arguably successfully!

While there could be some serious musing on the role of money, gifts and influence on the process on government (the Register remains the product of voluntary declarations – a moral, rather than legislative force. Similarly, let’s not even get into the matter of declaring tax returns) it’s important to retain some perspective and remember that New Zealand is kind of the Springfield of the world. Even its most venal politicians are still a strain of hapless smalltown eccentric, which these highlights from this year’s Register should hopefully prove:

John Banks (ACT, Epsom)
Travel Voucher from Christopher & Banks Private Equity Limited

Correct me if I’m wrong, but given that this is John Banks’ seventh (and presumably last) term as an MP, he should be receiving some pretty extraordinary travel subsidies by now. He should also be rich as hell, so the vision of him springing for a travel voucher conjures up nothing less than the CEO of a confectionary company going “Wow, free candy!” at a child’s 5^th birthday party.

Christopher & Banks, of course, is Banks’s private equity firm – which he doesn’t currently appear to hold a directorship or controlling interest in. Perhaps it’s a really big travel voucher, then, as some sort of temporary exit package. Or at least one to somewhere good, like Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast or Slough.

Dr Cam Calder (National, List) 
Boules To You – importing and consulting
Restoration project of ruin, Gers, France

Three things you may not have know about Cam Calder:

1. Cam Calder is a founding member of the NZ Petanque Association.
2. Who Cam Calder is
3. The website of Cam Calder’s petanque import business, ‘Boules To You’, is back, it’s taking over the Internet, and you need to get out of the way.

“Boules to You was the first NZ business to be on the internet on Telecom Xtra all those years ago. After an absence of some years it is good to be back. We have a CELEBRATORY SPECIAL starting today, anyone purchasing a set of competition boules will receive a FREE telescopic measure with their purchase . Very useful!

Try it for yourself – you may well be ”bouled over”.”

If this wasn’t amazing enough, there’s also the fact that Cam Calder is working on ‘a restoration project of ruin’ in Gers, the gateway to the Pyrenees. Dying to know more, I emailed Cam’s office for information:

“Hi Joe,

Cam has been a Francophile for some years, but has a real passion for ancient history too, as well as a good puzzle. The area of ruins outside Gers covers about a quarter of a square kilometer, and has been steadfastly avoided by superstitious locals. Surveying equipment is always found broken and bent by some massive and inexplicable force only hours after it’s been set down – pegs are simply sucked into the earth itself! Cam was a bit perturbed by the stories of mass disappearances in the area, but when he came back from the ruins after being unreachable for several days he had a new lease on life, and two asynchronous pulses. More excitingly, he encountered what he believes to be a rudimentary telepathic field at the epicenter of the site and he has committed its whispered phrases to heart.

These thought waves have formed part of our ape-mind collective unconscious. I feel their rhythm in the same way my primate ancestors sensed threats, loss or companionship in the early Eocene. Your flesh has a limit, but not so the flight-or-fight mechanism that evolved, that rose to form a droning, spectral hymn of command from generation to generation. What do you think the lines on a petanque ball represent? Teams? Such linear, matter-bound minds. Look again. Each night Cam awakes screaming, aware of something closer now, closer every day but He is still tantalizingly beyond the limits of the human condition. Of humanity itself. He is – we are calling. We seek a response – so fractured, so mortal. Weak. Primates. We are waiting….we are waiting….we are waiting…..

Hope this helps – Cam is always happy to have questions, queries, and even the odd constructive bit of criticism passed on! J”

David Carter (National, Speaker of the House)
Fuck it, every agricultural company in New Zealand basically.

Meat exporters, fertilizer, rural supply, wool, PGG Wrightson. Eleven companies or business interests, two farms.

Which is fine, and happy for him – but he’s basically got the NZ agricultural sector on some sort of supply chain lockdown, so why would you have made him Minister of Agriculture (and later, Primary Industries) from 2008 to 2013? Even assuming he was too upstanding to ever abuse the portfolio for direct personal gain, how did he make important decisions that affect the sector with the intimate knowledge of how dozens of his colleagues and employees stood to prosper or lose out, flourish or fail? It may be that everything panned out much the way it would’ve under any National Minister of Agriculture. Then again, it may not. Admittedly, this isn’t that funny – but it’s not really meant to be. Politicians need to act above the fray, but they also need to be seen to act above the fray to give the public peace of mind. In this case, it just seems like the government couldn’t really be that bothered about how it might look.

Need someone with the sector knowhow? Give it to one of your less successful farmers, then. David Bennett only has a paltry two farming businesses, for example – and he’s done it all with what looks like severe hypotension if the blood pressure monitor in this photo is accurate.

David Clendon (Green, List)
He Waka Eke Noa Charitable Trust – theatre in schools (Ugly Shakespeare Company)

For some reason, Dave Clendon of the Greens isn’t too keen on having his involvement with He Waka Eke Noa Charitable Trust and their flagship project, the Ugly Shakespeare Company, aired to the public. Each year, the USC “offers thousands of secondary students across the country access to contemporary comedy theatre exploring the themes and language of Shakespeare’s plays”.

Whether it’s a mainstream publication with a well-established web presence or the crowd-sourced product of a pack of angry illiterates, we hear a lot about the risks of a Labour-Green coalition after the next election, but not many people (or should that be sheeple?) have asked what will happen when we wake up one morning in November 2014 to discover that Shakespeare has become a core text in the curriculum of many New Zealand high school English classes. We will only have ourselves to blame.

Peter Dunne (United Future, Ohariu-Belmont)
Premiere, The Hobbit movie, Warner Bros

Mainly because not one other MP bothered to disclose that they got a free pass to the premiere of The Hobbit, leading to the rather wonderful image of Peter Dunne swanning around the red carpet outside the Embassy, smiling beatifically at onlookers, and assuming that the whole shebang had been put on for him as guest of honour.

Paul Goldsmith (National, List)
NZ Authors Fund, Creative New Zealand – for books published in New Zealand

Paul Goldsmith and the Pantograph Punch – both proud recipients of Creative NZ money! Look at this fucking hipster.

Honourable mention to Richard Prosser, for “Royalties from book sales (not yet received)”. Don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

John Hayes (National, Wairarapa)
We The People Foundation (United Nations-related activity)

I’m none the wiser as to what Hayes’ ‘We The People Foundation’ does, because the entire first few pages of Google results are dedicated to the We The People Foundation in Queensbury, New York. They’re a group that promotes the view that:

…Despite common misconceptions, there is actually no law that requires most Americans to pay income taxes or most companies to withhold taxes from employees’ paychecks. WTP also espouses the view that the Sixteenth Amendment was fraudulently declared to have been ratified.

And!…

We The People Foundation placed a full-page advertisement in the December 1 and 3, 2008 Chicago Tribune newspaper in the form of an open letter addressed to Barack Obama’s presidential transition office in Chicago, in which the Foundation disputes Obama’s status as a “natural born citizen” of the United States. The letter asserts that Obama cannot assume the office of President, and that the state electors cannot vote for his candidacy, unless Obama provides “documentary evidence before December 15, that conclusively establishes his eligibility.

If you think John Hayes is concerned about the misunderstanding, put yourself in these guys’ shoes for a moment and imagine how they feel when they’re referred to as a “United Nations-related activity”.

Brendan Horan (Independent)
Goldbuyers Waibop Limited – buying gold

My surprise to learn that a business named Goldbuyers is in the unsalutary work of buying gold aside, I can’t get past the vision of Brendan Horan, resplendent in neon pink swimsuit, jumping into a vault of gold a la Scrooge McDuck. #momoneymoproblems

Nikki Kaye  (National, Auckland Central)

– has nothing. Nothing. She got a trip to the States with a few other MPs and she has a superannuation scheme. That’s it. She’s basically a hologram. Could someone give her a couple months’ leave to sort out a wee apartment somewhere and a modest croquet import business?

John Key (National, Helensville) 

Annual membership – Omaha Golf Club
Golf club, Champions 460 driver – Trade Minister Gita Wejuaran of Indonesia
Set of Srixon golf clubs – Dunlop Sport Japan Limited
Round of gold with Greg Norman – Duco Events Limitecd
Annual membership – Clearwater Golf Club

 Laugh if you want, but when have we actually been told that John Key likes golf? Recast this as a narrative of a dude who fucking hates walking around a massive manicured lawn all day in idiot pants with world leaders, and this is an almost unbearably poignant list. I think I’m going to have go outside and take a walk.

 Other Highlights

-Pita Sharples (Maori, Tamaki Makarau) has something called ‘Sharples Productions Limited’ which is supporting development of a film script!

- Nicky Wagner (National, Christchurch Central) has a beneficial interest or trusteeship in something called Timelord Trust. It remains to be seen whether Ms. Wagner regenerates in time for the 2014 election.

- A full half of our MPs have Kiwisaver now – just like me! Over a quarter of them own multiple residential properties or plots of land, where people who can’t afford houses will inevitably live forever – just like me!

- Jonathan Young (National, New Plymouth) has a beneficial interest/trusteeship in something called ‘Young Two Trust’, which sounds like a Southern rap label.

-  Finally and crushingly, Maggie Barry’s personal business – the awesomely-named Maggie Unlimited Limited – is no more. The Companies Register tells me it was dissolved on 19 November 2012. With it die our hopes for a new season of Maggie’s Garden Show, or even a series of TV tie-in interactive VCR board games – the only real kind of footprint a politician can hope to leave on the shore of history’s rising tide.

Playing the taxonomy game | Communicating depression
African urban geographies | The Aaron Gilmore Conspiracy Theory
Defining the video game | Discovering modern Ben Elton
Charles Ramsay and the memeification of tragedy and poverty

and a very warm welcome to
James Dann

Matt

There’s a special kind of outrage reserved for getting taken in by a convincing lie. It’s not only directed outward, but inwards too, a small and formless voice that nevertheless keeps screeching YOU ARE A MORON.

Successful lies play to our fears and hopes, and since there’s nothing more terrifying than the existential threat of being removed from the world and leaving not a trace or a memory behind, the busy lie-factory that is our contemporary internet gets the most mileage out of inventing people who have never existed.

The best one I’ve come across recently is this immaculately detailed story of a Russian director who died in 1960 but was invented in 2002.

The drinks and exhaustion sparked their imagination. They tossed out fantastic hypotheticals, wondering what kind of director would “shoot an insane amount of material, more material than anyone could ever watch,” as Ducker later recalled. “What kind of person would shoot an endless film, just never stop shooting?”

The two friends were forging a fascinating character—a fictional marriage of legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and control-freak geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, an archetypal director slowly creeping into madness. Or as Ducker described him, “a slightly psychotic person. And a slightly manipulative person.” They were creating Yuri Gadyukin.

There’s actually a professor in the States, one T. Mills Kelly, who teaches an undergrad course named Lying About the Past. Each year the students in his class are tasked with inventing convincing lies and misleading as many people as possible. Last year they managed to start a Wikipedia edit war (“Things like that really, really, really annoy me,” raged Jimmy Wales, really, really, really forcefully). But I mean, what sort of a name is T. Mills Kelly? George Mason University, the school he’s supposed to teach at, has ‘Where Innovation is Tradition’ as their motto. Their student email server is called ‘Patriot Web.’ Is this a real university? Is he a real professor? Did The Atlantic just make the whole thing up to continue the joke? This is some liminal indeterminacy shit right here. If T. Mills Kelly were to rename his paper ‘Schooling schmucks: internet epistemology and u’, that is a MOOC I would sign up for.

