Omit Needless Words

Omit Needless Awards 2008: Festive Opinion Dump

2008-12-24T18:15:20-08:00

When I'm not setting overstuffed boats of prose adrift on these pages, I am occasionally reminded that this thing is actually meant to be a blog. As such, it is honour-bound to pay tribute to a few of the ancient traditions of the medium, established by our once and future kings in a neolithic age of model railway clubs tinkering with supercomputers. I refer of course to the year-end "best of" post. So, I'll bite. I'll give you some lists. My weekly distraction of presenting a radio show devoted to the musical arts has already produced a not-stressed-about-enough plain-old top ten albums of the year list, so I won't retread that here. Let's try a few other things out.

The James McNulty Awards for Excellence in Television

The Wire drawing to a close. Say what you will about the relative strength of the newspaper arc relative to previous seasons, but for a show that promised to be the greatest television show ever made, we were not let down -- it finished as so much more than that. It wasn't about cops. It wasn't in the end even about The City, which I'd thought it was for the first few years. It was about hope, about systems, about order, dignity, dreams and change; it was about humanity, about the sheer brutal fucking hopelessness and futility that comes with trying to live and be part of this world. It was pretty funny too. I shan't spoil for those unfinished, but the final scene between Michael and Dookie may just be the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. For those entirely Wire virginal, perhaps because too many people have told you how excellent it is and that means you'll never watch it, don't be stupid. Get thee to a downloadery now.
The part in the first episode of the new Knight Rider series where the hot young leads strip to their underwear inside KITT, even before the opening credits. After KITT has changed both into and back from a GM pick-up truck. And just after they've been hit by a missile, after escaping from a tuxedo party in "Foreign Consulate, USA". To quote sassy nerd chick back at sassy control bunker full of sassy blinking lights: "Things just got interesting!"
David Simon and Ed Burns get a second nod for what was, in the end, an underappreciated series, Generation Kill. This mini-series managed a tough balancing act, presenting a scathing assessment of the early stages of the Iraq war and its planning, while being fair and loving and fiercely proud of the troops on the ground, be they racist fuckup redneck shits or genuinely good sensitive guys lost in a desert far from moral ground. They are the people that were sent there to die. For long-stretches of episodes, nothing happens except the talking of crap. And then things go crazy. And then more crap is talked. We stay frosty, we wait. I'm naive in the art of warfare, I'll admit, but this felt so much more real, immediate and important than any of the hundreds of preachy message films released on same topic by Hollywood this year.
Lost not just jumping the Dharma-branded shark but sucking it into a space-time vortex and moving it somewhere where we'll never find it. Season four was glorious and silly and not at all concerned any more for the impatient, or those who don't feel like googling theoretical physicists. As it should never have been.
24: "Redemption", in which JACK BAUER saves Africa in two hours with no help from those pesky UN-ocrats who just won't think of the CHILDREN. See particularly JACK BAUER using Crocodile Dundee-style animal-taming hypnosis against a wild-eyed child soldier.
Jimmy Smits on Dexter. The third season of everybody's favourite good-guy serial killer show got mixed reviews -- I loved it, but mostly because I spent the entire season trying to figure out just what the hell was going on with Smits' completely nutso performance. It can be tough to play against everything Michael C. Hall has brought to the title role, but Smits went punch for punch and scalpel blade for scalpel blade.

The Harry Caul Awards for Excellence in Cinema

Slumdog Millionaire. All of it, every single one of Anthony Dod Mantle's beautifully shot frames (even the ones on annoying angles). Danny Boyle has been threatening a masterpiece now for several films and it seems that ditching Alex Garland for somebody who actually knows how to write a third act and end a story as well as it starts has finally allowed him to get there. Ridiculously joyous but never trite, Boyle takes the risk of making one of those wretched outsider films about Bombay in which we become obsessed with colour and sense and never feel humanity or reality. But he doesn't do that. He makes the greatest film he has ever made and he makes me love cinema again, even if just for a moment.
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. I've never been a fan of Heath's, though not for any reasons of hometown cultural cringe, and certainly not because his team beat mine in high school improv championships a decade ago and I hold a grudge, no sir. His performances -- outside of Ten Things I Hate About You -- have seemed leaden, burdened, at distance from their characters. His gay cowboy was one of the most overrated performances of the decade. His Joker, though? A force of nature. A perfect storm. It was not a great film but you did not notice and you will not remember. You will only remember that last shot, that smile swinging in the wind. You can read something into the seductive story of a role consuming its player, but let's not. Let's celebrate it for what it is, and what it would have been had he lived -- one of the great performances of cinema.
Werner Herzog's opening thesis statement for Encounters at the End of the World, his suitably wigged journey to meet the Herzogian scientists and forklift drivers who inhabit the research bases of Antarctica. He explains to his funders that the film will not be about pretty pictures of cute penguins, but rather he will be seeking answers to the questions that plague him:

"Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins? And why is it that human beings saddle a horse, and like the Lone Ranger, put on masks in order to disguise their identity and then feel the urge to chase the bad guy? And why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of wild lice in order to milk them like slaves for droplets of sugar? And why is it that a chimp--clearly a superior creature--does not straddle a goat and ride into the sunset?"

To further illustrate this final question, we are shown a marvellous painting of a chimp straddling a goat, riding into the sunset.
Frank Langella's Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. The film itself is as middlebrow as you'd expect of Ron Howard, and the Frost incompetence narrative is played up no end, but Langella builds his Nixon so perfectly, so meticulously, that those final rounds of the boxing match, the eventual near-confessions, admissions of betrayal and regret, carry just as much weight as they do when you watch them in the original interviews. He holds that famous close-up perfectly.
The twenty minute shot at the center of Steve McQueen's Hunger. McQueen pulls off a remarkable feat, making a film that is otherwise near-silent, drained of dialogue and driven along only by incessant physical pain; by indignity and grunts and moans (often too artily shot for their own good, it must be said, though I allow McQueen some first-time-director let off points for this). And then, just as we're gasping for air, he opens the tanks and floods us, letting it all pour out in a riveting single shot two-hander between a prisoner and his priest which journeys tenderly and unsparingly through the Troubles and all of their contradictions and pain, from tiny human betrayals and folly through to the broadest and purest of battles led astray through idealism. And then, just as suddenly, we're treated to a minutes-long shot of a prison floor being swept of urine, it being pushed back under the cell doors, and we hear barely a word again for the remainder of the film.

The Timothy Treadwell Award for Cinematic Folly

Australia, for showing just how much of a clusterfuck the Australian film industry has become. Here's my review, I don't have the energy to repeat it. To cheer you up and reassure you that things could always be worse, Baz Luhrmann promises that his next film will be The Great Gatsby.

