Ornery World

Nothing To See Here.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 23:41:00 +0000

This blog has been orphaned, sunsetted, and any other terms you can think of for "I'm not writing it any more."

I now write (when I write) at my site. I'll be straight with you, I'm doing this because people laugh at the Blogger platform and I want to remain on the right side of history.

In Which I Explain How Magic Works.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:36:00 +0000

Filament Magazine's Music Issue is now available, in which you can read my essay about music, occultism and human consciousness in ancient and recent history. Karen D Tregaskin's illustrations are so good I am half-seriously considering having one tattooed upon my flesh.

Marina in New Zealand

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:22:00 +0000

While interviewing Marina Abramović for Filament last year, we chatted about some stuff that didn't really fit into the article. A lot of it centered around her visit to New Zealand in 1981 for the performance of a one-off work in Christchurch (RIP Christchurch). I've decided to "publish" this "piece" "here" so you can enjoy some more of this fascinating woman's thoughts.

Performance artist Marina Abramović just finished a mammoth three-month show at New York's MoMA gallery in which she was joined by international stars like Lady Gaga and James Franco. But when I interviewed her, what she really wanted to talk about was her time in New Zealand.

The first question Marina Abramović asks when I telephone her New York country house is whether I'm calling from Christchurch. The 64-year old, self-described “grandmother of performance art,” left her homeland in the former Yugoslavia in 1976. But hers is still a thick Slavic accent, not unlike that of the snake-handling matriarch played by Angelina Jolie in Oliver Stone's Alexander.

It turns out Christchurch is the only place in New Zealand she's been. She and her then-partner, Uwe Laysiepen (commonly known by the performance name of Ulay), came here in 1981 for a one-off performance organized by local artist Andrew Drummond.

“It's a piece that's almost unknown,” she says. “A work called Witnessing. Ulay was sitting on the floor and I was standing and pointing one finger in his direction. The natural light was becoming darker over the four hours of the piece. My feet were on a pedestal and they had to lift me down because I was completely cramped. It was a very strange piece.”

It's strange within the context of her work mainly because it doesn't involve the artist putting herself in extreme pain or danger. Abramović's work explores the limits of the human mind and body. She creates illuminating experiences for herself and her audience by putting herself through physical and mental endurance tests. Highlights of her career have included stabbing herself in the hand with twenty knives as part of a traditional Balkan soldiers' game, cutting a star into her flesh, and ingesting drugs intended for catatonic patients, making a performance out of the seizures the drugs induced.

So while standing on a platform for four hours may not be as much fun as the exploits of, say, Andy Warhol's Factory or the Dada movement, for her it probably counts as a working holiday.

“It was a bit of a trip,” she says. Once she got here, she found that she was only six hours from the South Pole. “I wanted to go on an expedition. But I only wanted to go at the time when there was ten hours of sunset. They wanted to sign me for six months.”

“I'm sure if you found the right person,” I say, “you could strong-arm them.”

“That's true,” she agrees. “Another thing is that every person I knew in New Zealand saw at least one UFO. I think there's a landing area there. I was in Christchurch for ten days and didn't see one. I'll have to come back for that.”

“I don't know anyone in New Zealand who thinks they've seen a UFO,” I say, then immediately feel bad because this makes it sound like I think she's wrong or crazy.

“Come on!” she exclaims. “Everyone I talked to there saw at least one UFO. Or at least, they told me they did.”

“Obviously,” I say, “You're mixing with the right crowds and I'm not. I'd love to find someone who's seen a UFO.” I think this is a good way of qualifying my earlier objection.

“The other thing that happened,” she goes on, “was a crazy situation.” She tells me about the farm she was staying in in Canterbury. “One morning I woke up and walked up the hill. There were hundreds of sheep giving birth, all at the same time. The sun was coming up and it was like one massive birth. I'll never forget seeing that in New Zealand. It was the most beautiful thing.”

“That seems like exactly the sort of thing that should happen when you come here,” I tell her. Themes of rebirth and renewal are constant in Marina Abramović's work. In the 1990s she performed a work involving scrubbing the flesh off 6,000 pounds of cow bones, an intentionally impossible attempt to render them pure (the piece, Balkan Baroque, was her comment on the Bosnian civil war). Another saw her reinvent herself by trading places with an Amsterdam prostitute for four hours: the woman took Abramović's place at a gallery opening, while the artist sat in the brothel window.

Her latest work at the New York MoMA, The Artist is Present, saw her sit motionless opposite visitors, one at a time. The piece went on for seven hours, every weekday for three months. “People haven't talked about this,” she says, “Because it's not something you're supposed to talk about. But that piece was really about giving unconditional love to complete strangers.”

“You mean treating each audience member as individuals?” I ask.

“At the moment he was in that chair,” she explains, “Every visitor was a unique universe. That's new to audiences. They've never been treated in that way.”

Many of her visitors have been the New York art crowd, but she says many more would never step into a gallery usually. Part of the appeal is the famous sitters on the guest list. “Lady Gaga came to see the show and talked about me on Larry King Live and YouTube interviews. She reaches fourteen year olds who'd never care about performance art. They become this whole new audience, which is a completely new thing for me.”

Another guest was Hollywood actor James Franco, a performance art devotee himself. Franco recently claimed that his recurring role on the soap opera General Hospital was an elaborate work of performance art. I ask Abramovic what she thinks of this use of the medium.

“That was such a mixed-up issue,” she says. “In the 70s, people would just do some stupid gesture and say, 'I'm doing performance art,' and this attitude is still here today. But James Franco studied performance at NYU. He did a dissertation on my work. We've talked a lot. He says as an actor, he reaches a wall so many times because he's trying to be someone you're not. Performance art deals with truly being what you are, and he wanted to incorporate that into his acting.”

The intersection of performance art with superstars like Gaga and Franco is new for her. Abramović considers her fame to have come quite late – her Christchurch trip may have been big news among the cognoscenti, but most New Zealanders probably didn't even know who she was. She suspects that her late breakthrough to mass-media stardom was a good thing.

“Look at me. Recognition came very late. That's very good, because then you don't get stuck on how great you are. When it happens at 25, you're young and you don't know who you are.” She laughs. “Then you die of an overdose at 41.”

And then you'd never get to see a UFO.

The Gears of War post, now with less reading

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:55:00 +0000

Here's a video of a thing I wrote about Gears of War. Some people said they'd like to see it in film form, which was convenient as I myself felt that way also. This is definitely the best video about an okay videogame you're likely to see today.

In Which I Weigh In on Ayn Rand (spoiler: she's a dick).

