Bat, Bean, Beam

Signs of Discomfort

2012-05-21T23:59:00.000+12:00

This is a story set in New Zealand but hardly peculiar to New Zealand. Its template is a very familiar one: residents of cities with a high influx of migrants express discomfort at the growing number of businesses that cater solely or predominantly for the migrants as opposed to themselves; and that discomfort gets reported on not with the tacit or manifest disapproval that the most

Public/Private/Foreign

2012-05-14T23:59:00.000+12:00

Interviewed by The Dominion Post after signing a referendum petition last Friday, Wellington commuter David Lamborn had no difficulty explaining his opposition to asset sales: There doesn't seem to be any good logical explanation for why they want to do it, it's just based on ideology. I would rather retain them for future benefit for all New Zealanders rather than just a few who can afford to

The Airplane Film Review

2012-05-07T23:59:00.000+12:00

I envy critics who have the time, or make the time, to watch every film that is commercially released in their country. I enjoy reading the reviews of Dan Slevin now that I live in New Zealand just like I used to enjoy reading those of Morando Morandini back home and, much as I continue to take pleasure in close readings, I find something commendable in having a little bit to say about

25 April

2012-04-30T23:59:00.000+12:00

Partisans enter Milan on 25 April, 1945 I find it an intriguing coincidence that the 25th of April marks the commemoration of wartime events in both my country of birth and my country of adoption. In most respects, the two occasions couldn’t be more different: Anzac Day commemorates the service and sacrifice of uniformed troops in a global conflict whose rationale is seldom discussed and

The Absent Mother

2012-04-16T23:59:00.000+12:00

Then Sally and I Did not know what to say. Our mother was out of the house For the day. In the United States at the end of World War II, when their men came back from the front and their labour was no longer required, women were faced with an injunction: your baby or your job. In New Zealand in 2012, new legislation will require single mothers on a benefit who have another child to

Posthumous

2012-04-09T23:59:00.000+12:00

By the time you read this I may no longer be alive. Okay, it’s a fairly slim chance. I’m posting this Friday for Monday, so it’s just a matter of my surviving the weekend. But it could happen. Besides, of course, every text has a steadily increasing chance of surviving its author over time. Suppose you stumbled upon this page in one year, or ten years. How about fifty years? Or I could have

Garibaldi's Statue

2012-04-02T23:59:00.000+12:00

When they start a new town in Romagna, they first throw up a monument to Garibaldi and then build a church, because there's no fun in a civil funeral unless it spites the parish priest. The whole history of the province is concerned with spite of this kind. (Giovanni Guareschi, Don Camillo and His Flock) This week is all about the announcement that I have a new blog over at the revamped

The Empty Fortress

2012-03-26T23:59:00.006+13:00

There are books that, more than others, carry legible traces of their history. This one is well-worn and shows signs of successive repairs. During one of these repairs, the original paperback cover was cut out and glued onto a sturdier one made of cardboard, preserving what was left of the image of a child pensively holding a doll. There is no tenderness on either of those faces – the child or

Finlands of the Mind

2012-03-19T23:59:00.245+13:00

Kiwi Foo is a private gathering that takes place every year at Mahurangi College in Warkworth. It has no entry fee. The event is run on the model of the unconference, with a fluid agenda and topics for discussion selected by participants as they go along. Invitations are extended primarily to technology industry people and policy makers. Mauricio Freitas was there in 2008. He looked around

Ten Twenty-Five

2012-03-12T23:59:00.011+13:00

Cross-posted at Faces on Posters Italian version This might as well be the story of a clock. It is a clock that stopped at ten twenty-five in the morning of August 2, 1980, and then again some time in 1995, and then again in August of last year. Always it returns to that time: ten twenty-five. It is the clock on the top right corner of this picture. You can’t tell from a photograph if

Being a Great Dad for Dummies

2012-03-05T23:59:00.004+13:00

He’s an amazing creature, the modern father. Possessing in equal part confidence, creativity, endurance, optimism, passion, patience and presence, he has thrown away the shackles of his oppressed forebears and reclaimed the prerogatives of his role. To those who doubt him, he has only one thing to say: I can do this, I will do this. This is the modern father. No, better: the modern dad, for

The Social Network

2012-02-27T23:59:00.006+13:00

Miles Bennell changed his profile picture A boy who says his mother isn’t his mother. A woman who says her uncle isn’t her uncle. Yet the mother and the uncle look, act and remember as they are supposed to. So what is it? There is something missing. The person gives every outward indication of being his or her old self and plays the part to perfection, but still there is an unaccountable

The Whole Earth Is the Tomb of English People

2012-02-20T23:59:00.007+13:00

'Let us not apologize for being the nation which turned out to be the best at colonization.' Seventeen words near the end of an obscure book by an even more obscure publisher. Yet it’s practically a manifesto, the un-coded response to the decline of Western hegemony by a sector of the public in Britain and in its former colonies. How broad a sector, it’s hard to say, and would be instructive