The Townes van Zandt award for delayed discoveries of tortured, tragic genius

I came to the late "seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer" Arthur Russell last year thanks to a strange little EP of covers of his songs by folks such as Jens Lekman and Taken By Trees. His story was entirely unfamiliar, and the allmusic bio seemed a little improbably hyperbolic. And yet, as it is told in Matt Wolf's great doco Wild Combination, and through a series of excellent reissues mostly on the Audika label, I've fallen rather hard for this strange man who died too young, whose story and musical evolution, from sparse country to the 70s New York avant-garde scene with Cage and Glass through the Modern Lovers to disco and the birth of house music, are saying something bigger that I'm yet to entirely comprehend. Plus, those Dinosaur L tracks? You can not argue with those.

The Colossal Squid Award for Most Terrifying Thing in the World

It was a terrifying year in the world, possible apocalypse creeping in from many directions both man-made and not. I was going to go for a top five here, but Radiolab's year-end list brought with it one more than freakish enough to wipe out all of mine. So, for your terror, I give you zombie caterpillars controlled by parasitic wasps. Try to stop thinking about them. Go on, try. They're in your dreams now.

The Fuck You Tree of Smoke for Being So Excellent and Long Award for Books I've Actually Finished this Year

This can't really be a top list, because I haven't finished enough books to make it so. Instead, books I've finished (which implies I quite liked them) separated for your convenience into fiction and non:

Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke
Jesse Ball - Samedi the Deafness
Ahmadou Kourouma - Allah is not Obliged
Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh - Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Edward Tufte - Beautiful Evidence
Philip Gourevitch - A Cold Case
William Langewiesche - The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
Charles Glass - The Northern Front: A Wartime Diary
Henry Mayhew - London Labour and the London Poor

Books in progress that I'm going to list anyway:

Alex Ross - The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris - Standard Operating Procedure

The Hiro Protagonist Award for Most Overrated Book of the Year

Joseph O'Neill - Netherland. The Great Gatsby is reached for as fair comparison by the sleeve critics. Yeah, maybe the Baz Luhrmann version. Perhaps it was unfair to read the two Lethem books before it but this reads like New York as imagined by a leaden-prosed tourist who's been there for a week, two days of which were spent staring at the odd characters milling about in the lobby of the Chelsea, the rest spent attempting to shed excess similes from baggage. I can't understand why the American critics embraced it so -- perhaps the exotic allure of cricket?

The Patrick's Being Indulgent Now Award For Albums He Didn't Put In His Top Ten

These are albums I didn't list in my radio top ten because I didn't play them much, either because I missed them when they first came out (Grouper) or because the kids don't like driving around to 20 minutes of loops and drone (The Fun Years). Or because I forgot. Or because they came out after I made my list. Or because they didn't actually come out this year but I didn't hear them until this year. Or because I want to list them here. Okay?

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Matthew Herbert Big Band - There's Me and There's You
Kieren Hebden and Steve Reid - NYC
Hauschka - Ferndorf
Jacaszek - Treny
Fennesz - The Black Sea
The Fun Years - Baby It's Cold Inside
Deer Tick - War Elephant
Wildbirds & Peacedrums - Heartcore
School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
Jeffrey Lewis - 12 Crass Songs
Billy Harper - Black Saint

So there you go. No more lists until next year, I promise. Well done to all of you, except for you Baz Luhrmann... we need to have a little talk.

Field Notes Two: Canadian Winters, Fragments of Buenos Aires

2008-12-21T22:39:28-08:00

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

-- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

My mother has wrapped her shrubbery carefully in hessian sacks. Snow coats everything. This is home, here at the end of the earth. This is where I slow down. The power is out, I'm writing on my remaining battery with assistance only of the light of a log fire. How very rustic. A sliver of iceberg melts into my single malt, Scottish coastal fire mixing with Canadian coastal ice. I romanticise a little, of course -- the plasma TV was on not half an hour ago, I'm still playing games on my iPhone. But let's just pretend for a moment we're rugged and slightly insane Irish fisherfolk, stubbornly refusing to be defeated by something so paltry as Atlantic Canadian winter. "Is this all you've got?" we'd shout to the wind, scooping up our abundant nets of winter cod with a defiant glee. We'd build our houses on the sides of cliffs, sail into twelve foot waves on our rickety wooden boats, throw down the nets we'd woven by hand with our whalebone needles. We'd laugh at it all. We'd be the masters of the ocean. The whales would be elsewhere, ever the more sensible species, somewhere down in Bermuda awaiting return on the warm currents of spring with a calm and sanity we ourselves would never possess.

Or we could be the masters of the strip mall, the jumbo-sized tin of processed sausage or frozen juice, the great Canadian diet of sugar and preservative. We'd spend our liminal summers watching wrestling on stolen cable, lines run down from the poles by uncles with usefully tall ladders. Salt fish in buckets, salt beef in buckets, salt in buckets. Cod tongues in oil on the stove. Always the smell of drying animal flesh, picked over by flies, stretched out in the sun. Tobacco, rolled into cigarettes by the hundreds, in the hands of everyone, always. Collections of Molson Canadian bottles from the back sheds of drunken neighbours, exchanged for deposit, exchanged for sugar and rented Nintendo. And then later, exchanged for Canadian Club, cigarettes snuck under bridges from older cousins, retreats deep into the woods far from the roving eyes of adult supervision. The rules that governed you at home would not apply here in your other space, with these other people. Your blood people. These ones wouldn't see the awkward little nerd with the bottle-base glasses and shaky hands so much as just a boy from somewhere strange, full of different ideas and different experience. A wholly exotic little Scottish other. Your time here would be something else. Eventually, we would have to go home. But not yet, not yet.

Now I watch the ocean do its thing, dare the water to tell me something I don't know; to speak something new with those waves that I haven't learned in all these years of coming here. Daring the Atlantic to tell you anything is almost always folly, but occasionally she'll give something up if you phrase your question just right. Get it wrong, she'll let you know soon enough.

I pretend not to see ghosts. They're the same ghosts I pretended not to see wandering the streets of Toronto, hiding from the weather in bars named after Neutral Milk Hotel songs, Hank Williams and Porter Wagoner wailing on the stereo. I find they're with me most places, but we've learned to get along. We have a deal. I get to live my life, they get to hover somewhere just in the corner of my sight. It was a painful negotiation. My parents know this, they tread around me carefully and lovingly, doing what they can, filling the house with Christmas trinkets for reasons my twentysomething self never really understood but now wants to embrace them for and say thank you, thank you, thank you. The ghosts will follow me for the rest of this trip, all these towns we've visited before. Dreams traced in the fog of windscreens, evaporating quickly with the fans turned to three. We stayed in the place, my ghost and I, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. But today he is just a child in Wales, plunging his hands into the snow, bringing out whatever he can find.

* * *

The blur of Germany gave way to the streets of Buenos Aires. The Americas are my home now for the next two months.

A travel writer, a bad one, would lead off a description of Argentina as he would of India, or Australia, or anywhere. Something about a teeming mass of contradictions. It probably says something like that in the introduction to the Lonely Planet. It is not, to be fair, a country that makes much sense. It confuses me. Buenos Aires is the shell of a city built to be one of the greatest in the world, but the vast expanse of Nueve de Julio seems built mainly to ferry lost potential from one end of town to the other, 18 million people on either side trying to figure out exactly what the city is for.