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 01:24:00 +0000

I'm a bit late to this party, but here's a quickie from me about Objectivism and seasteading in which I make the subtext of every joke made over the last week about either topic achingly concrete. And now, your bonus blog-only Tom's Thoughts.

It occurred to me while watching Brad Pitt's performance in The Tree of Life (really, the most like Terranigma any film has ever been, which is to say singularly astounding) that Objectivism has undergone basically the ideal character arc over the past ten years. I remember in the early '00s when Pitt was running his mouth off about how great it would be to make a movie of The Fountainhead, and how the whole idea of Rand and Objectivism were this secretive badge of pride that certain public figures would wear poking out from under their lapels. The notion seemed imbued with a terrible sort of grandeur -- a gilded villainy that at least commanded a presence, even if it looked a bit scuffed and chipped up close.

But the past ten years have been rubbish for Objectivism as a cultural element. It now just seems a dirty, shameful, shabby sort of thing, a spite-faced lizard of a woman scurrying in the shadows of skyscrapers, her long coat stinking of stale cigarettes and ridiculous fumbling half-hearted attempts at humanness. Today more people, so the news reports and bestseller lists tell us, are looking into Rand and her work than ever -- but the larger the movement grows, the more malformed and cancerous it reveals itself to be, shiny-faced jackasses braying buzzwords as they stockpile increasingly useless cachet and preside over the darkest Age of Grimness since the Seventies were burned at Comiskey Park, a frustratingly inauspicious 35 days before I was born. The first Atlas Shrugged movie, presented Twilight- or Harry Potter-like in multiple momentous epic installments, had direct-to-video sloppiness written all over it and went largely unnoticed even despite the promotion of what we're assured is the most powerful political force since cocaine, the Tea Party movement -- surely the least self-aware group of people in the history of ostensible mental competence, not to mention the least glamorous assemblage of ruiners since the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Objectivism has got what it needs -- for a lot of people, preferably some of them owning property and mostly-clean clothes, to rally around it -- but it has lost what it wants, which is for the glamorous and respectable to extol its virtues. Which is the perfect position, from an audience standpoint, for a character to arrive at. Of course Objectivists will tell you that they neither want nor care for your respect or disregard; but then, why do they make so goddamn many speeches about it?

In Which Everything is Mentioned.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 04:21:00 +0000

My article on the past 30 years' Touchstones of Gaming - in which I survey the culture, politics and media (also video games) of every year since 1980 - is now up on Gamesradar. If you want an article which mentions the Falklands War, Waco siege, Lost, Bobbitt Trial, Elvis Presley, Doom and Ronald Reagan's relationship to Princess Toadstool, it is your lucky day! Of all the things I've written about games, this is the one most geared toward people who don't give a shit about games (well, apart from this, anyway).

Bonus blog content: I'd have said the touchstone of this year was Modern Warfare 3, whose heartfelt paean to the terrible euphoria of techno-militarism - not to mention embroilment in unending corporate, legal and political skirmishes - perfectly represents an age of corporatized war without end pushing us ever closer to the brink of extremely cinematic Armageddon. LA Noire is all very well, but I don't see the publisher of that game (whoever it is) starring in a Brad Pitt movie.

Corganwatch: A Big Fat Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:44:00 +0000

I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing
Oh, if only I'd seen that the joke was on me.
- Gibb/Gibb/Gibb, I Started a Joke

"God's joke" was how Billy Corgan famously described the origin of his band's name throughout the days of the original lineup: rather than new-wavers The Marked or synth-rockers Star Children[1], the band - operating under the assumption that this wouldn't last, thrashing out (excellent) Sabbath-meets-Reznor mechanistic psych-outs like Nothing and Everything for halfhearted audiences sporting no more confidence in the venture's lasting potential than Corgan/Iha themselves - figured if they were going to do something stupid, they might as well have a stupid name while they were about it. Thus, Smashing Pumpkins.

God, of course, was joking on the sly: if we can posit Billy Corgan as an incarnation of the two-faced god Janus (and let's see you tell me we can't), then one face must be that of the inspired genius, the other the dullard crippled by self-doubt and lashing out at anyone nearby: himself, Courtney Love, the press, fans, Courtney Love, Courtney Love. And so it was that Corgan's daemon became hoodwinked by his demons: the wind changed, and that shrugging, don't-worry-I-don't-mean-this jest would become frozen on his face for the next twenty years as "Smashing Pumpkins" became... Smashing Pumpkins.

Billy Corgan is at pains to establish that his thread winds inexorably through the tapestry of rock music in and after the 1990s; what he fails to acknowledge is that a large part of his influence is to add to rock's meme-pool one of the most generous infusions of that self-doubting essence. The oeuvre of Corgan at his peak may not have the visceral self-immolation of his most obvious counterpart, Kurt Cobain, but - in interviews and in tracks like Ugly or Tales of a Scorched Earth - it's tempered with a wry, almost twee brand of self-abasement that's less solipsistic than his contemporaries', and thus more engaging. The result is a deadly self-destructive streak with the cuddly, approachable palette of a Wes Anderson flick. And also probably Hinder's Better Than Me, thank you so very fucking much.

For years, Corgan would deny the literal interpretation of the name, accepting the appellation's sigilization of bittersweet divine mockery, its codifying of the universe's fickle silliness, even its connotations of Halloween boogedy-boo, toddling down the street in a Cool Britannia costume (this latter manifesting itself as the band became The Smashing Pumpkins, by which point the world was a vampire and Corgan a slapheaded superhero who only came out at night). But one thing the band did not go in for was the actual smashing of pumpkins: when one Australian fan asked Corgan during a radio phone-in whether any pumpkins were harmed during the making of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Corgan sneered, "that's the stupidest question ever asked. For asking that question you get a big fat nothing."

It is, of course, beneath Corganwatch to play the game of hoists and petards [2]. One day the literality of "Smashing Pumpkins" may be off-limits; the next it may be used to sell records. That is fine and good. A free pass from Corganwatch! However, it's worth noting that, in finally acknowledging after all this time that, you know what, the words "smashing pumpkins" do actually conjure the image of pumpkins being smashed, one might observe a resurgence of Corgan's long-dormant (and entirely unreasonably so, because holy fuck, have you seen this shit? There are no words) self-abasing urge.

If the new Smashing Pumpkins have an element of cut-up randomness to them - a desperation to be back in the zeitgeist, tempered by a welcome willingness to perform crazy experiments with unorthodox release techniques and music of tragicomically variable quality - then we might start to suspect the identity of the hand moving the planchette. The paradox is this: Billy Corgan is trying to free himself from the dull and dying machinations of a musical economy that patently has no use for him, nor him for it, and that is fine, because Billy Corgan is a gnostic and a mystic and he wants very much to get somewhere and that Neoplatonic form ain't gonna idealize itself, buddy. But in throwing the bones and letting onesself and one's image be swept wherever the current takes one, one encounters the risk (indeed, the probability) that the current sweeping one up will be the strongest one; and if there's only one force in the world stronger than what Billy Corgan thinks of himself, it's what people think of Billy Corgan. Meaning the stronger his attempts to put aside ego and do whatever he's moved to do, the more likely he'll just do whatever people have been assuming he's doing for years now, which is to say, fronting a band which is all about the violent pulverization of squash.