Not that big hoaxes were invented contemporaneously with IP protocols; I’m currently reading Foucault’s Pendulum, a book about playfully creating complex lies, getting caught up in them, and eventually, unwittingly, coming to believe them. Eco nails it:

That day, I began to be incredulous.

Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is near-sighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.

Rosabel

In psychology, it’s not often you’re exposed to personal stories of depression. Oh, you know the diagnostic criteria. You know those by heart. You know its neurobiology and the standard therapeutic approaches. You learn about maladaptive thinking patterns, rumination and how to identify the kinds of core beliefs that need addressing, but it’s rare that you’re given time to pause and engage in the act of empathy. Don’t get me wrong: you know how to seem like you’re empathising, but in terms of actually understanding what it means to be depressed, opportunities for this are rare.

That’s not necessarily an indictment on the way psychology is taught. Well, no, it is. But it’s also a reflection of the fact that, quite wonderfully, as a society we’re able to talk about it openly and often. The one pitfall of this is that the word can become a heuristic for an experience we’re all expected to understand – particularly since it’s a mood disorder and we all exist on the spectrum somewhere – and in some cases, it’s just plain misused. It’s also, of course, very hard to describe. David Foster Wallace touches on this in Infinite Jest:

It goes by many names - anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression - but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It… It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.  There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing.  This anhedonic Inability to Identify is also an integral part of It.  If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.  Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution.  It is a hell for one.

The return of Hyperbole and a Half is fantastic news not only because it’s the most absurdly charming blog on the internet, but because it returns with an incredibly clear and utterly compelling account of Allie Brosh’s struggle with depression. Everybody should read this. Everybody.

Also recommended is David Foster Wallace’s The Depressed Person, which is more weatherless and difficult to read, but of course this is exactly the point.

I’m naively looking forward to Baz Luhrmann’s attempt at The Great Gatsby, want so badly for it to be great, and am refusing to read any reviews of the film until I’ve seen it. I have no qualms about reading this selection of one-star Amazon reviews of the book, though:

 O.K. the first red flag was that this book isn’t part of any series.

IT IS VERY COMPLICATED TO UNDERSTAND AND THERE ARE A LOT OF CHARACTERS.
I AM STILL READING THE BOOK SO MAYBE IT WILL GET BETTER.

All the characters did was moan about their lives and do stupid things.

It’s boring.

It’s futile.

It’s dumb.

There are murders, but not very unique ones.

Bronwyn

Like cities all over the world (hello, our new friend the Auckland Unitary Plan), the cities of Africa are dealing with urbanisation and a burgeoning middle class in need of somewhere to live; keen to separate themselves from the messy realities of old cities, there’s a whole lot of “New Cities” being built to house them, over which the Informal City Dialogues blog sounds a warning cry:

What is worrying is that there is little recognition of place, economy, context and even poverty in these cities. This begs several questions. To whom do these cities belong? Who is planning them? Are they inclusive cities, or simply profit-driven businesses?

Many New Cities are being built with input exclusively from architects, engineers and property developers… For example, Tatu City in Nairobi is set to be developed on prime agricultural land. This land was initially a coffee plantation, which happens to be an important foreign exchange earner for Kenya.

One of the most notorious of these New Cities is the Chinese-built Nova Cidade de Kilamba on the outskirts of Luanda; built to house 500,000, it appears to be largely empty. Luanda is reguarly cited as one of the most expensive cities in the world; the combined effects of a twenty-seven year long civil war that decimated local food production, manufacturing, and transport infrastructure, and an influx of foreign companies chasing the oil dollar since the conclusion of said war, has resulted in a cost of living in the city that is eye watering at best, and life endangering at worst:

To offer his children a safe and clean environment, he may decide to rent a house in one of Luanda’s new distant suburbs, Luanda Sul. A 3-bedroom house with garden in a guarded condominium will cost his oil company at least $12,000 per month. Another good deal. In 2008, the price would have been $23,000 USD. His children’s international school, $40,000 USD per child per year, will also be at his employers’ expense. It reportedly costs an average international company operating in Angola $1 million USD a year to settle an expat in Luanda.

Although public healthcare is free, services are limited, which means many Angolans resort to private healthcare:

 …Angolans pay $80 to $150 USD for a simple malaria treatment, $200 to 300 USD for a complicated malaria treatment and about the same for the treatment of typhoid fever. Do these hospitals offer quality care? Perhaps the figures speak for themselves. Infant and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world, and average life expectancy at 51 is still among the lowest even though Angola’s (official) 2% HIV prevalence rate is extremely low compared to its neighboring countries.

Those trumpeting the release of more land for more development in Auckland, and talking up a new city in Manukau, only need to have a quick squiz at the images of Kilambra to see what happens when planning goes wrong; it’s generally held that its failure is because it’s too expensive for locals to buy apartments there, and too far away from the buzz of cosmopolitan downtown Luanda to be attractive to ex-pats who could afford it.

James

Adam

Video games, huh? How about them.

Leigh Alexander, editor-at-large at industry site Gamasutra, is a pivotal figure in modern games writing, prominent in her advocacy for criticism that treats games as expressions of political/social/personal/spiritual identity as well as systems of rules and goals interacting with aesthetics (her piece on Colossal Cave for RockPaperShotgun is pretty much the perfect entry to her work). Raph Koster’s a game designer who earned his stripes on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, a man who obviously knows his shit.

Together, they’ve inadvertently started a persistent blogosphere shitstorm.

The facts are these: In early April, Alexander tweeted the following -

Koster questioned Alexander’s position with ‘A Letter to Leigh’, a lengthy and thoughtful analysis of what, for him, constitutes a ‘video game’. To Koster, games are a conversation between player and creator, and the ‘art games’ he refers to, games like Dys4ia, Train and To The Moon, lack the ‘gameness’ that would make them ‘games’. ‘Gameness’ is contingent on agency – the ability to ‘argue’ with the game and ‘maybe change its mind’ – and compromising that agency for rhetorical purposes sacrificing the necessary element of dialogue. It’s not that these games are bad, Koster says – it’s that they’re different.

Alexander replied in full in a blog post titled ‘Definitions’. She acknowledges that she agrees with Koster’s belief that games are fundamentally a dialogue, but questions whether Koster’s ‘art games’ really do sacrifice that conversation:

And I think some of the games we’re discussing simply offer us new forms of agency that we haven’t seen before — the ability to pace ourselves through the conversation, to interpret, to choose points of empathy. These are meaningful choices that the system the author’s chosen makes available to me. If I play someone’s game, and I feel I have engaged with them, and I feel something in me move and respond, I feel I’ve had a conversation, an interactive experience.

Then Tadhg Kelly posted ‘Formalists and Zinesters: Why Formalism Is Not The Enemy’ – less a contribution, more a whine about being ‘victimised‘ because of his assertions as to what games are. He avoids meaningfully engaging with the political implications of creating and policing taxonomies, and it leans on a definition of game that demands ‘the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics’ and scorns mere participation and dialogue. It’s passive-aggressive, stubborn and full of generalisations; funny, given that he’s trying to call out ‘zinesters’ who do the same.

Unfortunately, Kelly’s response is the one that’s come to define discussion, as summarised in this helpful Critical Distance round-up (Craig Bamford’s response is my favourite). More recently, though, Matthew S Burns at Magical Wastelands weighed in with ‘Our Immiscible Future’, a reflection on the fracturing that was part-cause and part-product of this mess. It’s a surprisingly funereal overview of the interplay between commercial developers, modern ‘indies’ and ‘zinester‘ subculture, something he admits, but it’s compelling in how it builds off a hopeful statement made in ‘Definitions’ -

It’s not that I’m pressing for All Things Artful to be defined as “games.” It’s simply that I think the definition discussion distracts from the ways we see interactivity being able to give creative voice for so many. To allow them to have those conversations through a medium, and the medium is designed interaction. In other words, I don’t care what things are called, but I think all kinds of designed interaction can have a place at our table, can have things to teach us.

I agree quite strongly with Alexander here. Definitions can be fun, but their formulation can result in loaded decisions that shut out certain types of voice and experience when we should be doing all we can to help develop those voices and present those experiences. It’s telling that, of the reasons Kelly gives for Koster’s ‘art games’ not being games, one is that they represent such a challenge to the status quo that they’ll never gain mainstream traction. It’s almost as if there’s a value judgment there.

Ben Elton’s latest sitcom, The Wright Way, premiered on the BBC late last month. It was savaged by critics, for good reason. It’s grotesque and shambolic, indistinguishable from any parody of sitcom excess. It’s also totally baffling, constantly contradicting itself and the messages it wants to send. On one hand, it’s a sitcom custom-built to make a certain type of middle-aged middle-class white man feel comfortable. Through his volatile lead, council bureaucrat Gerald Wright (David Haig), Elton fires off archaic, overwritten broadsides at women, inconvenient technology, health and safety practices, millennials, customer service, male grooming, people who aren’t white, and women, and the majority of these pot-shots stand unchallenged. The show’s thirty years out of date, something reinforced by the hacky pratfalls and dirty acronyms that make up the rest of its ‘comedy’.

On the other hand, the only reasonable character in the show is Gerald’s twenty-something lesbian daughter, Susan, an electrician who goes out of her way to help Gerald through his recent divorce. Meanwhile, a world of pain and humiliation is visited upon Gerald, and all he does is moan and antagonise people, hurting himself more in the process. Gerald’s the author of his own misery, but it’s hard to tell how much Elton wants us to think he’s earned it.

Regardless of this, The Wright Way is terrible and Elton’s a shadow of the man he once was. The Elton who railed against sitcom sexism in the 1980s now peddles it for a couple of extra quid; the Elton who constructed witty, whip-sharp dialogue for Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson now operates as a pratfaller-for-hire; the Elton who used The Young Ones, Blackadder, Stark and Gridlock to critique the Thatcher orthodoxy is now too happy to  bemoan government micromanagement.

Elton’s been like this for a while. But I didn’t know that. As a gawky idiot teen, Elton was a kind of an idol. I cherished the Blackadder repeats on TV One and devoured Dead Famous, Gridlock, Popcorn, This Other Eden, Blast From The Past and Chart Throb in quick succession in 2005 and 2006. His work resonated – the selfish and unpleasant characters, the cynicism towards a world built on self-interest and petty grievance, the tempered humanism underscoring it all. I’m not understating his impact – hell, Gridlock left 15 year old me genuinely angry (and ill-informed) about Big Oil. His work clued me in to political and social discussions I wasn’t aware existed, and his influence still carries.

The Wright Way left me exhausted and betrayed. It was the final nail in the coffin of a man I once adored, a man I held up as an intelligent, entertaining, righteous comic idol. The same attitudes and jokes I fell in love with seven years ago are on full display here – but now they look ugly to me. All it took was getting older.

*

Speaking of dying idols, Dave Anthony and Greg Behrendt had notorious comedian/watermelon-smasher Gallagher on their Walking the Room podcast. Gallagher’s downward spiral into an aggressive, burnt-out husk of a comedian has been well-documented, and Anthony and Behrendt try to go beyond that. They meet him as they would any other guest, and the result is devastating. He owns nothing and thrives on distancing himself from others. Death preys on his every thought. He’s not a husk – just a sad man battling his own irrelevance.