Much has been written about Argentina's economic collapse. It is not the place of a drifter in town for ten days to attempt to explain it here. For an interesting primer, you might like to listen to an interview I did a couple of years back with Avi Lewis about The Take, the documentary he made here with Naomi Klein about worker-reclaimed factories and life rebuilt in the shell left behind by an economy that drove over the border to Uruguay in the back of trucks. Or you might not. The implosion of the peso was just the latest in a long line of misfortune and misadventure to befall the Argentine Republic. Draw threads of a history in words like junta, Malvinas, Peron, Dirty War, the Colonels, coup after coup, a country lurching always in different directions in search of an identity, a basis in faith or in power. But I don't know enough about all of that, not really. I won't pretend to. Maybe you should look to the evolution of the paintings of Berni, or read up on the villas miseria that skirt the fringes of the city's ever-so-European veil. The films of Adrián Caetano, give those a shot as well. Or just do as the locals do and turn to the idea of Carlos Gardel, paint him on your walls and put your faith in a lost tango.

What I do see in the shadow of the collapse -- Carlos Menem still in the news, the junta also -- is maybe a story for the rest of the world on the brink of one. A middle-class country whose flooring and foundations were, not without warning, removed. Dreams of prosperity, inflated by tricks of banking and the market, shown to be little more than air. Though I can't say I didn't go looking for that, that I'm not forcing a narrative on a city I don't know.

We start in La Boca, beneath the stadium. The area is protected by a perimeter of tourist-driven streets, fat North Americans with SLRs slung over shoulders, asking for them to be stolen, eating overpriced facsimiles of parilla-cooked beef and watching tango displays that even I, hardly a trained connoisseur of duende, know to be utter rubbish. But push beyond these, and so many microwave-reheated empanadas, and another town reveals itself. Humidity reconstitutes the general universal stench of a port, salt-water rolled in with ship oil and spoiling stock in long-locked containers, perhaps sealed before 2002, never to be reclaimed. The guidebook told us not to go here, for we'd likely be killed, but since when does one read the manual beforehand?

The warehouses and the factories now are -- at least officially -- empty. Dead spaces for dead, abandoned industries. Like the crumbling mansions just up the road in San Telmo, they've been shuttered and left to be reclaimed in a more prosperous future, always just around the corner. But unofficially, this area overflows with life. Poke your eyes through the door of any one of these vast buildings, you'll see a community, semi-shanty to be sure, but a real town nonetheless. On the streets, fat dogs spread themselves on concrete in futile attempt to find cool, cartoneros stack their hauls on the corners. Teenagers, I suppose these are the criminals and corner boys the guidebook author warned me of, drink from their Quilmes longnecks and throw a half-interested stare our way, something of a "keep on drifting, amigo, you can be here, you can stick your nose in for a second, but don't linger too long". On one corner, a grand old colonial bank building is hollowed out, repurposed as something that seems to be a community market space. I have fantasies for a moment of America five years from now, Chicago and Manhattan corner-banks retooled for same purpose. Presidents on radio, offering new deals and new hope, getting caught up in labour disputes in meantime.

But look, this isn't the Buenos Aires I'm in, it's just the one I'm looking at, the one that intrigues me. I'm staying in another part of town, in Once, just north of the gorgeously named Plaza de Miserere. This was another area I was warned not to venture into, not for tourists, locals only, full of thieves and villainy, the lady in the hostel said. But I'm here staying with two people deeply in love, in an apartment building part-Kafka, part-Jodorowsky. They've put up sheets for me, built a quiet room in the corner of their studio. That strange familiar smell of turpentine and animal that is the trademark of every tiny apartment of an artist and his cat. They show me the other side, the beautiful people, their bars and their parties. We go to the launch of a model-turned-illustrator, somebody else is launching wallpaper, I kiss many people on the cheek but have no language beyond a ¿Cómo estás? to offer them. They do their best with offering their English to me, we talk about artificial intelligence and the weather, skirting the safe topics on the language barrier. It's a good town, this well-heeled bohemian one. I like these people. I like their brand of late-night fun, sponsored as it is by terrible pre-mixed alcohols. I'm introduced to a celebrity TV chef, my friends are big fans and promises are made for the exchange of recipes. Her friend remembers me as the guy dancing like a crazy man the night before, very drunkenly, at an odd-smelling nightclub that was apparently, on all other nights of the week, intended for stripping, not hipster CD launches.

Here I feel comfortable, at peace. We sit for hours on grass and we talk. We journey to the nearby countryside. We crash country club art launches and drink champagne. We spend afternoons swimming and eating asado with family. My ghosts are not here. In a shabby old theatre we watch Juana Molina create beautiful mayhem with her loop pedals. A strange, peculiarly Argentinian sort of star, a wacky sketch-comic turned indie icon. Watching her live, slowly building fragments of discord into the controlled structure of a song, it reminds me of that strange game about a time travelling robot, in which your objective is not to get to the end of the level, at least not initially, but to make seemingly nonsensical moves that will allow future incarnations of yourself to get there safely. Too often, I'm reminded of time travelling robots.

Most cities you can get to know at least a little simply through the extended application of sneaker-sole to sidewalk, drifts and diversions through cultural pockets and stories written only in the brickwork. But, no matter how much I walk the streets of Buenos Aires, something at the centre eludes me. I get the feeling that even years of attempted flaneurie in this town would turn up little of meaning to the non-porteño. But such mystery is a little seductive. I think she got her claws in, more than a little, but though I feel the sharpness and just a small trickle of blood, I'm wary of what she's offering.

We drive to the airport, past roadblocks and buses of football fans guarded by phalanxes of motorcycle police caressing their shotguns. Not certain this was ever South America I was in, direct flight now back to the homeland and the winter cold. Home for Christmas, to the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves.