The part where the whole thing is presented by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on the other hand, is obviously just Billy Corgan fucking with you.

[1] A nom de musique employed when the band were making the styles of music they'd swear didn't fit the brand of their day-job outfit, until The Chamberlin Incident forced an adoption of those exact styles: first for the extended mostly-covers version of the Bullet With Butterfly Wings EP, then with Adore and the sheepish, halfhearted pretense that this was where things were headed all along.

[2] During the Pumpkins' heyday, Metallica were widely quoted as having said they'd never do all the things they then turned around and did the shit out of; this in response to their release of the alt-inspired Load, unquestionably the best album of their career.

A Review of Gears of War 2, or, A Rare Treat for Fans of my Thoughts on Games.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:15:00 +0000

Marcus Fenix, Gears of War 2's Great Meat Face, would vindicate Eisenstein's Theory of Montage if his blank grimace were ever juxtaposed with anything other than wrenching horror.

Everyone knows that all men are bastards.

Everyone knows that the tragedy of men is that they have built a world which is constructed to function as their own monument and throne and nothing else; that they have fashioned a language which compels its users with every breath to exalt men as their rulers and dominators; and yet every man knows the falsehood of this world that he have made, and thus strives always to witness its destruction and escape to a place where primal guttural screams are the only language, glossal shrieks imparting voices from the core he has buried beneath layers of ink and marble and leather and steel.

Everyone knows men despise their own flesh for its constant betrayal, its refusal to stifle as they would stifle all feelings of pain or pleasure that make them cry like children or smile like women. If a man were truly happy he would have flesh of cold iron, but a man could never be truly happy for to be a man is to know the world's grimness and to distrust relief and sneer in the face of respite.

Everyone knows that men make countries to keep out those they hate most, which is everyone who will not bend to their rod; and that those that bend as they ask, these they hate the most also, for their uselessness and their servitude and their demands for protection and cries for appeasement and requests for men to feel, and a man hates to feel because it reminds him that he Is, which he hates. And everyone knows that men will always find someone to lie to, someone to kill and die so that men may keep their countries; because if they had not, then others would rape their sisters before they themselves had had the chance.

Everyone knows men love war, because in war, the mistrusted and hated flesh is rent by metal, ground in the dirt, burned by fire and blistered yellow and crackling by scouring chemicals. In war, the chaos of the Abyss calls to men and shreds flesh from broken spirit until all that remains is grinning death, a final sneer for a world that deified and exalted and found no true use for them save fulfilling minor roles in a plan they constructed so long ago they have forgotten its purpose, only that its method is to dominate all things, and to this they must cling. Men are never unhappy to go to war; men are only unhappy that no war ever embodies the glorious promise of war itself, which is a maelstrom of blood and steel and bile and iron and stink and cry and fire and roar and red and black and drowning, enough to obliterate that deepest most hated truth, which is that they are still themselves, torn from all things and cold and alone.

Everyone knows that men hate to speak; so when they do, they will speak from a pool of their language which they have set aside for themselves, to be used only by men (never children or women) and specially chosen because all words and all combinations of those words mean nothing except I am a man and I will fuck you to death and hate every minute of it.

Everyone knows that men hate that which is natural and real, for it is the domain of women and children. For a man to enjoy something he did not build himself – crafted it to be false, made it ugly with his rough hands to show he cared not for it as would a woman – would imply that he had not ground enough children beneath his boot to afford the luxury of false things.

Everyone knows men hate all that is not of themselves; the alien, the sinister, the demonic and angelic alike; the nigger, the smiling wetback, the faggot, the whore, the arab, the bearded yid, the kraut, the commie, the wop and the wog, the retard, the socialist and the fascist, the good ole boy, the backwoods fuckwit, the cunt-lapping effete, the greased and grunting troll, the stupid bitch, the stinking hairy dyke, the acid-perfumed castrating harridan, the line-browed pornography-loving european moron, the haaji, the papist, the holy-roller, the atheist, the beaten prisoner, the glowering tormentor: there is no one that men cannot name so that they will hate them. Men know that there is only one thing which is holy and that is the mother, and all these Other would fuck her and dirty her before man could take his rightful place inside her.

Everyone knows that all men think their own mother a diseased and festering whore to be routed and exterminated so they may dwell at last alone and no one may question their pain and their hatred.

Everyone knows that all men hate ultimately themselves for they can see no way out of this, for it is what their fathers taught them, and their fathers are always war, because like war, a father's love is never complete and is always thus hate because it must be love or hate and they are still alone so it cannot be love. Everyone knows that men thus are born in pain and hate, and men are pain and hate is men, and this is truth, the only true thing that will live forever.

Eight point five.

In Which You Learn More Than You Thought.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:28:00 +0000

If you start reading my guide to tough dilemmas in videogames, you may well end up knowing more about ethics or Quantum Uncertainty than you expected! Then again you may not, it's a big field.

Tom's New Zealand: Atlantis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:30:00 +0000

The earthquake filled our house with dust. As soon as the first jolt struck, rooms were filled by walls as old cinderblocks shed their mortar and shifted atop one another. The outside came rushing in. Sunshine first peeked then glared through holes in the walls and roof: piled bricks, poor and arbitrary boundaries.

An aunt was at work at the chemists' in Redcliffs, glass shelves hurling last season's perfumes across the room: unbridled Obsession, dangerous Euphoria. She doesn't remember being knocked off her feet: only that one second she was standing; the next, sprawled over the counter. A portly regular hurled himself atop her as a shield from the onslaught of expired Eternity and unwelcome Escape.

The hip-for-the-kidz facade of my little brother's school leapt from the building's cold and sullen hulk in an undisguised attempt on his life. Joe was too fast for the depredations of this unmasked engine of obliteration, and that instant became a microcosm of his young life: peak experience wrung from another moment escaping smiling-faced and lethal education's attempts at a Saturnine morning tea.

A neighbor was working in an office block overlooking the Square before the jolt threw him toward the Cathedral, plate-glass all that kept him from falling five stories, allowing him the spectacle of the Cathedral's spire spiraling down into the quadrangle. He rushed from the building and started running.