*

Some other good stuff from the interwebs – Martin Amis’ hilariously terrible 1982 book about video games; a game about collecting candies and Leigh Alexander’s astute observations about what it says about social gaming; and a gem from the Internet Wayback machine, the website of Brendan Horan, NZ First MP and MC for hire.

Joe

Last week’s discovery at 2207 Seymour Avenue, Cleveland was always going to make international headlines. Loved, missing and presumed dead, found again, with the narrative tumult of disbelief, relief and then a yawing, awful horror. It’s the kind of thing cowled editors would try to summon into being over a stone tablet with the sacrifice of an intern, and I don’t really blame them.

However, the subsequent treatment of neighbour Charles Ramsey, one of two men who discovered and rescued the three women, felt like a weird and inappropriate moment in the Internet’s continued memeification of all living matter. Partly because it’s because about a dozen people attempted to Autotune (or Songify, or whatever) the aftermath of three people getting raped and tortured for a decade, and partly because it feels like we’ve seen a lot of poor black eyewitnesses turned into macros and dubstep remixes lately.

Salon put a finger on my unease first:

Granted, the buzzworthy tactic of reporters interviewing the most loquacious witnesses to a crime or other event is nothing new, and YouTube has countless examples of people of all ethnicities saying ridiculous things. One woman, for instance, saw fit to casually mention her breasts while discussing a local accident, while another man described a car crash with theatrical flair. Earlier this year, a “hatchet-wielding hitchhiker” named Kai matched Dodson’s fame with his astonishing account of rescuing a woman from a racist attacker. But none of those people have been subjected to quite the same level of derisive memeification as Brown, Clark, and now, perhaps, Ramsey—the inescapable echoes of “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife!” and “Kabooyaw,” the tens of millions of YouTube hits and cameos in other viral videos, even commercials.

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

Vlogger Jay Smooth makes some wonderful succinct points on top: he calls time on about three years too many of bad, cackhanded free software Autotune jobs on the most obvious of source material (admittedly, we got some highpoints at the start: here’s the video YouTube says I’ve watched the most). He loses the ‘harrumph’ tone of Salon, because sure, Ramsay was pretty good when you got him in front of a camera. But then he wraps up with this:

Charles Ramsay is a funny person, but he’s a real person, who at least on that day had a well of integrity and passion that made him worth talking about. And the more we take people like him and keep running them through the viral meat processing plant over and over…I worry that we’re filtering out whatever is real and valuable about people. I feel like we as a culture turned some kind of corner when the word ‘meme’ became a verb that described something you do to a person. I just think that’s kind of weird, and we might want to pause periodically and look on the path we’re on with that, because it’s taking us to some weird places.

You could push that boat out further and wonder what we’re doing to whatever the situations are – individual, or systemic – those memes arise out of. Eyewitness accounts and testimony have a place and a purpose in news reporting – take them out of it and the results are the sort of medium-to-message spaghetti junction McLuhan didn’t see coming. Especially as video crews grow more web-savvy, and finding ‘talent’ like Ramsay, even in the middle of a crime scene, takes a greater priority than ever before.

Anyway, Ramsay also has a nasty domestic violence record, which he would have had whether or not he happened to help save three people’s lives and go on television in the heat of the moment. Causation doesn’t equal narrative, wishing just makes it so – with that in mind, let’s not get into that huffy undirected sense of betrayal having rooted for the guy, or that tedious arc of redemption, shedding skins, “this marks a break from the past” news-cycle hagiography. I liked what Liliana Segura had to say for The Nation:

Some criminals, like some heroes, are allowed to be complex, as we are reminded in the wake of mass shootings committed by white men who are immediately scrutinized for signs of mental illness. Confusion and debate over what Ramsey really is—criminal or hero (or jolly Internet meme)—shows how little complexity we afford people like him. It may have taken an extraordinary action, the saving of three white girls, to make him worthy of people’s collective empathy—and it’s certainly likely that if his criminal record included, say, first-degree murder that this empathy would largely evaporate. But if we more broadly applied the logic of legions who have leapt to his defense as a changed man, if we started thinking that more people might be worthy of a second chance, we might start to change the conversation around prisons and sentencing.

Actually, on prisons: the best piece of TV I saw last week was Campbell Live’s feature inside Rimutaka Prison. Patient, compassionate, informative and underwired with a sort of steely pragmatism that felt like a challenge to the Xtra-accounted, law and order hordes: these people are going to be freed one day, whether you like it or not. What kind of society do you want for them when they walk out? One they reoffend in, or one with second chances?

More than once in its 11-minute runaround I had to turn around and exclaim “it’s still going! They’re still going!” This is a good thing, particularly when Seven Sharp can’t even give our salty, salty diets the 5 minutes grace they deserve. They’re all still beggars when it comes to any possibility straightforward embedding, though.

Finally, to commemorate my getting a new phone this week: the year is 2013, and here is one-time presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich doing his best “What’s up with that?” about cellphones. Stay tuned, though – it sounds like these things have some potential!

– The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin, 1935.

Illustration: Scott Satherley

The manuscript I submitted for my creative writing MA in 2007 was a collection of short stories, most of them autobiographical.

I’d spent the year in a process of ordering up events and people from my past and writing down what I remembered. I quickly realised I had control over these stories. Writing fiction, my stories didn’t need to be recounted exactly as they had played out. I began to change things, sometimes to protect people, often to make myself look better but always to avoid writing confessional or sentimental stories which could be read as memoir. My concentration and control was very firmly on the people and events. Oddly, the physical spaces in which these dissembled projections of my life took place remained largely intact. When I revised the stories, I knew the shape of things exactly. In houses, I knew just where to find a butter knife or a fresh tea towel. In restaurants, I felt the shape of the bathroom key and heard the noise of the traffic outside. When I completed the manuscript, every character sat and moved and lived in places I had; places that came to me fully-formed and complete as I re-read the work.

One of the examiners of the thesis commented, ‘Smaller settings are not really elaborated on – people work in featureless offices or salons, they live in houses made up of blank rooms and fences and gardens, they drive nondescript cars’.

I read the manuscript again and the examiner was right. Because I knew the settings so completely, was so familiar with them, I had put very little effort into portraying them in my stories. They were represented in scant, heartless detail and then only when that detail would help amplify something about the people or the events I created. Of course, I reassured myself, this is where the story is – with the people. But I took cursory heed and while revising the manuscript looked around the rooms and added just enough detail to ensure reality and avoid abstraction.

I spent eight months revising my MA manuscript. During this time I mainly worked in the Victoria University Central Library which is located in the Rankine Brown building on the Kelburn Campus above the Wellington central business district. A couple of mornings each week I would walk up Adams Terrace, climb the steps past the University Crèche and along Fairlie Terrace. In 2008, there was a building site on Fairlie Terrace. I had a vague idea that the building was for student accommodation. I took very little notice of the actual construction but I loved the cranes.

I would try to walk as slowly as I could along Fairlie Terrace so I could see them. They seemed precarious; sometimes the long arm of one would swing round in the wind. One day I saw a man climbing down from the crane. I’d seen the cabs of the cranes empty and I’d seen drivers in them but I’d never seen someone climbing down the ladder inside the tower of the crane. Even though it was the cranes that had caught my attention, I only recognised the potential for a story when I saw the driver taking this brave action. My friend Shaun had driven cranes. He had developed vertigo but continued working on high structures for a couple of years. I started to write a story about a crane driver who was scared of heights. I mentioned it to Shaun and he suggested we meet for lunch and talk about what his job was like. He was an architect now and I met him in a small park, beside a church, opposite a row of multi-storey apartments. I sat with my back to the apartments so I could enjoy the space and the quaintness of the historic church.

The last crane-driving job Shaun had was during the construction of the Otira Viaduct in Arthur’s Pass. He brought photographs of himself, the men he worked with and the bridge they were building. I looked at the men, assuming they were the heart of my story. Shaun explained what it was like, how frightening and cold. He told me men left in the middle of the night rather than work another day. I asked why it was frightening and he said how the work was high, but it was also low, they had to dig deep before they could build high and the viaduct was very high. He paused, trying to think of a way to explain it. Then he said he needed to tell me a bit about how the viaduct was built in the snow in a tiny valley bordered by huge leans of unstable schist, how they ran formwork out over nothing, cantilevered it off what they had finished only days before. I understood only a few of the words and none of the concepts, so I fell back on what I did know – poetics. When he said ‘tensile strength’, I listened to the music of the sibilance; ‘tensile’ summoned up images of flexed muscles and sweat. Shaun talked about piers, and I thought he’d said, ‘pears’ or ‘pairs’ so I made sense of it in an image of two Victorian women eating fruit off a silver tray. I repeated the word back to him, trying to make it my own, playing with the way it felt in my mouth, trying to make it serve my literary aim. Then he talked about concrete: aggregate, fly-ash, slag, cement. I snatched the words as Shaun said them, thinking about all the ways I could break them and put them to work in my story. As I listened, I turned everything he said into material for my work. I nodded and took notes, hiding them so that Shaun wouldn’t stop to correct me or explain further. All I wanted was the words and then only the words as I made sense of them in the context of writing.

Shaun stopped and asked if I understood. I was shocked at the question. I felt like telling him it didn’t matter whether I understood or not. My plan was to transform everything he said to suit my work; the truth behind it was his job, he was the architect not me. He had caught me off guard, though, so I said, no, I didn’t understand. I knew Shaun well, and I knew he would explain again and if I wanted him to keep talking about Otira and cranes, I needed to be able to give him an answer at the end of that explanation which showed I was beginning to understand. So I tried to listen differently.

Shaun went back a step. Did I understand physics? Did I understand how objects resist force? He pointed to the apartments across the road and explained how they stand up. He talked about the relationship concrete and steel has to gravity and ground. I looked at the buildings with an attention I’d never given any built form before. As Shaun talked and I began to understand what he was saying in his terms, I recognised the buildings as I’d never seen them before. They became odd to me. Buildings were objects for my use and when they were of no direct use to me I viewed them as shade, or obstruction, beautiful or ugly. As I listened to what Shaun was saying, everything I knew about them was being undone. Buildings became unusual to me and I realised this oddness was a lot more interesting to me than the things I’d thought about buildings before.

Throughout our discussion Shaun kept talking about engineers. At the time I had very little idea what an engineer did but it was their language Shaun was using. Instead of adapting Shaun’s words into something I understood, something familiar, I wondered what would happen if I put my work at the service of the unusual. If I let the ideas and words of engineering rule my work rather than trying to force them into the shape of conventional fiction. Would I be able to recreate the odd way I had perceived those buildings on that day?

Illustration: Scott Satherley

This approach indicated a different type of research. In the past, I’d hung out with people. I’d eavesdropped. In our house, growing up, I don’t remember many books, what I do remember is gossip. My grandmother liked to watch people and listen to people. She and I would spend hours doing this. When I left school and she went into a home, I became a hairdresser, the type of hairdresser who didn’t talk much, because I loved listening and watching. I listened to hundreds of people every week. This position and obsession with observation made me a crafty mimic, able to fake conversations on a number of topics and with a number of different types of people. This had been how I researched my writing. But it seemed this new idea –  of trying to let a language lead a story rather than using language as character in a story – meant I needed a new tactic. Where I’d always aimed to achieve mimicry I needed to attain literacy. I needed to find some engineers but I couldn’t just observe them, I needed to come out from the corners and ask them to teach me and test me. I found one engineer in particular, Andrew Charleson. Andrew works at Victoria University School of Architecture and Design. When I first met him he described himself as an engineer who had been ‘acrhictectualised’. He told me, if I was serious, I needed to take some courses he was running about structure.