The Premature Burial

2012-02-14T09:51:00.001+13:00

It is by reading Edgar Allan Poe that I learned to be afraid of fictions. I had been afraid as a child, of course, of monsters in the wardrobe and other things that did not exist, as well as some that did, but not of fiction as fiction, not of make believe. Not of things that I knew not to be true; whose very definition was that they were not true. (Deep down I know there is no monster in

The Death of Cinema Redux: Martin Scorsese's Hugo

2012-02-06T23:59:00.008+13:00

‘Fix it,’ says the shop owner to Hugo, handing him a small mechanical wind-up mouse covered with felt. The boy pulls out the coil, reaches for a small screwdriver and quickly restores the small toy to its original working condition. Then he and the man watch it as it pirouettes on the desktop, occasionally standing on its hind legs as if to sniff the air. You can buy a replica of this toy

Little Angry Synthetic Men Learn About Love

2012-01-30T23:59:00.013+13:00

When Xavi, trying to describe the mental process he undertakes in a World Cup semi-final, says it’s like being on the PlayStation, it is yet another way in which a metaphor becomes reflexive—another instance of a word becoming its meaning. Xavi tells us that being Xavi is like being in a video game. Of Xavi. (Supriya Nair) The ball whistles two metres wide of the post. The shooter looks

Liveblogging the Apocalypse (8): The End of the Internet

2012-01-24T00:04:00.007+13:00

‘Imagine a world without free knowledge,’ intoned Wikipedia lugubriously last week in lieu of its usually prompt and cheerful way of answering our every query. Next to the message, a large black W cast a long shadow to reinforce the intimation that we might witness in our time the twilight of free speech, perhaps of culture itself. The internet is not entirely new to this sort of display.

Flow My Tears, the Minister Said

2012-01-16T23:59:00.003+13:00

They call it the government of the technocrats. They say that they take their orders from the market, or from the European Central Bank. Passera, Severini, Terzi, Gnudi, Giarda, Catania, Catricalà, Clini, Profumo, Ornaghi, Fornero. Who had ever heard of these people? They sound like the lineup of a third-division football team, but they are lawyers, economists and academics. They used to work

Endings

2012-01-10T00:09:00.007+13:00

Like a book, suddenly unwritten. There are blogs that cease to exist just like that, that disappear without so much as a whimper, or that linger but in mutilated form, their archives hacked into digital pieces. I’m fascinated by these endings, whether hesitant and stuttering or lucidly planned and executed. And I want to put forward two ideas: firstly, that to the extent that they even exist

Tītokowaru's Dilemma

2011-12-19T23:59:00.015+13:00

This is a question to you. To whom does England belong? To whom does this upon which you stand belong? (Riwha Tītokowaru) Socrates and Tītokowaru sit together in a forest, tending a campfire with long sticks. Behind them, the profile of Mount Taranaki. It’s an incongruous, anachronistic meeting, drawn in an incongruous, anachronistic mixture of styles. Red-figure Attic vase painting for

You and Mark Aren't Friends

2011-12-12T23:59:00.006+13:00

Timeline is the story of your life. (Mark Zuckerberg) Nine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup… (Georges Perec, 'Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Ninteen Hundred and Seventy-Four') As of last week, New Zealand is again the site of an experiment. I’m not sure why Facebook decided to launch

Memory Trade

2011-12-05T23:59:00.012+13:00

Translout that gaswind into turfish, Teagues, that’s a good bog and you, Thady, poliss it off, there’s a nateswipe, on to your bottom pulper. (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, footnote 2, page 218) Histories record: Prehistories invent. (Darren Tofts, Memory Trade) Towards an archaeology of reading This is the technique that I use to recall the salient passages of a book I am reading

Land Values

2011-11-28T23:59:00.008+13:00

They resemble aerial bombardments, Rongotai or hex grids in a boardgame, Scoltand and Northern Ireland or quarantined areas in an epidemic. Auckland But they’re just different ways of representing the outcome of elections, according to polling station results or electorate winners. The last picture in particular corresponds to a mode of representation that has come to signify

Posterous

2011-11-21T23:59:00.007+13:00

Every three years the institution of the election poster gives us an object lesson in psychogeography, remaking the country into red zones, blue zones, contested zones. A sign erected on a private fence or put up at one’s window makes an uncomplicated political statement: this is a Tory household, a Labour household, a Green household; the sum of many such statements can mark an entire

The Long Goodbye

2011-11-14T23:59:00.006+13:00

I spent the night after Berlusconi won his first election working until the smallest hours to meet a deadline. I remember listening to Radio Popolare in my headphones while Justine slept, and hearing Northern League leader and ally Umberto Bossi trash Berlusconi in an interview at 3 am. Neither of these details is casual, my working through the night or Bossi’s intemperance. I have been