My girlfriend Hilary was thrown from a treadmill at the University's rec center. All the lights went out and she was herded from the pitch-black building. Ushered into clear daylight and a free-standing campus, she was presented by no sign that this was anything more than a slightly larger aftershock. She quickly became annoyed at the center's refusal to allow her back into the building to get her things. “Are you alright?” I asked from within her phone from within her locker from within the evacuated center.

The Port Hills were doing jumping jacks, leaping two feet in the air and spraying geologic dandruff. A boulder the size of a van effortlessly bisected one building on the section and careened down the hill demanding shelter in another. Cast out and sent onto the watercourse that forms the main artery through the property, the mighty stone would be unable to find satisfaction: seeking to end its journey in our spa pool, the huge rock instead upended the entire tub and came to a stop just short of the deck. Hard to avoid some measure of sympathy for even so destructive and burdensome a beast.

“I'll protect you!” yelled the fat man atop my aunt. “I've been wanting to do this for years!” She felt his hot breath on her neck as boulders rolled down the suburb's eponymous crags, disparate rocks becoming One and Free.

“I can't find my father,” our friend Ashley told Joe, “but there's too many people hurt. I can't leave to look for him.” He spent the afternoon pulling bodies living and dead from the wreckage of the Colombo Run: by his estimate, he retrieved two corpses for every survivor.

Our neighbor ran until he reached Hagley Park. There oblivious strollers, seeing his suit, took him for a visiting businessman and urged him to be calm, that a little shake was normal here in Christchurch. “You don't understand,” he told them, “I've just seen the Cathedral come down.”

“I've seen a lot of dead people,” Joe told me as he walked up the driveway. He walked past a bus crumpled by falling masonry, dimly registering crushed human forms inside. He saw an old man being tended to by emergency services; the man's face had been half knocked from his head. Walking down Colombo Street and through Sydenham, Joe saw streets lined with the body-bags and hastily blanketed corpses that, mere weeks earlier, Ngapuhi kaumatua Gray Theodore had prophesied for Wellington.

The fat man got off my aunt. They haven't spoken since.

Ashley found his father.

Hilary still doesn't have her phone.

Joe, fed up with living in so notoriously seismic a city, took advantage of compassionate airfares and booked a holiday in San Francisco.

Christchurch, never again a solid physical place, now becomes forever alive and frozen at the moment of destruction: the immaterial arena surrounded (as a friend beautifully reminds us) by Baxter's “mountains crouch[ing] like tigers.”

A place where shyster priest Arthur Worthington once pointed through the glass of a shattered lamp toward true reality; where boulders rain like dark karakea onto the beach at Tuawera, onto which a vengeful magician once conjured a poison whale against his enemies. A place of narratives and experiences, of memories and quake moments, streets forever trod by those who'll never tell their stories.

Tom's New Zealand: A Conversation with a Lion

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:12:00 +0000

“There is no reason that can make sense of this event. No words that can spare our pain. We are witnessing the havoc caused by a violent and ruthless act of nature.
...
I am a proud son of Christchurch. I was raised there. I got my first job there. My sister lived there. My mother died there. I know what a wonderful place it is. But my connection to Christchurch is no rare thing. All New Zealanders have a piece of our heart in Christchurch.
...
Christchurch, today is the day your great comeback begins. Though your buildings are broken, your streets awash, and your hearts are aching, your great spirit will overcome. While nature has taken much from you, it cannot take your survivor's spirit.”

- John Key, 23 February 2011

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

To personify a location (as your current author is as guilty as anyone else of doing) is as tempting as it is impossible. “Christchurch” only exists because we say it does; the place itself, tight shingle and steadfast rock, doesn't think of itself as Christchurch or as Canterbury or as anyone's home. The earth didn't shake because of anything we did upon its surface: it just moved because that's what the earth does. Not to spite us but in spite of us.

Druidic architects once stirred human blood into their foundational cement; more recent builders laid Bibles or other objects of human significance into the cornerstones of their constructions. Reminders of a universal principle of building: that when we lay down foundations – whether for a shack, highrise or city itself – we extend our own human meaning down into the earth, idea and narrative mixing awkwardly with clay and loam.

It was easy enough to incorporate September's shiverings into the Christchurch narrative. Seismic trembles rocketed up through the strata even as primal sparks rang out through sleeping brains, touching off reptilian fight-or-flight synapse patterns. Following immediately were early-mammal poetic-conscious nodes, rushing to make sense of the event, fit it into a narrative: tight faux-English grid and village-green suburbs tested by a dormant strain of Antipodean rim-of-fire wildness. Earth's Fury. Why didn't They warn us?

City and story alike were cracked but repairable. Look back or move forward? Either seemed feasible options for a populace never averse to a bit of hard work.

But this time, it's clear the graft hasn't taken. Blood and Bible alike sit dead in the soil, neither swallowed nor spat back. The land doesn't want to reject or revise our story. It simply doesn't care.

No longer can we feel we've sunken our awareness of place and community into the earth: the only place Christchurch truly exists, it's become clear, is in our minds (or hearts, if you prefer). We might all agree upon what Christchurch is or isn't (or better yet, we might disagree passionately); if nothing else, we all agree that it's there. But there's one party that reserves judgement on even that most basic fact, and that's the location in question.

The earth doesn't move out of malice or covetousness. The earth simply moves. Any attempts to ascribe human meaning would be like trying to have a conversation with a lion.

Tom's New Zealand: The Terrible Distar

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:44:00 +0000

“To All The Famlies of The Loved One's

Lost and injured in this terrible distar

of The BIG Earth Quake that hit

Christchurch

Our Love, Thoughts & Prayer are with

you all

M & T.P.”

We found this message, written with golden ink inside a card depicting a cherub: blue butterfly wings on a field of grey clouds. The card had been slipped into a ziplock bag and taped to a beautiful bouquet of bright flowers, and the whole bundle had been left at the foot of Ashburton's East Street Fountain.

Ashburton sits an hour south of Christchurch down State Highway One. Often referred to as “Ash Vegas” for its overabundance of pokie machines and gambling pubs, the town's known for its elderly and farming populations. Until recently, the town sign read: “Welcome to Ashburton. Blessed is the Nation whose GOD is the LORD.” Even motoring works differently here: a place where many older drivers will drive around the block rather than negotiate a right-hand turn.

Ashburton is packed. The town's McDonald's, which offers not just familiar tastes but the elusive and essential wi-fi, has been close to standing room only since Tuesday. Across the road, a chemist tells me they've been flat out for the past few days. I ask if she's noticed an influx of city slickers around town and she gives me a sly wink.