When I looked up the papers Andrew recommended I read that they offered an ‘introduction to the basic structural principles and material properties that underpin the fabric of natural and constructed environments’. They covered, ‘the basic requirements for structural systems; structural form and proportion; equilibrium; strength of materials; bending and shear; combined stresses; elasticity, plasticity and ductility; elastic deformation; buckling; structural design principles; and, elementary soil mechanics’.

‘I’ll be there,’ I wrote in an email to him.

 *

I didn’t know where to wait for the lecture to start. In a couple of months I would understand that well-designed buildings have a natural rhythm to them. That they teach you where people will walk and where people will wait. That they contain spaces of rest and spaces of activity. In a couple of months, I would be starting to get a sense of how to read the structure of a building to get an idea of where these spaces might be. But for now, I didn’t know where to stand or sit to wait. I’ve always been spatially challenged. I’m still unable to tell my left from right, people constantly try to teach me but I think the problem is more about how my mind places me in space. When I put my thumb at a right angle, people tell me, my left hand will make the letter ‘L’. ‘But they both do,’ I say. ‘It all depends which way your palm is facing.’ I am a floating thing not anchored to any magnetic setting. Once inside a building I have no idea where I am in relation to that building as a container. Leaving buildings is always a surprise. So here I milled, outside the lecture theatre, unaware of the story the structure around me was telling, with no sense of where might be a good spot to stand still.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone and I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. I was a lot older than most of the students, so that helped. I also quickly realised that, comparatively, I dress like a slob. The class was made up of an almost equal split of architects and building science majors. Architectural students may be the best dressed people on the planet. Because of the weird retrospective nature of fashion, I often felt like every one of them was in Talking Heads or Kraftwerk or some other equally crisp and divergent ‘new’ band that was about to take the world by storm but for now was just completely certain and practicing in the coolest warehouse in Wellington. The building science students likewise were decked in sharp lines and clean shapes. They seemed to wear a lot of their seriousness in their clothes and my second-hand frocks and big boots looked incredibly out of place.

When it came time for tutorials Andrew introduced me to a few people as a PhD student in, and he would pause here for effect, Creative Writing, I’m not sure anyone ever said it but it often felt like this revelation was followed with a sort of mutual ‘isn’t that weird’? I was weird. My equations often didn’t add up. I had to keep asking about vectors and cosine. I once referred to the steel members of the Bird’s Nest as slender when they’re metres and metres thick. And I continued to get lost, turning left while all the other students on a snake-line round a building site would turn, instinctively, right. But not that weird, I found out. George Saunders was an engineer, so was Fyodor Dostoevsky, Neville Shute, Robert Musil, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. Also, most of the engineers I talked to had a very wide reading habit. The myth of men reading only non-fiction seemed to be smashed by the engineers I met, a couple of whom wrote short stories and poetry themselves. But I wasn’t an engineer who wrote fiction, I was a writer who was pretending, play-acting at being an engineering student. I realised, two semesters in, I would never fully understand what it was like to be a real engineer. This discouraged me for a while but I then I wonder if perhaps there was some way I could use the margin I was standing in. I’d never fully live in the room of engineering but I’d left the room of writing to stand in the hallway between the two. I could wander into engineering but because it wasn’t my home it would always seem a little odd. I would always be able to see things as a visitor rather than an inhabitant. I would always be getting lost in useful ways and maybe this was more useful to my aim of reproducing the strange way I had experienced the ubiquitous apartments that day I’d had lunch with Shaun.

*

As I attended the lectures I found myself more and more troubled by the word ‘building’ in a way that wasn’t shared by my classmates.

Hearing the word over and over made it strange. I had an idea that the office blocks and apartments we studied in class were permanent, finished, solid and it troubled me that we gave them a name that although obviously a noun, is also a present progressive verb – a continuous activity, a never completed action. It confused my sense of time. The building is here, finished, still, and also in process. The word seemed to carry on some act started by construction workers well after they had left.

To add to this trick of language, I learned that concrete doesn’t reach its maximum strength until many days after being poured; how it is impossible to know whether concrete is as strong as it should be for almost a month after it has been cast, in which time several new storeys may have been built. Even more disturbing to my sense of linear time and what I knew about deterioration, I found out good concrete gets stronger as it gets older. This strengthening happens rapidly to begin with then slows down but, unlike us, concrete’s strength increases with age.

The more I learned, the more distorted space and material became. Everything in my experience to that point suggested that the natural state of an object, like a building, was stillness. The lectures, however, explained that the natural state of an object in the absence of applied force is a maintained velocity or motion over time. Built forms stand still because they are designed so that all forces are held in equilibrium within the elements. I found myself experiencing buildings in a different way. They are alive, in action, a complex relationship of force and reaction to that force happening all at once. I began to see that buildings are built based on how they will be in the future, at another time, when the weight of the building is finished, when the concrete has strengthened, when the full force of the function of the building is imposed and none of this seems fixed, or finished. These future selves are anticipated in the design and so are future events – earthquakes, fire, flood – events out of anyone’s hands and completely contingent. So my strange hearing of ‘building’ begins to fit more and more. The progressive present verb acting as a noun, the most solid part of speech; it is a clever trick which describes exactly what these things are that we live and work in – at once still and moving, here and at another time, finished and finishing.

WR Hearst and J Morgan in a still from a home movie made at the Hearst ranch

Some people go to America to find themselves; I went to America to eat the food and drink the wine. I was a few too many years past university to try and emulate some Beat Poet binge, and I’m still a few years too young (not to mention too poor) to make it some leisurely, temperate excursion. As much as I threw myself into gluttonous hedonism, between meals and bowel movements I came to learn a thing or two. For example, did you know that San Antonio, Texas is the seventh most populous city in the union? We did not, until we blundered our way downtown in a rented convertible to be confronted by one-way streets, shoppers and tourists in their throngs. Did you know that one is supposed to get straight back on the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan, rather than walk around in the freezing cold, looking at nothing? Lesson learned.

But I couldn’t help but soak up some history and culture as I wended my way across country – and with it, that urge to make sense of it all. Eventually, wandering around mutely witnessing the sights of California gave me a plethora of opportunities to try and grasp the nature of this vast, influential union. I was on the ground in a state that contained oppression and emancipation, extraordinary wealth and abject poverty, futuristic innovation and deeply conservative values. Like tinkering with the guts of a computer, I was trying to follow the connections and label the components. Occasionally I would fire off a playful observation to the world, but most of the phenomena I witnessed required more explanation than 140 characters would allow. Inevitably, I was drawn to those connections that appealed most to my existing interests: architecture, individuals and history. In San Simeon, CA I found all three: the Big Man who helped shape the USA, his crazy huge house on the hill, and the woman who built it.

 *

One of the many tourist destinations friends and fellow travellers added to our list was a trip to Hearst Castle; a lavish collection of buildings on a hill near the California coastline forming the ranch that was one of William Randolph Hearst‘s multiple residences. Going in almost tabula rasa, it seemed like an opportunity to see some antiquities and witness some American monumentalism. We stopped at the Castle early on our second day driving north. It’s a rite of intra-state passage, possibly the most touristy thing to do between Los Angeles and San Francisco (apart from drive the coastal highway itself). Construction on the hill at San Simeon began in 1919, following its owner’s ill-conceived bids for political office and the death of his mother. He began in earnest an affair with the stunning screen actress Marion Davies, and embraced his love for the arts and the California coastline.

The experience of visiting this famed residence is well-oiled. You purchase tickets for the coach, separately from another set of tickets from a tiered selection of tours. Your fifteen-minute bus ride is narrated by a recording of Alex Trebek (host of Jeopardy! since 1984) and punctuated by cries from fellow-tourists to look at a particular beast in view (here a coyote, there an elk, everywhere a goat). Nearer the summit, Alex points out the remnants of a mile-long riding colonnade, referred to wryly by its architect as ‘the longest pergola in captivity’. You arrive and pile out of the bus to be taken to the front entrance, where the tour begins with a brief and somewhat glossy biography of William Randolph Hearst – the man, the myth, the legend.

Hearst was and is famous for a bunch of reasons, but primarily for being extravagantly rich. The billionaires of today are generally quietly, subtly political; very few of the Forbes Top Ten do anything entertaining. Hearst, conversely, was loud and exciting and did things and made America interesting. Born in 1863 to a family of wealthy landowners, by 1887 he’d taken over management of his father’s paper The San Francisco Examiner. He spent the next four decades creating a media empire, attacking corruption with the press and poaching the best talent from nationwide to work on his papers.

He owned 28 papers across the United States, creating the largest newspaper chain in America, as well as being a proto-Hollywood mogul of sorts. From 1903 he spent twenty years in politics, largely unsuccessfully, despite wielding enormous power already. He owned or built a number of properties across the United States which were renowned by the elite names left in their guestbooks. Inextricably, his fate seemed to be tied to that of other noted figures of his period in virtually every other quarter; more successful politicians, less successful millionaires and actors, far less successful journalists, writers and artists. A handful of the more notable names include Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Parker, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes and Winston Churchill. Yet by all accounts Hearst was not an easy-going host, and could run through these personalities quickly: he tightly controlled everyone’s intake of alcohol and were one to fall from his favour, they may return to their room and find their bags already packed and ready to leave.

Hearst was also an avid and voracious art collector. The impressive collection of busts, statues, embroideries and paintings that remain at Hearst Castle are only a fraction of his collection at its height. Presciently, this keen eye for art extended to the comic strips that ran in his papers – more than anyone before or since, he employed a number of exceptional American cartoonists.

His method of attracting the best talent with large paychecks was double-edged. He likely made a millionaire of George Herriman, whose Krazy Kat was highly influential in later decades, but made the cartoonist unemployable outside of the Hearst empire. Winsor McCay was only able to continue his Little Nemo for two years under Hearst before being employed solely for political editorial cartoons; an unfortunate end to one of the century’s greatest cartooning achievements. Less fortunate men were taken under his wing. They were also grist to his mill.

Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley was an early and famous scalp of Hearst syndication. The lead character of the strip was The Yellow Kid, for whom the Hearst papers’ scurrilous and sensational journalistic style would come to be named. ‘Yellow Journalism’ came to mean the self-promoting, eye-catching and unsupported newspaper style that characterised the Hearst syndication. Editors, journalists and reporters would fabricate stories, interviews and sources in order to sensationalise content, and often whip up nationalistic fervour against perceived aggressors. Hearst’s influence is largely blamed for the Spanish war of 1898. Some of the behaviours engaged in at the press would be familiar to any student of today’s FOX News; there are parallels to be drawn between the professional lives of Hearst and both Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. A (more insidious) form of yellow journalism lives on.

Top: Hearst’s New York Journal in 1898 (the Spanish American War), Bottom: Murdoch’s Sun in 1982 (The Falklands). A century separates these bellicose front pages, but little else.