Field Notes One: Perth to Buenos Aires, the continents between

2008-12-06T05:29:25-08:00

Drain half bottle of scotch with friend returning from Mumbai gunfire. Leave Australia in midst of night. Arrive Frankfurt, sleeper train, Leipzig, leg of pig, bratwurst, beer, so much beer, autobahns, angry friends, high speed, blurring vision, snow-filled country roads and villages that should exist only in absurd postcards and quaint Disney musicals. Perfect children skip across the street with sleds. I try not to kill them with my car slipping down the ice. Pump brakes. Köln. Dinner with my father. Wolf Parade in basement club. Guns and Roses covers. No sleep. Autobahn again, blurring worse. I travel in the slipstream of trucks, hoping nobody will notice me in my American rental beast, surely the last Dodge on European roads. We could not find Chinese Democracy on sale in petrol stations so instead we listen to bad German radio and occasionally tinny laptop speakers until the battery gives in. I am accused of quoting from Adbusters. This makes me sad. Middle of the night. Obstinate GPS. In 900 metres, keep left. Recalculating. 86'ing, sadly. Frankfurt. Blink. No sleep. Buenos Aires. Excellent friends at airport, a smile that will keep me going for hours, a missed smile these past several months. A child juggles at traffic lights, a more impressive request for pesos than the old-fashioned window wash. Shower. Steak. My friend's band is playing, Diego says. They're on early. 2am. Okay sure. Heineken in Palermo bars, still unsure when the last solid sleep was. The band are not great; apparently the singer used to model for his paintings. Hostel rooms, quietly stumbling onto top bunk, the Chilean below felling forests all night long. 4 hours sleep. No coffee in this place. Stumble into San Telmo, gather up some pesos, become convinced the cash machine has only offered to loan me the money and is asking when I will pay it back. Wish I had learned a little more Spanish. No gracias! Walking, much walking, drinking mate in parks and then too much beer again in grungy cafes not so very different to ones from home, find a Melbourne friend's short story on display in the lobby of the national library, a science-fiction building apparently landed like brutalist spaceship in garden surrounds, wander drunkenly through shopping malls and forget about eating, pass out in a blur somewhere before midnight, skipping plans for dinner. The Chilean's at it again. I wake up and pick flecks of mate from my teeth.

The backpacking life is not for me, never particularly was -- surrounded by Australians and Germans asking where you've been, where you're going next. Skipping along the top of the world, a smooth rock on a flat pond, never sinking down with any satisfaction. I'm going where my friends are, where my family is, recharging, reshaping and shifting perspective. Thinking about not going to Brazil, where there will be a week more of this backpackerly bullshit, but after these 10 days with excellent friends in Argentina, fleeing back to Canadian family perhaps earlier than intended. My carbon footprint is monstrous, perhaps to be unearthed by palaeontologists exploring far-flung parts of Patagonia, postulated to be a travelling beast the likes of which the planet has not seen for millennia, and should not see for millennia more. Finding myself thinking about people I had not planned to be thinking about, cursing myself for that, for being unable to leave with the blank slate intended. Plates shifting beneath feet, as they always are, but a strong feeling that, upon return, configurations of friendships and life will be very different -- the past no longer a foreign country, but the past as Gondwanaland. The pieces the same, but you wouldn't recognise it without expert training. 2008 was snuck away from before it was fully done with -- actually, no, not snuck away from at all. I thumbed my nose and ran, hopped on a jet and brought myself here. 2009 will not begin until I return. This is the dead space of travel, a gap year for the soul.

More notes to follow. Vaya con dios.

As you can see, having descended the hill, I still look like me, and forever will

2008-11-22T19:16:55-08:00

A dark stage. Silence. You've been here before. You've heard the promises.

Your narrator shuffles once more onto the stage, a little older, a little more broken, just as tall but somewhat surprisingly a little skinnier. A single spotlight picks him out against the fading curtains. There are more scars on his body than last time you saw him, but those aren't the reason he's been away. He's wearing jeans that are not ripped, for he is now more mature, although he is still wearing a Daniel Johnston t-shirt, so he might just as well be fifteen. The glasses are more expensive and oddly angled.

PATRICK

Umm... hi. (Taps Microphone). Yeah, so anyway. Thanks for coming.

Frankly I'm quite surprised to see anybody here at all. We kinda closed things up without telling you about it. Sort of like when that little restaurant, the only decent one in your neighbourhood, puts up the signs saying they've closed for a few weeks for renovations. Something in you knows what that really means, right? Those signs always make you sad. Me? I'm still mourning the loss of walking-distance cajun.

I'm not going to go into the boring detail of the reasons why I haven't been writing for the last year. Those who need to know do know. Those who don't most certainly don't need to. It is not a year I would choose to repeat, let's just leave it at that and I'll tell you some time over a beer or ten.

But I think I've managed to piece my brain back together. I've been stripping back my various online presences, redefining descriptions of self to something much simpler and much more achievable. At the point where my day-job business is more successful and has higher profile than probably ever before, I've taken down its website and replaced it with a one-pager. Likewise with my professional site, which cribs the same design and pretty much just points to other things I'm doing.

Cutting down on noise. Cutting down on distraction.

What I'm attempting to do, what this place has always been for, is for me to share my writing, my interests, and some of the stranger stories and characters I've encountered in my travels of being whatever the fuck I am. Which, I've decided, is mostly a writer, partly a broadcaster, something of a community organiser. I've been described as many other things -- here's one website calling me an arts guru and jack of all trades. Not sure I'm those things, but I figured I best set to working it out.

Look, I hate these apologetic returns as much as the next person. So I'm going to shut up now and get on with it. Any questions?

A man wearing a fedora, a card with PRESS written in 38 point Arial protruding from its brim, raises his hand. He is in fact the only person in the audience. I suppose that he is you.

PATRICK

Yes, you there?

NEWSMAN

Patrick, what sort of work can we expect from this new reincarnation of your blog? And is this just a hollow promise?

PATRICK

Well I'll answer that question in two parts. Firstly, yes it probably is just a hollow promise. For starters I'm off to Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the USA for a few months in a couple weeks. But there are going to be things to write about there, from dormant volcanoes to the hunt for Sarah Palin, so I don't think that's going to get in the way. Who knows? It's a blog, there aren't any rules. You might even get some of my fiction, people seem to like that. And the reasons I've left this blog alone for the last couple of years... well they're not so current any more.

NEWSMAN

But can you point to specific content you will be posting?

PATRICK

Oh you're a tough one. Well, I thought I'd kick things off with a few of the more interesting interviews I've done recently. Look in the coming week or two for interviews with my favourite filmmaker of the outsider nutso underground, Craig Baldwin, about his wonderfully bizarre screed against L. Ron Hubbard, Mock Up On Mu, and also a great chat I had with Jeff Krulik, the guy who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot a couple of decades back. There are some other things to dust off in the archives as well. I think tomorrow I'll post an interview with Matthew Herbert about his mad new big band album.

We'll see. It'll be fun. Do come back, won't you?

Hush now, won't be long

2008-03-23T18:23:55-07:00

It's been a fair while since I've posted anything serious on here. There are reasons for that, but it'll be changing soon, promise guv.

However, it just occurred to me that I never actually post much on here about what I have been doing. It's not like I haven't been keeping the usual level of ridiculous busy (and coming down from mad round-world travel), I just forget to mention it in anything other than Facebook status updates (when those aren't about building sentient robots).

So, here's a couple little websites I've launched this week that relate to larger stories.

Firstly, Cottonmouth. If you've been along to any of the Cottonmouth nights so far, hopefully you're as excited as I am about this one -- I'm on an excellent committee that grew from the WA contingent of the National Young Writers Festival last year. We've packed out the ace little bar we've been having it in, and (surprising to someone who has always considered watching spoken word to be something akin to gargling hydrochloric acid) we've had some pretty damn good readers. Some not so good as well, but we're working on that as we figure out exactly what the night is, and what it can be (and as I threaten people with Gantt charts). Anyway, it excites me. Check the website - there's audio and video (including some of me. ergh.). If nothing else, it forced me to write fiction, which was nice.