Like sidewalk gawkers from an old movie, TV screens in restaurants, bars and electronics stores in Ashburton convey the latest earthquake news to gathered throngs. Even when there's no new information, there's a sense that it would be disrespectful not to watch. Many have family or friends in Christchurch; many more, ostensibly, live there themselves. Christchurch, once the place that you went when you outgrew Ashburton, has become the place you run from when it shows every sign of not wanting you there any more.

Corganwatch: The Name of the Pose

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 23:48:00 +0000

When I was in primary school, the principal for several years was a woman named Claire Coburn. She was an ebullient woman given to joining the younger children in games, which disgusted us older children but which they seemed to enjoy. After about two years, she gathered the school's pupils before her and announced that we had shown great maturity in her time with us, and that she was now ready to be called by her true name: Claire Cockburn.

If you like the idea of concept albums but don't couldn't eat a whole one, you could do far worse than the Thirty-Three EP. Six songs where only the title track is filler, the disc starts with Billy Corgan singing from the perspective of a very human Christ contemplating His own crucifixion and only gets more navelgazey from there. Positioning itself as a series of transitional moments which, laid end to end, form a graceful coda to the Mellon Collie era (and, it was widely assumed at the time, the Smashing Pumpkins project itself), the EP's work in the manipulation of time, personal identity and musical character cannot be underestimated. Which is pretty good for a disc you could listen to in the time it took to get ready for your supermarket job (if you were me when the record came out).

While Thirty-Three itself may be fairly second-rate as actual songs go (divorced from the album, its attempt to infuse the Twilight to Starlight half of the record with playful Beatles silliness just becomes doubly cloying), it does its work in establishing the EP's elegiac tone. Again, if you start with the notion that Billy Corgan is going to be portraying Jesus in His final days (besides the obvious, the title refers to Corgan's age at the imminent Millennium), it's fairly easy to work out where things might be going. Four songs, each themed for a different member of the band[1], explore themes of transition, finality and reconciliation before the twee-as-you-please My Blue Heaven rolls elegant end credits[2].

The Airplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right) is Corgan's bitter farewell to Jimmy Chamberlin, a "fragile heart so cursed" whose broken promises caused the heartache that would drive Corgan through the doldrums between the death of Jonathan Melvoin and the eventual Machina (it's also, if this needs restating, one of the best songs Corgan has ever written).

Transformer is Billy's attempt to get inside the head of a D'Arcy who obviously no longer had much time for the band; while it paints a fairly charming picture of the bassist, its thesis seems to be that D'Arcy doesn't exist except as a member of the Smashing Pumpkins, and that as such, it sure must be awful hard for her to be growing dissatisfied with the venture[4]. The Bells is James Iha's nice little song about going back to church; shortly following the song's release, he would express public concern about Billy becoming friends with Marilyn Manson.

The other song is the second explicitly Billy-themed riff on departure and reconciliation, The Last Song[5]. What transforms The Last Song from an okay song by Billy Corgan during the Mellon Collie era (which is to say, one of the hundred-odd best songs of the mid-to-late 90s) into a truly meaningful entry into the Pumpkins canon is the singer's choice of backup musician. If you're going to sing a song about how you've done good work and now it's time to go home, that is fine; if you're going to end an era marked by songs about how hard your parents made your life, and you're going to do it with a song where jazz guitarist William Corgan Sr [6] underscores your homeward walk with quietly assured soloing that's a bit like your own licks, just a little older and sweeter... well, it is unlikely that the reader will require an in-depth explanation of why this is relevant.

"William Corgan," then, becomes a sort of magical True Name, a seldom-invoked reference to who the singer "truly is" when all the hurlyburly's done and the Father has been Reconciled With. Last week, Billy announced that "William Corgan" would henceforth be the name he would be working under. Corgan had made peace with who he truly was and where he truly came from, and was ready to start garnering the same direct, unadulterated adoration bestowed on Johnny Cougar or D'Arcy Wretzky.

The Thirty-Three EP is probably, next to his other work of the era, the closest in musical tone to Corgan's current album, Teargarden by Kaleidoscope. A recent entry into that project had the respect to address me without being so forward as to call me Thomas; so I guess I have to be, for the time being, in favor.

Claire Cockburn left the school not too long after making her announcement, and we laughed at her a great deal. We were, after all, kids; but come on, it was a pretty silly speech to make.

[1] Billy gets two songs, either (a) because he's Billy or (b) because Thirty-Three isn't really a Billy song so much as a Billy-as-Christ song, which is basically just (a) writ large.
[2] The song's elegance is marred only by a Samuel-L-Jackson-in-a-Marvel-movie peek at that rising star of the Adore era, the "Melancholic Elmer Fudd" style of singing that Billy would inexplicably drop into otherwise good [3] songs.
[3] Obviously I am joking about Annie-Dog being otherwise good.
[4] Apparently being a spunky girl defined by the Smashing Pumpkins is a prerequisite: new bassist Nicole Fiorentino first appeared on the cover of Siamese Dream. No Smashing Pumpkins bassist has ever had a penis.
[5] Which is always positioned before several other songs, to make sure you know that it's not actually the last song, not in that way anyway.
[6] Biggest prior public accomplishment: turning down a spot in a band who would later hire Ted Nugent.

In Which I am Speculatively Pessimistic.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 02:15:00 +0000

My list of "The Worst Games You Never Played" includes Star Fox 2, because I just ain't give a fuck. For Twitter devotees, this is the one where I had an ethical crisis as to how to phrase a joke about prison sex.

Oh, My Stars!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 02:28:00 +0000

As someone who uses a veneration of the psychology of C.G. Jung, the linguistics of Owen Barfield and the poetic sensibilities of W.B. Yeats to mask all manner of dismissive ambiguities in my scientific worldview, horoscopes are problematic for me. Basically I think they are a very, very stupid thing. The idea that a magical man could come from the sky and do only good, freeing the world with his own sacrifice, I basically have no problem with; the notion that a prince sat under a tree until he knew everything, I can get behind; the notion that an arrogant boy was cursed with an elephant's head, and now smiles from the æther upon travelers who take the time to offer him a coin or two, I have been known to actively buy into.

In these examples (or those of werewolves, or heaven, or magnets), we're talking about events that took place in a time of poetic consciousness in which the bicameral mind hadn't, in some cases, entirely finished combining into the single powerful beige box we now use for all our knowledge-manipulation needs. To say that these events are worthy of "belief" in the post-Enlightenment[1] sense that we say that, say, the Moon Landing is worthy of our "belief," we have to adopt a bead-dangling hairy-person position of attempting to fit poetic pegs into a prosaic hole, which just makes everyone look silly. Asking the scientific community to accept propositions without providing the falsifiable proof that that community rightly demands is like asking me to admit that Two and a Half Men is an excellent show just because you like it.