His father’s fortune was left to his mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst. He had access to the funds for business and private use, but prior to her death in 1919 he was required to beg for them directly or otherwise raise capital elsewhere. Only after her death, and receiving his full inheritance, did he begin truly building and buying with abandon. He travelled the world purchasing artworks and architectural features and for years outspent his income from the papers, property and mining concerns combined.

Hearst was the big man with the high-pitched voice, an emblem of American free enterprise who relied on a family stipend and the readership of the working class alike – a contradictory and complicated man with layers. Like the country he lived in, there is more subtlety and nuance than the Hollywood portrayal. The 1941 film Citizen Kane features a number of direct parallels to Hearst’s life, including a spooky stand-in for his castle named Xanadu. The notions in Kane that the castle was a solitary sanctuary from civilisation, or a palace for his lover, do not hold up well to scrutiny. The ranch and surrounding area was clearly a place he had loved since childhood. It was initially intended as a spring residence for his wife and children and was seldom unoccupied by invited guests.

 *

“I would like to build something upon the hill at San Simeon. I get tired of going up there and camping in tents. I’m getting a little too old for that. I’d like to get something that would be a little more comfortable.”

These are reputedly the words by which Hearst announced to his architect his desire to build a cottage where the castle now stands; they are oft-repeated both for the chasmic understatement and the neat visual gag. The place is gigantic. There are three ‘bungalows’ which each have between ten and eighteen rooms on multiple levels. The main building, called La Casa Grande, comprises twenty-two bedrooms, forty-one bathrooms, and fourteen sitting rooms, among others. We were taken through the ground floor of the Casa Grande, including two sitting rooms, a dining room, a billiards room and movie theatre, meaning the tour was near comprehensive – excluding only about 160 rooms. There are two very large, extremely opulent hand-tiled swimming pools, one of which rests below a never-completed gymnasium, the other overlooks the coastline, framed by a classical Greek temple façade.

The estate was also home to a large variety of exotic animals. Ever the collector, Hearst corralled animals from all over the world, including giraffes, elephants, kangaroo and camels. The animals held right of way over motor vehicles on the ranch. Most, but not all, were later removed to zoos or died of natural causes; today a thriving herd of zebra will occasionally stop traffic on the highway to the delight of onlookers.

Outwardly, La Cuesta Encantada (as it was officially named) is impressive and harmonious, with all of the buildings designed and decorated in a uniform Neo-Gothic Spanish style. Internally, it’s a mess: the construction and ornament represent a hodge-podge collection of elements and artefacts from all over the world. It doesn’t seem to follow a single classical school of design and often breaches what the purist would consider good taste. Certainly, a number of artistically minded guests risked Hearst’s wrath by writing less than kindly about the horror vacui style of furnishing and the clashing objets d’art. It seemed as if Hearst picked things at random, as they took his fancy. Fifteenth-century Gothic jostles with Greek antiquity, walls are ripped from cathedrals with choir seats intact, merging with ceilings from Spain painted hundreds of years ago.

The tour guide is knowledgable, friendly yet stern, and seems well-indoctrinated into the cult of Hearst. She happily describes his ‘avocado’ physique, philandering and financial irresponsibility as the minor flaws of an otherwise heroic figure. The tour dwells upon the receptions and dinners with presidents, film stars, and writers, reinforcing the image of Hearst as the wealthy socialite, maintaining his elite financial and social status. My initial impression was that the castle seemed like a very old-world style of displaying wealth (I noted, with no apparent irony, a bust of Caligula). Having studied classics at uni, but little prior knowledge of Hearst, it seemed like the tyrannical whims of an avaricious lout made manifest.

 *

Yet a keener eye than mine may have earlier detected the skilled hand of an architect bringing harmony to Hearst’s collection of global flourishes. Our tour guide mentions the architect during the initial biography, but it isn’t until she’s pressed that further information about Julia Morgan is presented. Her sex is noted as unusual for the period, and I make a familiar connection: the forgotten, unsung woman behind the rich and tyrannical Great Man. Here, it seemed, was an example of history remembering the individual with every privilege available to him, while she who overcame real adversity and oppression was overshadowed. I wanted to know her full story. It didn’t disappoint.

Morgan studied engineering at UC Berkeley (unusual, yet not unheard of for a female), receiving her Bachelor’s in 1894. She was mentored by Bernard Maybeck who encouraged her to seek further training in architecture and pointed across the Atlantic. Morgan moved to Paris in 1896 to study French and revise in earnest for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This was the city of Seurat, Cézanne, Rodin and Lautrec – a marvellous place and time for someone interested in the arts. The mixture of Neoclassical Beaux-Arts style and avant-garde galleries provided the basis for innovation in her later career.

She had a small apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement and lived off a fund given to her by her parents. She refused to request any further money, preferring to live frugally and instilling a sense of financial responsibility that would become helpful in budgeting for projects (and stands in contrast to Hearst’s profligate financial recklessness). She took the entrance exam for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts three times: her first score too low, her second arbitrarily lowered by male examiners, and her third high enough to embarrass the school were they to again refuse her entrance. Required to complete the course of study before her thirtieth birthday, she now had five years of work to complete in three.

If this is all sounding somewhat Disney, let’s throw in the arrival to Paris of her unwell brother who she then had to also support financially. It was around this time that her efforts attracted the attention of one of the wealthiest women in America. Phoebe Hearst reached out to Morgan, offering her financial assistance. A stickler for principle, she turned it down, feeling it would have no effect on the quality of her work. Against the odds, she completed the necessary work to earn her certificate from the Beaux-Arts, becoming the first woman ever to do so.

She returned to California to begin her career, working briefly for another Beaux-Arts alum, John Galen Howard. Morgan terminated their relationship after hearing how he had boasted about the skills of an unnamed architect in his employ, concluding, “And the best thing about this person is, I pay her almost nothing, as it is a woman!”. She became certified as a professional architect and opened her own office in San Francisco in 1904 (another female first) and went on to create a legacy of over 700 buildings. Intentionally or not, she futureproofed her legacy through the earthquake-conscious construction of most of her buildings – the Neptune pool at the Hearst ranch, for example, is actually suspended from reinforced concrete to sway rather than crack.

So when another Hearst came looking for Julia Morgan, it wasn’t in search of a feel-good charity case.

Morgan worked on the ranch at San Simeon from the age of forty-eight to seventy-five, completing her involvement in 1947. She had to contend with the physical difficulties of reaching and navigating the site, a disability that affected her balance and the inevitable irregularities of finances received from Hearst. All the while she ran a full-time practice from her San Francisco office, completing the hundreds of other building projects that make her one of the most prolific architects in American history. Her partnership with Hearst, unlike most others in his employ – the cartoonists, the writers, the yes-men – didn’t stifle her own ambitions.

Julia Morgan and a baby elephant

My appreciation for the estate grew as we were allowed to wander free in the exterior, witness the swimming pools and admire the view. The details in the periphery – the statues, trim, tile mosaics – and the 127 acres of landscaping embody a sense of craftsmanship and betray an appreciation for the site that was shared by Hearst and Morgan. I realised my idea of Hearst as the domineering egotist, and Julia Morgan as the forgotten, uncredited true artisan was incorrect. Despite their different temperaments – she business-like and dry-witted, he mercurial and impulsive – they shared a number of key interests and traits. Both were determined and intelligent, too determined and intelligent to have treated each other as a folly. The estate is the result of a creative partnership between two talented and driven individuals that lasted twenty-eight years. Apart from their shared taste and knowledge, letters between the two regarding construction demonstrate the extent of their collaboration and mutual respect. There was no exploiter, no victim. The more recent partnership of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ives is a fairly apt comparison.

Eventually Hearst’s compulsive art collecting slowed. In 1937, he began selling off large parts of his collection to alleviate losses suffered in the Depression – though even after Hearst’s death, the building still contained enough artifacts to qualify as a museum. The entire ranch was donated by the Hearst corporation to the state of California in 1957. While respecting the approach and achievements of both Hearst and Morgan, I feel like the ranch remains too lavish, too extravagant as a residence. As a museum, though it succeeds wonderfully, and makes me wonder if this wasn’t a hidden intention of its creators, who spent three decades bringing it into being.

Talking about the USA is difficult, partly because of its size and diversity, and partly because it is both terrible and wonderful. Doing it in a few words is frustrating, resulting in something facile or slippery at best, or a false single-issue pronouncement at worst. Much of the global face of the US is squabbling politicians, gun violence and greedy excess. When viewed through the lens of news media and internet culture it can often seem like vocal ideologues and hatred have the run of the place. Actually visiting allows one to witness the partnership, community and basic human values that keep everything running. For me, Hearst Castle provided a good micro for the macro – the disjointed mélange of disparate cultures that functions as a whole. Its creators formed an unlikely partnership by finding commonality rather than argument. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but together Hearst and Morgan created a singular and superlative way to keep the rain off one’s head.

In 2001, my parents cobbled together $75,000 that, simultaneously, allowed our migration to New Zealand, and would eventually bond me to 2 years of national service in Singapore. Six years later, when the time came, there was no outward trace of it. No government-officiated letter or phone call reached the house in Saint Johns where I lived with my parents. My friends in Auckland knew I was about to leave, although it must have been difficult for them to understand its conditions. Some remarked on the impossibility of the decision I’d made. There was no decision, but rather a play of forces – political, economic, legal.

In Singapore, it is compulsory for males who have reached 18 years of age to enrol in national service. The term is 22 or 24 months, depending on one’s physical fitness on enrolment. I was to serve in the Armed Forces, as part of its conscripted military, for 24 months. My family paid a bond because we wished to live elsewhere; but I was deemed to have lived in Singapore long enough to have to return. Refusal entailed a summary trial or court martial in the military justice system, on charge of being AWOL. In short, I would be arrested if I ever landed in Changi airport – even in transit. My return was a ventriloquism emergent of a force-field, an inexorable cultural response and not a decision. Around the end of the last year of my Auckland high school education, I packed my suitcase, boarded a plane, and was given my first real lesson in power.

*

In nine strokes, the first beginning from my right temple, I no longer had hair. I was moved from the large room we’d started in to another large room of shaven heads. I found myself unable to recognize anyone I’d met in the first. We put on grey training singlets. We were told how to arrange the items in our lockers for inspections. Fifteen strangers slept in one room that night. I thought that we all had the same face, that we all had the same eyes.

As recruits during the first three months of service, we were told where to go and what to do (i.e. herded) by section instructors, who bore a sergeant rank. Their orders were legitimised by commissioned officers – the “fathers” above our non-commissioned “mothers”. Intensity plays a fundamental role in the formation of memory. As with childhood, I remember the ways we were punished more easily than the ways we were actually trained.

Sometimes, in seemingly arbitrary fashion, we were given impossible timings to meet. “Change Parade”, for example, would proceed as follows: thirty people stampede back upstairs, to fall-in again in completely different gears. You’re late. Change into your Smart-4 (neatly folded and pressed camouflage fatigues and parade boots). Your ten minutes started six minutes ago. You’re late. Change into your PT kit (singlet, running shorts and shoes). You’re late. Change into your admin attire … And so on.

Against the already-overwhelming tropical heat and humidity, some would risk donning their camouflage fatigues over their singlets, trying to save seconds. Others would arrive downstairs in the entirely wrong attire. And so on. I would arrive downstairs to find the rest of the platoon already neatly arranged – forty-five degrees to the left, in push-up position.