Secondly, and slightly less seriously, Novel Badges. Not going to say too much about this one, other than the fact that it grew out of some (possibly drunken) conversations three or four years ago, and we've finally done something about it. Buy some badges!

Plus of course there's still all the radio stuff -- my playlists, shows and interviews should all show up automatically in the sidebar over there, and thanks to my tragic geekery, you can restream any of it from the RTR website (in fact, you can restream any show from the last six months or so). I'm currently presenting Out To Lunch on said station every Monday from 12-3 (Perth time). Not quite so politic as previous involvement, but tune-spinning is always a fun break from the harsh realities of life outside the studio.

The next year promises much in the way of experiment with radio and podcast, particularly some fun ideas in relation to Cottonmouth. My little recording studio is slowly taking shape. Stay tuned/subscribed in your favourite reader.

Workwise, there's been the Laneway Festival site, the FTI redevelopment, and a bunch of others. Much madness abounding in future months on that front, including a website for (sort of) my old high school.

So there, that's a few things, and a reassurance that this blog ain't dead. Now leave me alone, I'm trying to write. Thank you for listening.

This story's right, this story's true

2008-02-13T05:22:09-08:00

or: What Are Words Worth?

I arrived in Australia in the early nineties as a sprightly 13 year-old. What that kid knew of this country's history, just off the boat from the far reaches of Scotland, was something vague about boomerangs and convicts. I was excited about the fact that Santa Claus came in summer, and it seemed that he rode a surfboard.

It didn't take much time spent in the streets of Darwin to understand, even as a 13 year-old, that something in this society was fundamentally, sickeningly broken. In one of my first Australian history lessons, before I'd even learned about the Eureka Stockade, the teacher played a song to the class that was so unexpected that it changed the geography of the land beneath me - Archie Roach's They Took The Children Away. I knew then that what lay underneath, what Roach spoke in that song, which was then hardly being spoken at all, was the kind of past darkness that could corrupt and break the strongest of people. I knew it would need to be dealt with. I knew that would take bravery.

Well, I can say I knew those things now, but perhaps as a 13 year old, I just knew for the first time what it felt like to have a country and a government break your heart.

I swore my oath of Australian citizenship on Australia Day 2001, on the Centenary of Federation. Stephen Smith -- then an obscure backroom ALP machineman, years later an unexpected Foreign Minister -- shook my hand and gave me my certificate. In the years between, I watched Keating's Redfern speech, young still, but still captive to great rhetoric. Mabo changed the game, and there was a moment of hope. And then came Howard. And then came Hanson.

But though Howard's first five years before my citizenship were already clearly defined by a fervently ideological and partisan shift in governance in the country, it was not until the election of the following year that things became truly clear. Then came the moral darkness, signposted by Pacific solutions, mandatory detention and willing coalitions. My newly-minted passport weighed heavily in my hand, policy and public sentiment slowly killing my deep love for adopted homeland by a thousand tiny cuts.

In those years -- years of wasted opportunity defined largely by John Howard's strangely singular stubbornness -- the gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia widened. Not just gaps of economy or key performance indicators, but gaps of compassion, gaps of understanding, and gaps of opportunity. Things got worse. Obscenely, shamefully worse. Poll-driven politicians listened to the hip pockets of the suburbs, whose concerns lay far away from here. We, as a country, forgot something -- politics, and leadership, is not purely defined as sound economic management. Politics is morality. Leadership is bravery. Both can be honesty.

Last November, the media attempted to spin Kevin Rudd's leadership style as "Howard-lite". For anybody who had been keeping an eye on Rudd for a while, who had read his (well calculated) articles in The Monthly the year before, they would have known (or hoped) something different. They would have seen an idea of politics founded first, and foremost, in morality. Rudd is a man of deep religious faith, but in worshipping the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer's idea of the role of religion in social justice, it is clear that Rudd is a man who begins his governance from the idea of that which is morally just. And that, if nothing else, is a revolution.

The calculated blandness of the election campaign, we hoped, was a smooth strategy designed to defuse the bully-boy tactics of the complacent coalition and their aging leader. It worked, beautifully. This is how we felt on that day in November when our people kicked out a government who, in pursuing a sound financial record at the expense of all else, had let so many sores fester, so many wrongs linger, and, in the end, hadn't even kept a handle on the economy:

Biased ALP kids sure. Inner city suburban well to do's, sure (at least, on the surface of things). But also smart, intelligent people who saw for a moment real possibility, in a country that was voting beyond its hip pocket, that was no longer willing to be lied to. And a country that may be willing to face its past, to search its soul, and to begin to develop a just foundation for the future.

Before this morning, such ideas were mostly hope and highbrow posture. There was every possibility Rudd in Government would be the same as Rudd in Campaign, demure and unchallenging, and a little depressing. But, as we gathered on the grass on the increasingly shabby Perth foreshore (soon to see its own new hope after years of neglect) early this morning, short on caffeine and consequently short on enthusiasm, we felt something unexpected.

The pre-released wording of Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations had hardly inspired tears, being mostly a tick-the-boxes exercise in saying what needed to be said and no more or less, but to hear it spoken -- to hear the words sorry, sorry, SORRY -- had an impact I could not have imagined. And then Rudd continued to speak. And he laid out a moral basis for his position. He engaged with arguments and counter-arguments. He touched on the culture wars and black armbands. He proposed tangible action and serious, ambitious targets. He challenged Australia and Australians to face their own moral responsibility. He challenged a nation to look at its soul. Never were the words "me too-ism" farther from a pundits mouth. And far, far away, somewhere unknown, Howard quietly fumed in irrelevance, the only living former Prime Minister not in attendance.

Around me, people were crying. It felt like a country was silent, in reflection. We were witnessing what leadership could be. Symbolic gesture though it may be, we were at a point of turning in our country's story. We could, for once, feel proud.

The less said about Opposition leader Brendan Nelson's speech, the better. Suffice to say that it was a particularly fascinating shambles, the result of a backroom in chaos and a man with no leadership skills,unable to stand up to irrelevant former powerbrokers who should be going gently with their icon into that good night. The country turned their back on him. In Perth, they turned him off. Despite my deep belief in the importance of full and open debate, I can't say I wasn't glad (and perhaps the slow clap should be introduced as a regular feature of the new Parliament).

We left, speechless but invigorated. We knew that nothing was fixed, but that something was beginning to heal.

CODA

This evening's commercial news attempted to spin the backs turned against Nelson as being in reaction to his statement that there should be "no compensation". Channel Seven edited the story to make it seem as though the selfish aboriginals insisted he be turned off as soon as he refused compo. It was sickening spin, to be sure, but anybody that actually paid any attention to Nelson's speech would know the slow claps and back-turns were for reasons entirely unrelated to compensation. They were for a party and a leader who could not understand. Who refused to be bold enough to accept responsibility. Who spoke an apology that sounded like an excuse. Who mumbled vaguaries about fighting in wars.