It's simply not appropriate to place statements made from a poetic-conscious perspective, or the truths they express, on a prosaic scale of truth-to-falsehood. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, tell the inhabitants of a laboratory or lecture-hall that prosaic consciousness is an unwieldy and inappropriate position from which to interrogate some positions, and they will brand you an irritating postmodernist, and they'll be right; but then again, you get to suspect that these are people who don't really know what postmodernism is.

Anyway, so I have no problem believing (in whatever sense) in these sorts of things; however, I simply cannot be prevailed upon to believe in astrology as it's popularly understood. The idea that there are stars in the sky? Certainly. The notion of a "Saturnine" temperament? No problem. But the suggestion that the former might play some part in creating the latter? Oh come on now.

I think this is because astrology, as it's publicly understood, doesn't hesitate to attempt to place itself within a causal, rationalist worldview; but the way it does so is ridiculous and laughable and stinks of cheap hairdressers' waiting-rooms. IF you were born in August, THEN you will be extroverted and showy; and if you're not, then surely INWARDLY you must sometimes feel like you are not expressing yourself as openly as you might be; and (1) what a nakedly transparent piece of cold-reading this all is, while (2) why would that be, exactly? Might it be the desire to prove that your presence on this earth is anything but an incidental side-effect of too much holiday wine? No, no, it's just the stars, don't question the stars. Go fuck yourself.

This makes astrology the intellectual equivalent of the fundamentalist zealot who insists that not only is their dogma "true," but that it's "true" in a concrete, shade-of-the-tree, nails-in-the-palms sense, as if that were an appropriate level on which to interrogate such positions. Such an insistence isn't just impossible to discuss usefully, it's also almost as boring as those who insist on the utter meaningless emptiness of the universe as ultimate, inviolable truth. Which is to say: very boring.

This week, a mischievous scientist has pointed out that, if astrology were to hold itself to any sort of scientific standards, it would have to admit a new astrological sign: Ophiuchus, the snake-wrangling Healer sign. (Famous Ophiuchuses would include the snake-handling Britney Spears and God's frickin' gift to humanity, Ian Somerhalder).

The parody may be more apt than intended: the snake often denotes self-awareness, that force whose ascent has given rise to all the immensely beneficial and evolution-advancing developments since antiquity, but whose era is also marked by the fracturing of a shared awareness, a painful maturation that separates consciousness from the All.

To wrestle the snake, like Ophiuchus, could then denote a refusal to submit to the ego's will toward separation from All That Is: a quixotic attempt to to navigate back into Steiner's womblike Old Moon Consciousness[2], or the brave surge forward into Jean Gebser's "double consciousness," that posited future age in which all earlier phases in the evolution of awareness come together to form an ultimate sort of "super-awareness." To wrestle the snake would be to take charge of the direction our ego is leading us, to forge a way forward into the future of human awareness with a Healer's eye toward bandaging the wounds left by years of rigidly perspectival existential separatism.

Whereas the astrological position seems to be more one of, "get fucked, we're not writing an extra paragraph for the newspapers every week."

Astrology was originally intended, of course, as a science. The first astrologers were scientists of the poetic-consciousness age, many of them (we ought to presume) every bit as rigorous as those of our own prosaic[3] time. Their tools were different, so their conclusions are often incompatible with our own science (which has, on the whole, far better tools and more time in which to use them); when consciousness evolved, astrology progressed into what we now know as astronomy and continued to serve as a useful and fascinating scientific field.

If people were serious about astrology, then, they might well say, "thanks, modern science: it appears we have once again proved useful to one another." The resultant discussion of what exactly astrology means to those who half-heartedly follow it might provide some useful insights into just how rational we've become nowadays, or expose an area in which logical positivism has yet to satisfy millions of people.

However, this hasn't happened; which means that, if I want to make space on my belief-shelf for the potentially useful Ophiuchus, I have to hide that shelf not just from visiting logical positivists, but also from any hairy bead-dangling friends I might allow into my sphere of discussion.

No, I think I'll stick with my lengthy library of The Complete And Annotated Why Astrology Is Stupid.

[1] I mean "Enlightenment" in reference to the grey-haired man who sat under a tree until he glimpsed the force that organizes the entire universe, not the bald boy who sat under a tree until he glimpsed the force that organizes the entire cosmos; however, I readily admit that when you put it like that, it's a pretty spurious distinction to make.
[2] For many of these thoughts about consciousness, I am indebted to Gary Lachman's book, A Secret History of Consciousness.
[3] "Prosaic" is meant here simply as an alternative to "poetic," rather than any sort of value-judgment of our own time as boring or staid. As any student of apocryphal Chinese curses will tell you, our own times are plenty interesting.

In Which I Teach You A Thing Or Two.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 03:33:00 +0000

As part of my project to enrich the world by having them think more about old videogames, here is an article about life lessons buried in old games. "I am enjoying this gentleman's contributions to this site," shares a commenter. I appreciate, as Jordan Luck would have it, your appreciation!

Also, a reminder: Filament 07 is in stores now. You can walk to the shop and buy pieces of paper on which are printed words I wrote, and you will enjoy doing it!

In Which I Befriend a Post-Human Sorceress.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:48:00 +0000

My interview and article about Marina Abramović is the top story in the latest issue of Filament. We spoke about art (obviously), her childhood in the Balkans (probably obviously), and the play Martin Crimp wrote about her (somewhat less, I like to think, than obviously).

You can see a preview of the first pages of the article here, but I can't stress highly enough that if you are a fan of anything, you ought to purchase your own copy of the magazine to keep and treasure for always.

In Which I Feign Geekiness.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:38:00 +0000

"This sot of list is why I love Gamesradar," effuses one commenter. What sort of list? Movies geeks love that should not become videogames, of course. Such a simple idea!

In Which Our Hero Grits His Teeth, Chomps a Cigar and Forgets to Shave

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:45:00 +0000

I recently wrote for Gamesradar about times when videogames did the "gritty reboot" thing like as if they were The Punisher or some shit. You can read about it here.

Corganwatch: Malanachrony and the Inferiority Complex

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:07:00 +0000

I[1] take Corganwatch seriously. I am subscribed to his mailing list. I have a Google News alert for his name, meaning that whenever the music blogs I read mention him, I get to read their news (which is usually about Jessica Simpson or the Rush documentary that he featured in briefly) twice. Sometimes, for my sins, I even check out his spirituality blog, though I can't do that at the moment because against all odds it is, at time of writing, down.