For failing bunk inspections, we were banned from sleeping on our beds during the day, so that we were forced to preserve the cleanliness of the floors if we wanted to nap. In our first extended period of training in the jungle, we performed back-crawls, rifles held above our chests, through our latrine area. The final day of the 22 or 24 months of national service is called “ORD” or Operational Readiness Day. I never once in the army considered my operational readiness. I don’t think many of us did. I just wanted to get through.

In basic training I attracted the term “Jiak Kan Tang”, or “Kan Tang” for short, which roughly translates as “potato eater”. While on its surface, the designation was a mockery of my Anglophone accent, the act of distancing ran deeper. My section instructor once told me that I was arrogant, and that I felt I was better than the others, even though I constantly felt frail and incapable. At the time I didn’t realise that my accent bore class, as well as cultural, significations. I did come from an upper middle-class background, although my family lost most of its money during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. And we did have enough money to move to New Zealand. Yet while I felt different – certainly after discovering the way I spoke was marked by a conflation with dietary habit – I never felt better than the others. I was often clumsy. I was always dazed. It took me a while to grasp lessons, especially when I was running around with the dual weights of helmet and rifle. (And it was true what instructors said – you were dumber the instant you put on a helmet.) So the prejudice confused me, and while it largely fell away among the other recruits as they got to know me better, my section instructor persisted in his. Shaking his head – after witnessing a particularly mazy run of mine through the underbrush that probably would have guaranteed my annihilation by friendly fire in real combat conditions – he told me that “someone like you will never get this”. It was difficult to feel foreign in Singapore as well as New Zealand. And it was difficult to return to find Singapore a more foreign place than New Zealand.

Filling out an expression-of-interest form at the end of basic training (which lasted 3 months), I marked “Yes” to be considered for command school. There were a number of reasons to compete for a place in officer cadet school (the “higher” of two possibilities for the remainder of my service – the other was a place in a course to become a non-commissioned officer). Commissioned officers received twice as much of an allowance. They could have better food at the officers’ mess, and cheap beer. They had proper rooms and bathrooms. And commissioned officers were the ones who had power over the others.

It is obvious to me now that this was the moment where I decided to gain the most power to guarantee the most protection. It wasn’t so much one particular event – say, the time I watched someone forced to run around a building yelling “I am a stupid bird!” over and over, or any other senseless dehumanization in the name of regimentation I may have experienced – but rather the knowledge that I could be subject to such an event at any given time, for any reason real or contrived. In general, I wanted to escape. By this point my otherness had also become firmly ingrained in my psyche; I thought that perhaps by joining the command structure I could transcend my difference.

I got to officer cadet school, eventually, after being funnelled through a regime of assessments measuring my physical fitness, combat fitness, command and control, emotional stability and tactical awareness and knowledge. The office cadet course was a 9-month extension of this. I remember trying to decide where to send my machine-gun team while my instructor struck me repeatedly in the helmet and screamed at me. I laughed a lot in these times. Short, sharp bursts – not in amusement, but to expel the moment’s sheer excess. Crying wouldn’t have been quick enough.

*

Beside a large river in Brunei, I tore the head off a quail, as I was instructed. I was on an 11-day jungle confidence course, one of the more brutal moments of officer cadet school. Its liver was reddish-brown, with no white spots, which meant the quail should have been healthy enough to eat, but I threw it into the river as soon as the instructors left on their boats. The smell of blood on my hands ran on for days. The first sound of rain reaching the jungle canopy was always far away enough for me to hope it was the wind. I heard later that one of my platoon mates lost his machete in the rising mud. In the jungle I came to know a darkness full of noise, none of which I could recognize.

It had been four or five months since my commissioning. An officer is recognized by the display of rank on the shoulder, instead of on the arm. I grew accustomed to soldiers falling silent when I passed them in hallways, or in forests, on parade grounds, or in offices. You can follow the trajectory of a body as it passes through one knot of forces to the next. I had been given rank, but I had been given no power. With each successive command I issued, I realized that I was nowhere nearer to claiming individual expression, let alone control. I became aware of myself as a mere body positioned to channel an imperative from a larger, regularizing network of forces. It was agency, but it was an impersonal agency. For the moment, it had borrowed a pair of lips.

Part of the reconnaissance course we conducted involved resistance-to-interrogation training. The trainees were captured. Their weapons and equipment were taken away. They were cable-tied and blindfolded. The blindfolds had numbers on them. The trainees were addressed from then on by the number on the blindfold. They were gathered in a single area bounded by concertina wire. They were placed in high-stress positions which involved various kneels and squats, whose specifically inventive contortions ensured a significant intensification of pain over the 10 or 12 hours they were forced to hold them. Many of the trainees fell asleep in these positions, having already been carrying out missions for the past 3 or 4 days. They were jarred awake by instructions to change position screamed at them through a loudhailer. Individuals were led to rooms where their blindfolds were removed and they were interrogated over maps for information. I have been on both sides of the blindfold. I have never seen so many bodies contained and processed this way.

I remember that when I was in primary school, there were pencil sharpeners that could be bought cheaply from the school stationery store. These had a small plastic container attached that held pencil shavings. Most of us used these containers to house our spiders. I had a glass jar with a magnifying lid to keep mine in. The spiders we found were all more or less the same size, and I always thought they had the same face. The original intention was for them to fight and kill each other, but we struggled just to keep them alive. Even when we managed to put two of them together they often seemed uninterested in fighting. Made faceless, individual differences erased, reduced to bodies, further reduced to body parts (trigger-hand, aiming-eye, crouching-legs), all for easy manipulation and mobilization in a theatre of war.

One day after receiving my civilian papers and walking out of camp with my gear bag for the last time, I was back in New Zealand and back in school. It was already the second week of semester. Was it weird to find myself sitting beside fresh-faced 18 year-olds in a lecture theatre at Auckland University, hours later and half a world away? Not as weird as I expected. The university is also a processing centre for bodies, to prepare them for the theatre of work. I sat with about four hundred others, neatly arranged in a lecture hall often jokingly referred to as “The Fridge.”

I wish I were better able, at this point in my life, to trace the changes that followed me out of the army, in my return to civilian life. Most of those are still indeterminate, and require further dragging through the mush and opacity of experience. But there are little strangenesses. When walking down a dirt track at night I am sometimes confused about which country I’m in. All dirt tracks feel the same to me, at night. I like leaving rooms more than I do entering them. I am never late, unless I want to be. I feel safe in forests, whose chaotic ecologies of overcoming and displacement elude all apparatus of capture.

Dear Rakhi Kumar,

I write regarding your open letter to Michelle Obama, the subject of which is Beyoncé “My Surname Is Redundant But Here It Is Anyway” Knowles-Carter.

Beyoncé is usually a fairly uneventful topic to discuss because almost everyone agrees that she is a perfect human being with a superhuman abundance of talent and beauty, forcing the conversation on to more mundane matters. (Everything is more mundane than Beyoncé.) You, however, take a different view. You argue that Bey is destroying the futures of adolescent girls one jewel-encrusted, faux-nippled leotard at a time. You believe Beyoncé’s slutty outfits are degrading her — and, by proxy, all females — and you want the First Lady to stop publically admiring her. Beyoncé’s scantily-clad body provides a poor example for young girls, you say; shattering their dreams and luring them into the sex industry. It’s hilarious nonsense from outer space, but I’m barely paraphrasing.

I notice you’ve subsequently described your letter as providing a “point of view that flies in the face of popular culture.” It doesn’t. Your letter slut-shames and body-polices women, which is one of pop culture’s most stale routines. It condescends to women and girls and robs them of their agency, which is drearily pro-culture. Mainstream media outlets like Yahoo aren’t in the counterculture game, and despite its “alternative media” facade, HuffPo isn’t either – which is why they were all too happy to promote your particular brand of socially-conservative and anti-woman feminism. “Anti-woman!?”, I hear you scoff, perhaps while tweeting a Voltaire quote from an upside-down Ayurveda yoga pose, “but my letter is all about SAVING women!”. Well, precisely, Rakhi Kumar, and here’s why it’s not helping:

You talk about women the same way sexists talk about women.

There’s nary a woman, or group of women, who you don’t patronise in your letter. You instruct “smart” “mum” Michelle Obama that Beyoncé “can no longer be called a role model” (your bold); you label girls and women in the music industry “no more complex than dolls”; you conflate sex workers with trafficked women and treat sex work as axiomatically demeaning (and “heartbreaking”); and you claim that Beyoncé performed the “the final degradation of her talent” by donning a sheer bodysuit.

Rakhi Kumar, who needs sexists when we have you to slut-shame women for “shaking [their] butts on stage” in that most reprobate attire, “high heels and sheer tights”? Who needs misogynists when you describe women engaged in sex work as “objects” whose humanity “can be forgotten”? Who needs hyperbolic right-wing conservatives when you describe as a “demonic myth” the idea that women can dress how they damn well like, for whatever reason? Who needs parody when we’ve got you calling Bey “a glowing ball of soullessness” who has “allowed her sexual identity to eclipse the genius of her spirit”?

You posit a nonsensical causal link between glittery body suits and sex trafficking.

After you’ve berated Beyoncé for her immoral dress sense and admonished the First Lady for supporting her, you slot in this jarring statistic of dubious relevance:

Remember that in the USA, the average age of a girl when she is trafficked for sex for the first time is 13.

At this point it’s unclear how exactly this relates to Beyoncé, but you go on to explain your logic:

Remember that she’s often brought into the ‘life’ by drug dealers who promise her a celebrity lifestyle, clothes like the ones Beyoncé wears, and situations where she can live like Queen Bey.

WHOOPS! Here I was thinking that the interplay between sex work and forced labour was complex and multi-causal, involving structural factors like poverty, identity-based discrimination, and anti-migration policies! BUT IT’S ACTUALLY INCREDIBLY SIMPLE! Turns out pimps (or, as they’re also known, “drug dealers”!) are simply luring young girls into the game with sequinned knicker shorts and the “Single Ladies” video, and if Beyoncé would just put some damn clothes on, the sex trafficking industry would dissolve!

Sorry to snark, it’s just that I can’t seriously engage with your evidence-devoid theory. The anti-sex trafficking cause is already thick with moral panic, misinformation, and ill-informed, PR-boosting celebrity activists, and you’re cluttering the already-diminished discourse with further nonsense. This wouldn’t especially bother me if it weren’t for the fact that theories like yours spawn attitudes and policies that actively harm sex workers. You are ignoring the freely-available perspectives and requests of real-life sex workers because they interfere with your romantic notion of the Prostituted Woman as a forlorn, passive victim who needs to be saved. If you engage with sex workers before you form a view on what’s oppressing them, you might find that criminalisation and stigma are higher-priority concerns than mythical drug-dealing pimps wielding persuasive charm and Beyoncé’s hotpants.

You hold individual women responsible for systemic sexism.

Look, Rakhi Kumar, don’t get me wrong; I share many of your concerns. It genuinely sucks that women in the music industry have to jump through more hoops than their male counterparts to achieve half the recognition. It sucks that women have to capitulate to mainstream ideas of what’s sexy regardless of whether or not they want to. Trust me that I care deeply about trafficked women and girls. Trust me that I care deeply about young girls wondering how best to stay on the grind in this shitty, capitalist, girl-hating world.