According to Channel Seven polls ("The Pulse of Perth" says the promo), 90% of viewers were against the apology. As much as a phone-in commercial news poll is worth, the sentiment on talkback in our state was similar, 6PR callers saying indigenous Australians should "apologise for crime".

Nothing is fixed. But we must now begin to heal.

Sorry.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

2007-11-26T06:46:46-08:00

Final proof that eco-consciousness is penetrating into all corners of governance. This generally excellent Scientific American article (subscription only, sadly) on the rather misguided attempts by the military-industrial complex and the US government to replace its aging nuclear warheads with a more modern, "reliable" (but untested) arsenal, doing a little end-run around non-proliferation, contains a little nugget that made me spit my coffee across the table this morning.

The RRW1 [reliable replacement warhead] also would eliminate the need for some of the toxic substances often used in weapons, such as beryllium, a brittle, carcinogenic metal that reflects the neutrons released in a nuclear explosion and redirects them back to start a thermonuclear chain reaction. "Because of the release of the weight requirement, we are able to use materials that are heavier but more environmentally benign," says Livermore [a spokesman for the laboratory designing the nukes]... You replace [beryllium] with something that quite honestly you could eat and be healthy....

Gosh, that makes me glad. Do you think that last bit holds true after it's spent that long next to plutonium and uranium? I wonder if I'll have to unlearn my most reliable childhood rule: "never eat yellowcake".

The real question is, are they going to carbon offset the 100 kiloton blast?

(Related opinion piece on the free side of the paywall here).

On exploding cars and ginger beer: This Is Not Art 2007

2007-10-06T03:00:12-07:00

Train rides home from TINA — I’ve had a few of these, over the years. I find myself using the long, slow decompression—the Hawkesbury expanses and the endless parade of central coast towns— to sort and filter the strange, singular experience. To put me back in balance as I’ve been spun in a thousand directions, seen a thousand different possibilities, felt the rare thrill of being in the company of decent people trying shit that sometimes comes off, sometimes doesn’t. Multiple, crazy random types of shit you’d never have thought of. It throws your life that little bit off the rails. And so, back to the train thing. See?

Newcastle on a long weekend in late September is an unlikely place to find the vibrant, throbbing heart of Australia’s creative culture, as ginger beer is an unlikely fuel. While convinced hallucinogens would save the world sometime in the midst of a mushroom frenzy in the mid 1980s, raveolosopher Hakim Bey wrote of the idea of the temporary autonomous zone, a space created for just a moment outside of the boundaries of society, outside of the normal rules of existence for its participants. In this space, strange and magical events might transpire — the boundless potential, freed from restriction of society’s norms, would translate into social and political possibility and change. And, sex. Lots and lots of sex.

For this one weekend, This Is Not Art throws up the perfect example of a TAZ, and the feeling is tangible. Walk more than a block from the festival’s hub on Auckland Street, and you’re in the real Newcastle — vacant shopfronts, crumbling buildings, bogans shouting well-considered insults from cars with a bass rumble so low you could be forgiven for thinking they were part of one of the Electrofringe gigs. This is a town still basking in the glow of the Pasha Bulker, a shipwreck a source of local pride and thrill. The locals don’t really know what to do with us strange blow-ins, with our asymmetrical haircuts and often questionable hygiene, and we don’t know what to do with them, so an uneasy dance down the ruins of Hunter St ensues, glowers at five paces all the way.

But across Darby Street and within collapsing range of the festival, it’s as though an invisible curtain has been draped. Past stalls manned by cute young Melbourne things selling poetry zines, past Tomas Ford beating a pinata of bad writing hung from a tree, past the quote generator girl who will only speak to you in quotes from television and film (fully referenced, of course), we’re not in Newcastle anymore. We’ve passed not just through Newcastle’s looking glass, but through the country’s (and Tomas may beat this piece hard for mixing my fantasy references, if he pleases).

Against this backdrop of madness and lesbian ferals holding parties in abandoned hotels, you’d be forgiven for thinking TINA was the kind of horrid neo-hippy festival that took over country towns around the country through the seventies and into the nineties. Though many of those people do show up, something entirely different is going on; the people gathered here are a self-selecting crowd of some of the most creative and inspiring folks in the country, from amazing record labels such as Spunk and Popfrenzy, publishers and authors of books that have sold in the millions, innovators of the electronic music scene running workshops on circuit bending, to various workshops on open source and its place in community activism. This ain’t no Earthdance.

The National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe, Sound Summit and whatever other festivals decide to latch on create a different kind of space. Here, the thriller writers sit and drink beer with the laptop punks, Brisbane zinesters sit on panels with representatives of AC Nielsen discussing the state of the publishing industry from a level footing. Shaun Tan, magical illustrator of heartbreak, depression and wonder, shares a panel with Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, and Henry Reynolds while upstairs, nervous young poets share genuinely wonderful non-performance pieces with an attentive crowd and Community Cultural Development workers share tales from the frontlines of war and disaster and explain how they translate into work with youth on Halifax streets.

There is a common thread that unites the participants of the festival — they are creative people, who believe, generally very passionately, in the idea of DIY, that the practise of any art, be it a solo endeavour or a community cultural development project, is a political act and occurs within the context of a broader community. We’re all working towards the same thing, from a thousand different angles.

There are, for the most part, no wankers here. They don’t come. There are bad artists, yes, and idealistic young socialists. But the hipsters; well, for some reason they seem to stay home. I think they know they wouldn’t be tolerated—the only thing TINA seems to demand of you is that you participate, that you celebrate. That, in whatever it is that you do, you accept that to change the world or to change your mind, you’re going to have to do things yourself.

My first panel of the week was on exactly this topic, how to make a life from “keeping it real" (if you will), living a DIY ethos — a roundtable chaired by Adelaide zine-guru Ianto Ware, with myself, a radical craft activist from Christchurch, the folks from Sticky in Melbourne, Tom Civil (a street artist I actually have time for), and partner in Breakdown Press with Lou Smith.

The room was packed and between the panellists, many fundamentally different, mature and practised takes on the concept were thrown around. The audience, too, joined in — a tradition from the early TINA days of roundtables in pubs over beer, is that everybody has an equal position in a debate, that no one person is more authoritative than any other, just because their bank balance or CV says so. None of this is directed — there is no wan statement of equality that needs to be pinned to a wall (and proofread by the texta-wielding poster grammar checker), there are no directive that need to be laid down. It’s just that, almost without fail, roundtable panellists will fold up the table they’ve been provided, and move the chairs into a circle, and everybody will shuffle up a little bit closer.

Though discussions will, as they do at any festival, degenerate into whinges about the decline in arts funding, there are at least constructive contributions to this debate. One of the most constructive is festival founder Marcus Westbury’s new ABC series Not Quite Art, which manages to sneak a sound and well considered political message about the difference between nurturing the creation of art and the exhibition of it, about the intangible places culture really comes from that don’t tend to cost a lot of money. It’s on sometime in October. It’s really quite good. Even a little bit angry.