What this means is that I live my life in a bubble of Billy Corgan-related scuttlebutt, and sometimes it is easy to forget that the reason I do this is that nobody else in the world (not even Billy Corgan, if he so chooses) has to live their lives in this bubble. So when a Really Big Story about Billy Corgan breaks, it is tempting not to even bother relaying it - as obviously, I think from inside my bubble, everyone in the world has heard this story already and filed it in their "very important story" boxes between "there is a woman in New Zealand with a name similar to that of a woman in England" and "Steve Jobs does not know that his software has a 'Rip CD' button on it." It is easy to forget that out there in the world of regular people who don't think about whether Courtney Love ghost-wrote Disarm, there are plenty of people that don't know (though surely they would care!) that Billy Corgan recently talked some shit about Pavement via Twitter, that rare example of a nu-medium with which he is (regrettably) growing increasingly savvy.

Corgan's squabble with Pavement stems from some sort of notion that the band represent a corruption of "indie" ideals and "alternative" integrity. This speaks to the fervent strain of indie fever pulsing through the veins of Corgan 2.0.

The Billy Corgan from the era of a living Jonathan Melvoin, a fucking D'arcy/Iha and a giving-a-shit public wore his exclusion from the "indie" crowd on his sleeve[2]. He made no secret of running the band like a business or demanding professionalism and a high standard from himself and his bandmates (on the rare occasion that he let them play their instruments). When his contemporaries were hating on Rolling Stone and Big Music, Corgan was chumming up with soon-to-be Nevermind producer Butch Vig; in an era of Hal Hartleys and Whit Stilmans, Corgan was by no means a Tony Scott, but he was at least a David Fincher.

But when the reborn, reduced-capacity Smashing Pumpkins took to public stages, it was with the "indie" flag flying: Corgan seemed to think that being "alternative" justified any cockamamie decision or hurtful act of bitchiness he could muster. (He would later offer a variation on this theme, tweeting that "complaining is the inherent great right of a musician.") In Billy's scheme, "indie" meant "living in a universe where Billy Corgan is immune to criticism," so that anyone who didn't enter that space was less "real" or "authentic" than Billy Corgan, a man who by this time was also claiming that his petulant stage presence was a "persona" in the tradition of Ziggy Stardust.

Pressured (no doubt at gunpoint) to share a bill with Pavement, a band who typified the old-school notion of "indie cred" since when Billy Corgan was avoiding being lumped into such a milieu, there was only one option: rather than decrying Malkmus et al as "not indie," Billy had to rail against his fellow fuzz-toned Stipe-acolytes as "bad indie:" not pretenders but abusers. If Pavement were George W Bush, then Billy Corgan wasn't Al Gore, cheated out of the crown that was rightfully his: he was John Kerry, a well-meaning would-be in the right place at the wrong time, forced to watch that crown legitimately awarded to people who misused the mandate it conferred. If "indie rock," in Billy's scheme, was Courtney Love, then Pavement weren't a sub-par cast-off like Trent Reznor or a heroic burnout like Kurt Cobain: they were a manipulative, demeaning ogre. They were Billy Corgan.

The trouble with all this is that it belies a severely outdated model of the "indie"/"mainstream" divide. Corgan's model of the dichotomy, a binary that evidently influences so much of his thinking and creativity nowadays, is an ironic throwback to a time when such a paradigm was valid: ironic not because Billy Corgan did his best work at that time, but because while he was doing that work, he actively didn't give a shit about that division.

In the 1990s, we talked the fuck out of the "indie"/"mainstream" divide. The most public evidence of the discussion was the cinematic "indie boom" of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: a massive shift in public and industry perceptions of cinematic importance in which movies and studios that would once have been too gritty, too talky, too foreign or niche-oriented became, for a few brief shining years, the darlings of Big Cinema. This was the era not just of Tarantino and Spike Lee but of Merchant Ivory, Vincent Ward, Christine Vachon and Jane Hamsher and the Weinsteins and Jane Campion. "Indie" became a buzzword for young cinephiles eager to cut their teeth on fare they perceived as tailored personally to them, not dreamed up by committee in an LA highrise.

That was fine and good, but that discussion only went so far before it had to rub up against the awkward truth of the matter: everyone was indie now. By the late 90s, it had become fashionable to point out that it was fine and good to celebrate indie darlings like Welcome to the Dollhouse or Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it bore remembering that the "indie" label applied equally to Se7en (starring Brad Pitt and directed by the man behind Alien3), Scream (starring actors from Friends and Party of Five and directed by the man who launched the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) and Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (no qualification necessary).

By the time New Line Cinema swept the Oscars with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the fact that the movie was an "indie film" by an "indie studio" didn't even bear consideration. This was the new paradigm: the creation of Hollywood blockbusters was a service outsourced to independent contractors, the same as everything else.

Billy Corgan is not irrelevant (as he consciously wastes no opportunity to remind us), but he is woefully anachronistic (as he unconsciously see above). While Corgan 1.0 was bypassing the whole "indie" farrago in favor of selling shitloads of the exact records he wanted to make, his contemporaries were wrestling with the angel of authenticity and, more often than not, coming to conclusions that Corgan 2.0 would have deemed "inauthentic." By adopting a mythologized version of the "indie" mantle long after contemporaries like Pavement had outgrown that notion, he puts one in mind of the Vietnam draft-dodgers who grow fat and old, turn hawk, and defend unnecessary wars by bemoaning their lost opportunity to bond with their fellow men in the sacred crucible of the soldier's nobility. He got to avoid a messy fight from which there was no escape without getting your hands dirty, but in later life, he still gets to cling to an ideal under whose standard he never marched to begin with. It's hard to condemn a figure like that too harshly: it may be a delusion, but the fact remains that for him, the war never ended.

[1] Oh, what, you're going to complain about hubristic author insertion in a story about Billy fucking Corgan?
[2] Let us not pretend that I am the only person to talk this week about the amusing contradictions of this situation.

What Monsters Would Say: Sagami Bay Ningen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:08:00 +0000

"Robble robble!"

Corganwatch: Say What You Will About Billy Corgan, At Least He Isn't The Guy From Opshop

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:06:00 +0000

Because come the fuck on.

What Monsters Would Say: Jack the Ripper

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 11:49:00 +0000

"I suspect that you can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library."

I'm Still Here (Prematurely), or On Intention and Authenticity (Prematurely)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 00:08:00 +0000

Are You Aware of this new movie, I'm Still Here? It is a movie in which Joaquin Phoenix, the Rich Man's Balthazar Getty, has a nervous breakdown and tries to become a rapper. It is shot in a documentarian style by Phoenix's brother-in-law Casey Affleck and chronicles the last few years of Phoenix's life, in which he publicly grew a beard and subjected people to terrible rapping and rants about celebrity and altogether made an ass of himself.