But of all the people or institutions you could call to task over these issues — music industry executives and their money-hungry models, politicians and their discriminatory laws, advertisers and media outlets and the dim view of women they promote — the primary target of your ire is one individual woman: Beyoncé. One individual woman, herself subject to vile racism and rank misogyny; endless media scrutiny and ruthless body policing. One individual woman who, despite the odds, made it to the top of her game only to have you berate her for DOING FEMINISM ALL WRONG when she got there. You’re holding Beyoncé personally responsible for the sexist system she’s surviving in, and that strikes me as some victim-blaming horseshit.

You discredit women who use their bodies to get ahead in a way that smacks of classism.

In your letter you call for “a more refined, intelligent message” than the one Beyoncé is promoting; one that (emphasis mine):

[Engages girls] at the level of their intellect and potential because implicit in our message to them should be the acknowledgement that they are naturally brilliant and that we believe that they are capable of everything – without ever having to undress to achieve their success.

Tell young girls that they are more than that. Engage with artists who sing, dance, write, design, perform – but whose presentation centers on showcasing the brilliance of their brain, not their body.

Not everyone has the luxury of choosing a job that showcases the “brilliance of their brain”. Some of us will settle for a job which showcases the brilliance of our ability to put food in the fridge, even if it means “undressing” to do so. Some women need to use their bodies to get ahead. Some women want to. This doesn’t make them less than, and their choices are not incompatible with brilliance.

You’re discouraging people from being feminists because you make feminism seem so fucking austere and dull.

Let me tell you something embarrassing about me. When I was a late-teen first discovering feminism, I was attracted to your radfem, abolitionist model like a fly to shit. I was angry about sexism, and so were you, and it felt good to know that I wasn’t alone. I was starting to notice the way that sexism operated systemically, and you had a word for that: Patriarchy. I began to understand that being a good feminist meant abolishing the sex industry, which was oppressing us all, and rejecting femininity, because our brazilian waxes were shackling us. I felt like I’d taken the red pill; that if I could only convince women to stop participating in their own oppression then we could all be free. I cultivated a superior attitude and an aggressively unsexy personal aesthetic. I was just a kid, but I was cringeworthy.

I also really resented being female. At the time I chalked that up to having my eyes opened to the pervasive effects of sexism and misogyny, which are real and terrible, no doubt; but eventually I noticed that the particular flavour of feminism that I was consuming was making me relentlessly self-critical. There was a list of a million things I couldn’t do without feeling like I was letting down the cause: I couldn’t watch porn. I couldn’t wear high heels. I couldn’t call someone a cunt. Every time I put on liquid eyeliner I thought, “good one, Maddie, why don’t you just give the Patriarchy a blowjob now?” I felt limited and guilty all the time. I was bored.

The upshot is that I soon discovered better feminists models: sex-positive feminism, intersectional feminism, feminism which is actually pro-women. I don’t feel like I’m corroding the sisterhood when I listen to rap or paint my fingernails anymore; my porn folder is full and poorly concealed (bookmarks –> “porn”); and I use the word cunt on a daily basis, freely and advisedly. Feminism isn’t a cult; it’s a social movement for fundamentally cool and decent people. It shouldn’t be an onerous chore that makes women’s lives harder; shaming them and instructing them how to live. That’s what your model does, and that’s why it’s broken.

You don’t seem to be seeing the same Beyoncé we are all seeing.

Hey, Rakhi Kumar, you know Beyoncé’s not “under the management of [her] daddy and/or [her] husband”, yeah? That she doesn’t have a song called “Bow Down Bitch”, right? That even her actual song, “Bow Down/I Been On”, is not setting women back 50 years, okay?

I’m nervous we’re not even talking about the same person here. Is this who you mean when you say you see a “degraded talent”? You’re looking at this when you see “something dreadfully familiar and sad”? We’re definitely talking about this Beyoncé, right? That’s your “glowing ball of soullessness”!? Wow! Okay! I’m sad for you that you can extract no joy from this astounding megastar! Personally seeing  Beyoncé perform turns my eyes into cartoon love hearts and my guts into jelly and my heart into a planet-sized orb and my nipples into jewels. It makes me want to rush downstairs and start pashing my LLB. It makes me want to donate my life savings to kickstart some girl’s maths degree. It makes me want to slip into a glittery leotard of my own and run down the street high-fiving every female-identified person I see. It makes me want to personally congratulate every woman and girl on the planet for existing.

Beyoncé is a powerhouse, a feminist, and a queen. If you can look at her and think “poor women, we’re ruined”, I can’t understand you and I never will.

Yours Bey’s,

Maddie Collier

Dissecting the Super Mario flop | Ebert on The Pot |
Manufacturing slacktivist outrage | The economics of Amanda Palmer |
Applause as a social function | The best time to talk about ANZAC day
is ANZAC day | The Boston bombings

Adam

If you haven’t seen the Super Mario Bros movie from 1993, it’s important to note out of the gate that it’s both horrible and visionary, a cynical film made by people hungover from the dark, edgy parts of the 1980s and getting it out of their system in the most visible, unpleasant way. If you have, it probably won’t surprise you that it was a troubled production.

In her piece for Grantland, ‘Hollywood Archeology: The Super Mario Bros Movie’, Karina Longworth positions herself as both biographer and pathologist for the beleaguered film. Her breakdown of the harrowing production period doesn’t provide any new material – its value is more in its curation of some key pieces from the time, including a 1992 Los Angeles Times feature that’s unflinching in its coverage of the trainwreck backstage and a collection of some of the nine Super Mario Bros scripts drafted (a highlight from the synopsis of one: “The one (misguided) attempt at humor is a scene in which Bruce Willis, in homage to Die Hard, cameos in the air ducts of Koopa’s Tower”).

As pathologist, though, Longworth goes right to the source to find the cause of the film’s extravagant failure. Longworth buys a NES and a copy of the original game and invites her friends around for some gaming and a movie. Longworth writes with warmth as her friends stick around for hours to take turns with the single NES controller, but once the 1993 movie goes in the DVD player -

…by about 20 minutes into the film the group had collectively done a 180. People started fiddling with their phones. People who didn’t smoke went out back to have a smoke. But I had to sit there and watch the whole thing, because for whatever reason I had decided to ask for that job.

Longworth’s conclusion about why the film emerged from the Hollywood womb already doomed – it was a “blatant exploitation of a brand name that totally ignore[d] that brand’s function and meaning, [a parasite] designed to leech off of warm feelings about past amusements, produced with no understanding of what made people fans of [that brand] to begin with” – resonates today, in a contemporary market saturated with these kinds of films (A Good Day to Die Hard, Total Recall, Transformers 3). And if the failure Longworth identifies is a failure to pander successfully, a failure to adapt to a market  , rather than a failure to create a piece of worthy cinema, that’s only because the context (one she recognises with a fair degree of bitterness) is one where the Super Mario Bros formula is, twenty years on, actually succeeding; a world where a little extra cash is justification enough for taking stories we love and stripping them of what we remember fondly. Longworth’s unspoken suggestion is that, had Super Mario Bros been put through exactly the same process in 2013, maybe it would have had a fighting chance.

Bloomberg Businessweek ran a feature last week about Herman Torres, a young man drawn into a bank robbery scheme by a man on a phone who claimed to be working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Torres’ job was to ‘test the security of retail banks’ by going into them and robbing them. Armed guards, police or a five-minute wait were cause to flee, as the bank had passed the test. Of course, one robbery did not go according to plan. Of course, Herman got arrested. And of course, all was not as it seemed.

Torres’ story is a larger-than-life tale worth reading for the sheer absurdity of what followed Herman’s arrest. It’s a hoary cliche to say truth is often sometimes stranger than fiction, but Herman’s story is one that wouldn’t be out of place in a five-dollar paperback in a bin at Whitcoulls – and that’s what makes it fascinating.

Roger Ebert died on April 4. Ebert was an incredibly lucid, eloquent writer with an immense passion for the art of film, and his influence is felt in every young upstart reviewer who started a blog or wrote in student media in the last fifteen years. He democratised film criticism, for better and for worse. But, most importantly, he was an incredible advocate for young filmmakers who only had a camera and something to say, as attested to in this video of Roger at the Sundance premiere of Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow.

Buy a rice cooker in his honour. Make something in it. He would’ve liked that.

Joe

Wellington’s Saziah Bashir is finally blogging under the nom de plume “Brownie Prolix“. She wrote the following heartfelt and deeply resonant piece about why MP Richard Prosser’s Investigate column about profiling young Muslim men was so vile – whereas most responses were a white Herald harrumph of propriety or just hashtag satire, she actually made the case for why it mattered. For her inaugural post on her own space, she’s taken a very hard look at the “pls like-pls share-1 click means 1 dollar” ethos of Facebook – often initiated by companies, usually propagated by the well-meaning, accomplishing precious little. If this is familar territory, her particular critique isn’t – members of the young Bangladeshi diaspora sharing pictures of partially-crushed people in vibrant and unsubstantiated appeal, whose engagement with homeland politics are limited to the odd parental rant, who oscillate between apathy and the odd flurry of outrage when something kills enough people:

I disagree that a picture is always worth a thousand words. Even a thousand words is sometimes not worth a thousand words. If you feel strongly enough about something, take the time to engage. It needn’t be lengthy prose.  But this two second share and retweet exercise of something fraught with problems which you then discard in your mind a second later means nothing. In fact, it’s harmful.

I don’t know how we participate meaningfully. But I know how we don’t. We don’t make it a trivial one click experience. We don’t dwell in the grotesque and trade in shock value at the expense of respect and engagement because it’s easier and garners a bigger, quicker response. We don’t exclude. We don’t harbour the grand and ultimately self-serving delusion that we can “save” anyone (because too often I’ve heard educated Bangalis talk of “teaching” the “lower classes” in language borrowed directly from the colonizers who once sought to tame us savages).

Sure, Bashir allows, some of us talk about issues and solutions and share practical on-the-ground information, but there’s a lot of noise that we consciously choose to make. Obama’s Digital Director, Teddy Goff, visited New Zealand in February. One of his social media ‘takeaways’ (ugh) was about what people share – and no surprise that it tends to be the stuff that makes us look, at least superficially, like well-rounded and interesting people (ie: no one wants to be the guy who’s on Facebook admitting they read about the Kardashians).

We’ll form an echo chamber for marriage equality once it’s legislatively a done deal, for protecting dolphins and kittens after an environmental disaster, for huge, sad-eyed children after a building collapse or a famine. Information that lacks a face or is systemic doesn’t let us offer up a concerned and ‘switched-on’ facet to the world quite so easily, because the world is in a hurry – too bad, because it’s this kind of information that can have real preventative application if shared and learnt.

This isn’t some declaration that we need to start posting reams of text online – because if it’s designed and presented well, you can convey important information on an infographic too. But Bashir is right that even those of us who are stuck on Facebook have choices about how we use it, just as much as we have choice about what we say aloud. Let’s pad out the water-cooler conversation with some substance.

If you haven’t read a Thomas Friedman column before in the New York Times, save your free monthly quota and continuously hit F5 on the Thomas Friedman OpEd Generator - a genius bot that produces a near-perfect simulation of his proto-TED Talk slashfic. Every point on your Friedman checklist is here. Travel anecdote as key to generalised truth? Yes! The knowledge economy as experienced by sage foreign taxi drivers? Yes! Homily upon homily about a globalising (or, ‘flattening’ world)? Yes!