There were other panels, equally interesting, equally strange. There were nights spent listening to laptop drone, talking at length about stuff that doesn’t matter, with an overwhelming feeling that it really mattered to do so. There were strange interventions by performance artists during panels. There was public urination, and drinking of same from a cup. There were strips. There was a burning car and a bad indie dance party. There was champagne sweet-talked from barmen at Irish pubs when no other alcohol was forthcoming from the town. There were mercifully few veejays and proponents of rave culture, which made things a litle more bearable than previous years.

Over the course of the weekend, in this strange temporary autonomous space, I was continually struck by how my cynicism was being beaten down in the face of genuine talent, or at least genuine intellect. A poet or a comedian or a guy who makes music from Darth Vader masks and Barbie dolls would take the stage, and I’d be ready to hate. And yet within minutes I’d be enraptured, or laughing, or clapping wildly. These same people I could see on any other night of the year, in any other place, and mutter dismissive sarcasm under my breath, but here, in this space, I couldn’t get enough. It’s the energy of seeing people having fun. Or maybe it’s because I’d been drinking beer instead of water since sometime before lunch. The world is full of wonder until you run out of beer.

It’s tough to put a finger on the precise import of TINA in Australia’s cultural and political landscape — it’s just not that kind of festival. You can’t quantify what it does to you. But, as everybody packs and trundles with their packs towards the train, not quite prepared to burst the bubble and face big city streets once more, something has shifted. Each and every one of us knows that literary and artistic culture is not moribund in this country, and it is not dominated, as is lazily and loudly claimed so often, by elites who float on pretentious clouds above us. It is not owned by the multinationals who bought our publishing houses. It’s right here. It’s with us. It’s in the streets of every town and every city, and we’re taking it back there, renewed once again. Now, have you got anything to drink?

Where's a boy supposed to get a drink at this time of night?

2007-10-04T07:58:17-07:00

Remember how, when the liquor license reforms went through in WA earlier in the year, we were supposed to suddenly be drowning in Melbourne-style alley bars, freed once and for all from the grips of the hoteliers? Have you noticed any small bars showing up yet?

Let's take a little trip to parliament, and pull out this week's Hansard to see where we're at...

2674. Mr M.J. Birney to the Minister representing the Minister for Racing and Gaming

(1) Can the Minister advise the number of liquor licensing applications under the new small bar laws that have been rejected (either formally or informally) by the Department since the passing of those small bar license laws?

(2) Can the Minister advise the reasons for those rejections?

(3) Can the Minister advise how many new liquor licenses have been granted (or old ones amended) under the new small bar laws since they were passed through the Parliament?

(4) Is the department carrying out the will of the Parliament and the Government with respect to the small bar laws?

Mr E.S. RIPPER replied:

(1) Nil

(2) Not applicable

(3) Small bar licences granted - two.

(4) Yes

Two. What Birney didn't ask (and as such, Ripper didn't answer, as a good politician only answers what he's asked) is how many applications there have been for said licenses.

Off the record, informal conversations with those who have applied for the licenses suggest that the issue is not necessarily with the government dithering but with certain nameless councils not quite willing to get with a more modern, radical program. Certain nameless councils that have been far too cosy with entrenched business in their areas, at the expense of the creation and nurturing of culture. Certain nameless councils for which a parade of candidates flood my mailbox with campaign propaganda for a postal election, none of whom articulate policy on anything.

Welcome to our Creative Capital, where all you need to kickstart the city at a time of absurd prosperity is, well, good intentions and zero followthrough.

Continuing Concrete Dialogues

2007-09-08T00:59:33-07:00

It's always strange when something you worked on a couple of years back suddenly starts generating interest, without any particular reason. I've been asked to speak at a couple of different seminars this month on the Concrete Dialogues writing project, a rather mammoth undertaking which has been online now for a couple of years. I can't explain why it's being noticed suddenly, but it certainly makes me happy. There's even talk of developing the concept in other areas.

To celebrate, before I speak about it tomorrow at the Still/Open Online Publishing Forum along with many infinitely more interesting international guests (at the Bakery, info here), I've gone in and tidied and fixed up a few things. I've also removed the ridiculous age restriction that was imposed on us by funding bodies, so anybody can now contribute.

It's still too heavily javascript-dependent, but all good mashups seem to be, and it feels like something I wrote two years ago, which it is, but I'd actually forgotten how much fun it is. And to make it more fun, I've just wasted the afternoon integrating with Google Earth. Just load this file into Google Earth and, in the words of Jobs, "boom". Wicked cool - and freaky as hell when you turn on flight simulator mode.

Each week we choose a theme

2007-08-12T17:50:11-07:00

When trying to figure out what one can do with the medium of radio beyond delivering generic dreck for the fictional "average" listener, it's impossible to go past the extraordinary decade-plus output of This American Life. I've never actually blogged about the show, because no analysis or interpretation I could apply might actually reflect the simple beauty and transcendent quality of its storytelling -- I could try and explain how it effortlessly merges the political and the personal, uses the intimate space of radio in a way for which it was seemingly invented, while returning to a storytelling tradition long lost in other more popular mass media. I could talk about how stories of alcoholic mothers and bad memories of summer camp intermingle with tales from Guantanamo Bay and Baghdad, but still, it wouldn't be worth it. It wouldn't explain things any better than Ira Glass's intro, every week: "each week we choose a theme, and bring you stories about that theme."

This week's episode does exactly what the best episodes do - it slips in with an innocuous theme, competitiveness and failure in the art world, only to have you, somewhere between stories of balloon-animal maestros, New York locksmiths, Philip K. Dick and terrible music-based scams of the 1960s, wrenched apart by a simple, common thread: in the creative world, and in every world we live in, people have particular skills and particular talents, yet those are so very rarely the ones we wished we had. Though our balloon animals are incredible creations, we never really saw ourselves as a maker of those. We really play guitar. This is just, you know, for now.

Until we've got the time to give it a serious crack.

Listen through to the last story of a locksmith, a Hawaiian guitar player and a saxophonist, who can't play a lick, on a way to a wedding, down under Manhattan bridge. Try slipping something that simple past a producer round these parts.

One day I'll figure out how to use radio like these guys do. Meantime, here's a new website I made. It's pretty nice.