I'm Still Here has a lot of people feeling very clever, because Affleck, in his capacity as director, has recently informed the public that Phoenix was not actually undergoing a mental breakdown while the movie was filmed. Well, Of Course, we are all saying, We Knew It Was Fake! What clever people we all are today!

In fact what we are saying, when we say, "I'm Still Here is fake just like I told you it was," is that we are quite old-fashioned when it comes to this lingering Romantic notion of "authenticity." It is a very old thing, this obsession with "realness," and while authors like the confoundingly interesting David Shields may invite us to get a little bit more adventurous about it all, for the most part it is a very creaky sort of paradigm through which we are still processing it.

When we say that a movie documenting its star's breakdown is "fake" because he did the things the movie says he did but not for the reasons given, are we saying that action is not enough, that intention is what counts? Because after all, the events documented in the movie (with the exception of some faked home-movie footage) really happened, regardless of the principals' reasons for doing them.

Is it our position that Joaquin Phoenix did not really give an embarrassing interview on Letterman because he was not actually flipping out at the time in the same way that, say, Crispin Glover would have been? Can we then say that Tom Hanks did not really get his teeth capped for The Bonfire of the Vanities because he was not doing it in the name of Tom Hanks' dental health, or that Klaus Kinski did not really drag a boat up a mountain because it happened in the wrong half of the 20th century?

Those seeking to explain Phoenix and Affleck's work often refer to the concept of "performance art," that same context that James Franco was so lampooned for placing his work on General Hospital within. The reason this often fails is that if someone does not like what someone else is doing, he will like it even less if she says that it is "art," because if he is meritocratic about art or insecure about his ability to understand culture, this implies (to him) that she believes there is an inherent nobility to her work which he did not get.

To call the movie "performance art" is valid, because it puts the notion of "fakeness" in its appropriately irrelevant place: nobody would call, say, Marina Abramovic's screaming until her lungs gave out "fake" because she was doing it in the name of a pre-planned artwork instead of because she was being chased by a monster or what have you.

But even if we can excuse a work by calling it art, this basic reliance on intentions is still bothersome, because the fact remains that the work was not allowed into the canon until we knew "why" it was done. This is a troublesome and dangerous distinction to make, not least because if we only allowed ourselves to enjoy things that were "good" in the way their creator intended them to be, we would become very bored very fast.

David Simon, the creator of my current favorite thing The Wire, likes to say that most entertainment in our time works within a Shakesperian model, whereby the focus is on the inner lives of characters' thoughts and emotions; whereas his television program worked within more of a framework of Greek tragedy, whereby protagonists' outward actions and the consequences of those actions are what matters. When we penalize someone like Joaquin Phoenix for doing something like I'm Still Here, we are faulting him for what we judge to be a duplicitous inner nature, whereas we might find more value in examining our notions of celebrity, narrative and performance and seeing where his actions fit within these contexts.

But then, I haven't seen the movie because I live in New Zealand, so I may be quite wrong about all of this. Just pretend I was talking about Wayne Anderson: Singer of Songs.

Tom's New Zealand: A City Forsaken

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 06:48:00 +0000

"Not the God, but a God, at least." That's how Bill Murray describes himself after discovering that he's trapped in a purgatorial parochiality in which time never changes and his ability to predict the next few minutes marks him as a minor superhuman. The people of New Zealand don't think themselves a God (much less the God), but they have some idea who knows what's coming next, and they have a fairly good reckoning that if they just keep in touch with this entity (who must be deific in the pantheonic sense, if not the monotheistic), she [1] will be right.

That God, of course, is the numinous and omniscient "They[2]." Like the God of the Israelites, the true name(s) of God must not be uttered; They are nameless and without number. And like the God of all those who follow Abraham, They can will events simply by speaking of them: for Them to say a thing is so is to make it so. If They say it is to rain, then the washing comes in; if They expect a popular swing to the Right, the Labour party had best start arresting terrorist suspects and promising tax cuts.

But Christchurch, a city deceptively faithful to They[3], is so haunted by the motif of the impassible cup that an immovable monument to same has been erected in the town square. And just as such a cup heralds questions of divine abandonment, so the people of Christchurch, this week, have had to ask whether they have been abandoned by They.

When the woofters and wowsers of Wellington and the Aucklanders of Auckland were replacing their bricks and tram-lines with cement and cables and terrifying children with hard-sell preparedness, They assured Christchurch that this was Political Correctness Gone Mad, the Softening of Society. Christchurch kept her stone buildings and her solid frontages and her thick steel rails and her fearless youth.

And so when They turned out to have overlooked Christchurch's place on the Pacific Ring of Fire, Christchurch's people were unsure what to say. Uneasy about channelling their newly-fickle patron deity, Christchurchians ran to the words of favored son Chris Knox: across the breadth of news coverage, there were only cliches to get across the feeling. Everyone buckled down for 48 hours of equally punishing aftershocks, They having assured them that this was coming.

A brief respite, granted when They turned out to have been wrong again, turned to despair as They's assurances that the worst aftershocks were over turned out to be a third time wrong. Christchurch, unlike its namesake, had no way of predicting that it would be spoken against three times, so this was particularly galling.

It is this abandonment that Christchurch finds the hardest to deal with. The physical nature of the damage, it has overcome ably: community centers overrun with donations and contributions, even the Council had to post a "please stop helping" message on their website. Cordons and curfews, geographic and chronological concessions to They, have been dutifully obeyed, that their patron may be appeased.

But the blow to Christchurch's spirit is harder to bandage. Usually a city with a proud (some might say ostentatious) tradition of stiff-upper-lip-service, Christchurch's town paper spent a week talking as if the crisis had been so severe that the questions facing townsfolk were far more serious than whether or not we'd still get to host the Rugby [4].

When the people of Christchurch speak, they speak of They; when they have questions, they have always known that They have the answers. In a city where They saw nothing coming, and where nobody is scared of a little hard work if only They would tell them how to make everything stone-solid once more, this is the hardest thing to stomach: the notion that the earth could shake, and They would have had nothing to say about it.

[1] While the God of epistemology and teleology is Janus-like and genderless, the personification of circumstances themselves is feminine.
[2] For foundational thoughts on the nature of They I am indebted to Bill Pearson's masterful essay on the New Zealand character, Fretful Sleepers, and to my friend Cheryl Bernstein for alerting me to its existence.
[3] The Christchurchian, deeply egalitarian in his politics, spirituality and day-to-day affairs, harbours a deep-set mistrust of any one entity with too much going for them. He appreciates the effort that must have gone into creating the Universe in a week, but hanging around to dictate a book about it smacks of skiting. Civic nomenclature aside, that goes double for His son.
[4] A question nevertheless so pressing that the Press was asking it within hours of the initial tremor.