Let’s make America for the world what Cape Canaveral was to America: the world’s greatest launching pad. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about gas prices. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend more: and not just spend more, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of human capital that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax increases as well, but as they say, “them’s the breaks.”

Second, I’d tell them to look at Norway, which all but solved its gas prices crisis over the past decade. When I visited Norway in 2001, Tintin, the cabbie who drove me from the airport, couldn’t stop telling me about how he had to take a second job because of the high cost of gas prices. I caught up with Tintin in Oslo last year. Thanks to Norway’s reformed approach toward gas prices, Tintin has enough money in his pocket to finally be able to afford a soccer ball for his kids.

It’s good to see the talks between the president and congress getting off to a solid start, but we know there will be plenty of partisan fireworks before any deal is cut. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about capital gains. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend less: and not just spend less, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of green energy that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax cuts as well, but as they say, “Ya gotta get down to brass tacks.”

I don’t know what Luxembourg will be like a few years from now, but I do know that it will probably look very different from the country we see now, even if it remains true to its basic cultural heritage. I know this because, through all the disorder, the people still haven’t lost sight of their dreams.

On the other hand, there’s not much to be said about Amanda Palmer’s TED talk, but it helps to tease out some of the stuff that’s a matter of taste (her music’s drippy theatrical excess, the frustrating and obscuring distance of its melodrama, the way ‘punk cabaret’ seems more like borrowed nostalgia for edgy high-school virtuosos and less like a bid to shatter taboos – okay, you see where my taste lies) from a series of words and deeds that suggest a complete failure to come to terms with privilege, class, and a basic economic history of the music industry. Writing for NY Mag, Nitsuh Abebe does a good and considered job of it:

She’s politely explained and defended her choices at length on her blog, but the forum Palmer chose to unpack her philosophy as a whole turned out to be both the most ideologically friendly and the easiest to mock: She recently gave a TED talk. As TED talks go, it hit all of the right marks. She wrapped the length of her career, from street performer to lecturer, around the kind of single, simple insight that appeals to people who regularly consume fairy tales about creatively “disrupting” established business models and summoning Utopia via Wi-Fi.

I have sympathy for this argument, because the exchange she’s talking about really does get lost when we talk about the economics of art; we focus on material questions of who should pay for what, and often act as though the attention and approval artists get from us is a bigger gift than the world full of art we get from them. However: Palmer’s logic here is itself generally identical to cold, hard free-market capitalism. Yes, the exchange she’s describing is “fair” — everyone involved is willing and happy to engage in it. It’s also “fair” to pay someone minimum wage for work that makes you millions, and fair for a male musician to spend every night having sex with starstruck, consenting young fans, but fairness is not the same thing as nobility, and neither of those arrangements is something you’d present as a revolutionary new relationship.

His conclusion is on it too: love her or despise her, Palmer’s Kickstarter and app-fuelled public persona now faces the same gap as any commercial entity that reaches out to an online audience: some people are going to want what you’re selling, while a whole lot are going to be infuriated when they incidentally encounter it. The question of whether this is simply the myth of ‘the divisive performer’ writ large or the cold-hard reality of persona as product may be a vexed one – but Palmer sure as hell isn’t the first, or the funniest to cross it:

Finally, these oil-on-canvas film posters from Ghana’s fledging film theatre industry are lurid, crude and quite wonderful. The story goes that, with the arrival of videotape and VCR equipment in the 1980s, rural audiences were able to see international films for the first time, and a roaring trade of mobile cinema travelled from town to town with social club or open-air engagements. Screenings were presaged with locally commissioned and painted posters for the likes of Terminator, Face/Off and Mission-Impossible. 

More can be seen here.

 Bronwyn

I was going to link some articles I’ve been reading about comedy, and why it’s so often the preserve of a particular group of people (like the comedian I saw as part of a group show last night who made a joke about how gross it is to have sex with their pregnant wife, because the penis might touch the baby, hahaha/ewwww/hahaha! and his wife was so horny she raped him, big laugh!) but as you could imagine, it’s all mostly pretty dispiriting. However, as a worthwhile diversion I did find this list from Amy Poelher on the habits of her co-star Adam Scott.

On a related tack, The Atlantic has a history of applause, including the theory that the Alexandrians had three categories of applause, so admired by Nero that “he selected some young men of the order of equites and more than five thousand sturdy young plebeians, to be divided into groups and learn the Alexandrian styles of applause … and to ply them vigorously whenever he sang.”

Even the modern audience member can be struck by the differences in how audiences use applause; on Broadway the convention is that actors are clapped on entry, to the point where this regularly threatens to derail the whole production, and directors are tasked with coming up with increasingly inventive ways to circumvent this.

The writer makes a slightly tenuous link made between clapping and the use of Like buttons and retweets; yes, both are ways that people give approval of a person or idea, but this ignores the fact that applause from a crowd is almost exactly the opposite of an individual sitting alone pressing a button; also, our conventions of performance and being an audience member mean that clapping is so codified that often we don’t even know why we’re clapping.

 Jose

I missed Gordon Campbell’s column on Friday, but I’m glad I caught up eventually because he wrote about the previous day’s ANZAC events.

The point is that the official tone of the day’s events is almost uniformly celebratory – which is arguably not the best or only way of honouring those who died, or those who came home wounded in various ways. In the process the allegedly glorious nature of the human sacrifice involved tends to drown out the consideration of the horrors of war, and the craven nature of many of the decisions that generated them.

While I don’t think it’s quite right to describe ANZAC day ‘celebratory,’ it could be twice as wrong to call it exploratory.

I once contacted a prominent comedian to ask if he would take part in a fundraiser I was organising for the journalist Jon Stephenson. He declined, citing Metro’s decision to run Eyes Wide Shut (Jon’s expose on how New Zealand soldiers in Afghanistan broke the Geneva Conventions by releasing prisoners over to US and Afghan forces knowing it was likely they’d be mistreated and, possibly, tortured). He said he couldn’t respect the fact that the issue of Metro with Jon’s story was published during ANZAC week (I think it might have even gone out on the 25th), that he was “pro-SAS” and “although he is not accusing them  of torture I personally think prisoners do need to be transferred to Afghan authorities as it is their country and is not our job to try them.”

Putting aside the fact he clearly hadn’t read the article (Jon’s sources include SAS members) I appreciated the fact he took the time to politely point out his objections. I appreciated how it illustrated a particular view: anyone pushing out media critical of the military during ANZAC week must be doing it for extra publicity and that is disrespectful.

The positioning for media exposure is a given and I don’t think it necessarily follows that it’s disrespectful.  Done the right way, ANZAC day, or at least that week, is a perfect time to examine New Zealand’s military adventures overseas. Take, for example, He Toki Huna, Annie Goldson and Kay Ellmers’ understated but strong documentary on the war in Afghanistan seen through the eyes of Jon Stephenson. The full doco is online and an extended version is, apparently, to be screened during the film festival this year.

Matt

A part of Boston’s skyline from the top of Bunker Hill

I woke up a few mornings ago and habitually checked my phone see what the world had been doing while I slept. An email received in the early hours caught my eye – it was from a close friend, just one line long: Don’t worry – was not near explosions.

I immediately started worrying.

At the beginning of 2012 I spent some time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stroll over the Charles from Boston’s CBD. After a month confined in an RV, rushing between cities, two weeks unhurriedly wandering Boston was good for the soul, even in the dead of winter.

Boston’s not like any other town in the States. Cosmopolitan and massive, it revels in its history, with stories of heroes and sites of tragedy linked not only by historical walking trail, but also through a foundational mythology. The city’s heart beats less frenetically than mad New York, and its people are more willing to stop and smile and say “excuse me.” They slowed rather than accelerated as you crossed the street. It felt almost homey; I loved the place.

This giant flag hangs from inside the JFK presidential library. In Dallas last week, Obama spoke briefly of the bombings while opening the George W. Bush presidential library.

I found myself trying to ignore the grisly details, but it was impossible – endlessly iterated via social media, they were hard to hear, but harder not to. Pressure cookers and baseball caps and tourniquets and backpacks and nails. Then, days later, a shooting at MIT – where two friends and a dozen acquaintances study – and then a night spent listening to the police scanner and refreshing twitter as a manhunt sent a city into “lockdown.” What is lockdown? Is it like martial law?

More details: a boat, a tarp, an infrared camera and a gunshot to the throat. They were white, but also ostensibly Islamic, and everyone knew what that meant. The boy caught alive was not read his Miranda rights.

Throughout, a deluge of ‘news.’ Reporters stood on Boston street corners, gleefully solemn, and hysterically spoke nothing. People were accused of being involved, and then accusations were revoked in light of better CCTV angles, a measure of how far we’ve come since Salem (just a short drive up the road). It was a chaotic mess, and now the suspects have been either charged or killed, and it remains a chaotic, fucked up mess.

Some supporters are already rallying behind the surviving suspect, suggesting the brothers were victims of a ‘false flag’ operation perpetrated by the US government. I followed a link on Facebook to one such conspiracy theory website. It had detailed diagrams and asked pointed rhetorical questions and showed a photo of the older brother, naked and dead on a table, with dark wounds gaping and deep holes excavated from his body – it made me sick.

Noticing a trend here

The internet abounds with more mainstream analyses of the Boston events. The most unexpectedly muddled comes from The Atlantic:

“But perhaps less important than whatever their rationale turns out to have been is how the United States is reacting to the events of this week. On that score, the initial reactions here suggest that we may have turned a post-9/11 corner, still shocked, still pained, but no longer so fearful, so ready to blame religious zealots, and so willing to discard the freedoms that give us such strengths and yet can, at times, leave us so vulnerable.”

This is very perplexing. An entire city sequestered as shops didn’t open and people were told to stay inside during the manhunt. Several people had their faces inappropriately plastered on national newspapers and magazines as editors around the country raced to finger someone, anyone, for the explosions (what was that about Salem?). People began openly praising the CCTV cameras that recorded much of the marathon crowd, and the concept of a surveillance state was spoken about, for the first time in my recollection, with a sort of aspirational fetishization. None of these steps actually contributed to capturing the suspects, who outed themselves by mysteriously shooting an MIT cop, then getting chased down the old fashioned way; the younger brother wasn’t located until people were ‘let’ back onto the streets, and someone found him cowering in a boat.

This article in Salon – “In Boston, our bloated surveillance state didn’t work” – clarifies my objection, and unlike the one from The Atlantic is worth a read.

There’s also the misplaced impulse a certain sector of the political spectrum seems to entertain when tragedies like this strike American targets, to equivocate on the root causes global suffering – as if there’s a quota on caring, and it’s all used up mourning Pakistani children murdered by drones. It was especially foul after 9/11, but social media’s expanded public sphere means that odds are, some of your friends posted something a bit off-colour, as some of mine did.

Even so, there was a kind of silver cloud to the bombings – if you can call the expanded venn overlap of ‘civilians’ and ‘people who have endured bombings’ a silver lining. Kafranbel, a small town in Syria, expressed their sympathies to the Boston victims, and Boston responded in kind. It’d be nice if signs like the above didn’t have to exist, but in the meantime I’m just glad they do; despite the 70,000 people so far killed in Syria’s ongoing civil war, it means that at least some participants in that ongoing tragedy haven’t used up their stores of empathy just yet.