Technorati Tags: radio

Fuck the Average Reader

2007-08-07T18:25:04-07:00

I've been writing a rather long piece, ostensibly about television, also possibly about skewering the snobbishness of an older generation of novelists, but mostly about The Wire being the greatest thing I've ever seen or read. This quote, from Nick Hornby's interview with its creator in the new Believer, couldn't wait for me to actually finish writing. Take the mic, David Simon:

"My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Beginning with Homicide, the book, I decided to write for the people living the event, the people in that very world. I would reserve some of the exposition, assuming the reader/viewer knew more than he did, or could, with a sensible amount of effort, hang around long enough to figure it out. I also realized--and this was more important to me--that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect. "

Drowning in Green - Ecoconsumerism revisited

2007-08-04T23:45:47-07:00

Sometime it is just not possible to find an environmentally friendly version of the product you want to buy. But now you can ease your conscience by using one of a range of 'green' credit cards to make your purchase.
-- Hey green spender! Spend (and borrow) a little money with these -- The Observer, August 5

I wrote a couple of months back on the slowly burgeoning backlash against eco-consumerism. That was before the great hulking beast of Live Earth spluttered across the planet, pop-stars attempting to make a difference as only they knew how, by asking you to spend money, drink beer and watch Bon Jovi.

Since then, the eco-consumerism juggernaut (biodiesel fuelled) has been gathering pace, creating one of the greatest marketing opportunities of the decade. That quote above comes from a new column launched in the Observer this week devoted to "eco-finance" issues. There are many important issues within this bailiwick, to be sure, and sensible, ethical investment is one of the few ways I believe an individual can have a serious impact on the carbon emissions of the multinationals. So bravo for the column.

However, this (generally very intelligent) paper has fallen for the hype -- "if it is just not possible to find an environmentally friendly version of the product you want to buy", heaven forbid that you wouldn't buy it. Buy it with a credit card that not only gives you great low rates (of course with a slight "conscience" premium) but contributes a token amount to an environmental cause!

The ever-readable, ever-reliable and ever-angry George Monbiot published a column last week in the Observer's weekday sister, The Guardian, surveying the absurdities of this emerging market, from eco-gadgets to free conference junk made from recycled paper:

"Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers, giving things up is an essential component of going green. A section on ethical shopping in Goldsmith's book advises us to buy organic, buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says nothing about buying less."

"Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing: one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first."

Monbiot's article illustrates the inherent class-snobbery of eco-consumerism, and the sometimes even destructive effects of a showboating ecological hobby lifestyle. The world needs the answers to fit within the pages of a glossy.

I was recently researching web hosting alternatives for a client, keeping in mind those reports about Second Life avatars consuming about as much electricity as the average Brazilian (person), and I found a fair few providers proudly claiming themselves to be "carbon neutral". DreamHost even give you badges to put on your site so you can animatedly claim you are a "green site" for being on their servers.

What does this mean in practise? Generally, that they've purchased carbon credits from larger industrial players (via many of the emerging middle men spotting an opportunity) who were reducing their emissions anyway, or planting a few trees (via). It does not mean they've installed ranks of low-power computers all powered by renewables. It apparently doesn't even mean they've stopped using disposable coffee cups, they just use ones made from "renewable resources" (such as trees, I'd suppose). I don't mean to pick on DreamHost, for good intentions are better than none, nor do I mean to pick on those who stick carbon-neutral stickers on the back of their petrol-guzzlers. The problem is not these people, it is the combined weight of industry, and its marketing machine, creating a world where we believe that we can pay somebody else to actually deal with the real issues.

The problem is, carbon emissions and pollution can't be offset by cash. In that marketing focus group from five years ago I discussed in my last post on this, I expressed a certain terror that the introduction of "carbon-offset" energy products, as opposed to encouraging the use of fully renewable energy sources, was nothing more than a money grab wearing the clothing of ethical business. That it would make it somehow okay for me to run the giant industrial air conditioners in my current house non-stop, because somewhere out there a tree is being planted to balance. Good old-fashioned greenwash.

What, though, is the alternative? What is our proposition if we are in opposition? Are we suggesting that one not attempt to be carbon neutral, or use eco-friendly products? Of course not. The parent organisation of this blog will soon be publishing an ethical shopping guide that contains many wonderful suggestions for ethical shopping and consumption, and I'd stand by everything in it as worthwhile and important effort. But (if you'll fire up your solar-powered Melissa Etheridge for a second and pretend this is projected behind her) too many people use environmental branding as a get-out-of-apocalypse-free card, a Prius as a license to drive more, a green credit card as a license to buy more, or Bono as a license to stage a global series of concerts consuming untold ridiculous amounts of resources and generating massive amounts of waste.

Don't outsource your responsibility. That's all.

And no matter what Bono tells you, don't forget this, worth repeating from my last post: as the hype tells you, the responsibility for saving the planet is on us. But not in the way they want us to think. Don't just be a good consumer. Be a good citizen. Don't buy the story that climate change can be fixed by changing the products you buy (though you should). Don't feel pressured to buy coffee table books printed (with beautiful varnish and the smell of fresh petroleum wafting from the ink) in their millions to show you how to replace your chemical cleaners with organic ones. Six months ago, the Australian media was full of politicians talking of their "climate change credentials", and yet now as we get closer to the election cycle, real environmental policy, bold environmental policy, is nowhere to be seen.

Buy the story instead that, insomuch as it's not too late, the greatest impact we can have is by forcing governments to legislate with strength and ferocity against the combined industrial forces of the world, by forcing them to embrace Kyoto and the strategies beyond. By forcing politicians to be bold, to act with vision and reimagine the world after fossil fuel. By telling them we want them to stop exploiting our passive inbuilt racism by blaming China and India. To invest serious money in research and development of viable medium and long-term alternatives, be they nuclear, renewable or breeding a new race of wheel-running super hamsters (I don't know, I'm not a scientist, just putting it out there). They'll only do that when we remind them just where the responsibility lays, and when we remind them that, even though we have a nice new pre-approved ecoMastercard, we won't be buying their organic, all-natural fertiliser any more.

Technorati Tags: environment, carbon offset

Impatience, Resistance, Production and Possibility: The Take, revisited

2007-07-24T04:31:52-07:00

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis have an interesting article in The Nation this week following up on the situation they documented a couple of years back in the extraordinary documentary The Take.

The Take is a document partly of the destructive tendencies of neoliberal capitalism, but more of the forms and structures that emerge in the wake of its collapse. When the Argentinian economy was detonated by a Menem-bomb at the turn of the decade, workers in the factories of Buenos Aires were left jobless, their bosses having fled for higher ground. At the end of every street, factories stood intact but empty. Dusting off the most basic sentences of Marx, workers realised the means of production were right there in front of them.

The story of how collectives formed, broke the gates and began to produce in these ghost factories--some more profitable than they ever were before--provides a strange sort of optimism that we're not used to seeing in the protest documentary. It shows a tangible model for real social change, and a brief glimmer of possibility of a better, fairer world. There's little more inspiring than a vanguard of aging seamstresses, storming a police line, fighting for their right to work and support each other. Nothing more, nothing less.

I had a fascinating conversation with Avi Lewis (son of the equally inspiring Stephen Lewis) a couple of years back which I've always meant to get around to posting. So here's a wonderful excuse.

Technorati Tags: argentina, interviews, politics

I know where the skeletons are in your closet

2007-07-22T00:38:27-07:00

From a time before the victorious rewrote history in their favour, enjoy Keating in his prime.