Two Years

It feels like just yesterday that I said my last goodbye to Dad, but when I think seriously about it, a lot has happened since the 16th September, 2009. I learned how to organise a funeral, I thought a lot about death and mortality and politics and society, I started writing my thesis again, I produced a play and took it on tour, I started to learn how to play a ukulele, I started to learn how to keep a garden alive, I started to learn how to collaborate properly, I became a vegetarian, I travelled abroad with my mother, I travelled abroad alone, I became an artist, curator and writer, I learned to take risks, I reopened myself to the world, I fell out of love, and I fell in love again.

When I think about it now, I think these activities of the last two years of my life are motivated by grief. I had to find ways to stay alive and present in the world in the face of such loss. I had to figure out what to do in order not to fall over in a heap.

Dad died two years ago today. I remember when he died cards came from everywhere expressing sympathy, but sometimes we received empathy cards. Often the empathy cards would say quite clearly that while they are sorry for the loss, they wanted us to know that ‘it doesn’t get any easier’. I felt as though such cards were welcoming mum and I into an exclusive club; a club for those struck by insurmountable grief, giving us the opportunity to suffer terribly forevermore along with them. This filled me with fear and dread: ‘It never gets any easier?’ I thought, ‘How will I survive?’ Two years on I guess I can say that they are right, it doesn’t get easier having lost the person. That person has gone and, as we know, no amount of wishing or hoping brings them back. But what those cards didn’t say was that if you can find a way to keep that person alive through yourself, that difficulty becomes manageable; they remain alive in the way they guide your actions, in the way you trust what they taught you and act accordingly. If this is true then I have my father to thank for the last two years of my life even though he wasn’t to help me through them. These were two of the most difficult and incredible years of my life so far. I wish he was here to share them with me, but that is impossible because since he died I have lived for him, rather than with him.

My dearest Dad. I love you. I miss you. And thank you, for everything.

Monday Morning: A Closet Drama

Dramatis Personae:

• Middle aged man, driving a bronze SUV, in sunglasses, windows up.
• Cyclist

Cyclist wends her way down Wilson Street, Darlington. She’s thinking about the craziness of her life at the moment. Past. Present. Future. Thoughts can be represented with interpretive dance. Although it is 8am the traffic is light and she’s making good time. The sun in shining. The birds are singing. Life’s good. She’s wearing a bright red coat and a bright green helmet. She has second thoughts about her outfit: she thinks she probably looks like a Christmas tree. She comes to a roundabout and sees an SUV coming up the street to her left. She thinks unconsciously ‘no worries’; she’s got right of way two times over because he’s on her left and he’s not even at the roundabout yet. She enters the roundabout. She realises that the SUV is not stopping.

Cyclist: (loudly) Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.

She slows down so the impact is not dramatic. He hits her. Luckily he’d slowed to turn the corner too. Her bike scratches the front of his car, but she comes off the bike but does not fall over. There’s a short standoff. Cyclist looks directly at the driver desiring acknowledgement of his wrong and an apology. The driver gestures impatiently for the cyclist to move on.  

Cyclist: (Loudly, gesticulating wildly) Aren’t you even going to apologise for almost running me over?

The driver, unresponsive, reverses a little in order to get around the cyclist and speeds off down the street. Cyclist looks around for recognition of this injustice, and the impertinence and gall of the man in the unnecessarily large car. Nobody is around. Cyclist rides off thinking how glad she was to not be hurt, how much she wanted to kick the car, but also glad that she is that she had restraint, because by not kicking the car she retains the moral high ground. The second wave of thoughts can also be represented with interpretive dance, but ideally dancers would have a costume change to signal that the mood of the thoughts had darkened somewhat since the incident.

THE END.

——-

Playwright’s statement: This is a follow up to Wednesday Morning, a representation of the possible harmony between Cyclists and Pedestrians in future. This drama perhaps represents the particularly toxic dimension of the current relationship between Cyclists and Drivers in Sydney from the Cyclist’s perspective.

Living

‘You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.’

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, ‘Letter #4′.

(a companion to my earlier post: ‘writing‘)

Day Dreams

This blog is rarely personal because usually I have more to say about the world than myself. I have blogged about leaf-blowers and death, politics and history, and science, meteorology and deep fried bacon. So please excuse me while I get a bit personal for a moment…

Last night I dreamt that I was a gladiator on the TV show Gladiators. I was striving to get to be selected as the one to chase the contestant up the rock-climbing wall, and violently rip them off in a dazzling display of physical strength and agility. I wasn’t selected but I had great abs and an awesome costume.

I also dreamt that I was spending a lot of time on the train, and the final destination was Bellambi Train station; I dreamt that Bellambi Train station was less like a bleak concrete platform in the middle of a suburban waste land, and more like an exotic Moroccan bathhouse on the side of a cliff on above a large sandy beach. I spent a long time reading photocopied material, naked in a bath, waiting for the train.

I also dreamt I was walking and talking with someone along a pretty path, when we were interrupted by the sudden appearances of spectres from the past and portents of the future: this simple stroll became complicated. It was not awful or frustrating, but the walk was totally interrupted, all spectres and all people dispersed, and I’m not sure what happened next.

Incoherent as all the parts of the dream are, they hold together as a whole unit: a coherent emotional story. The dream has stayed with me all day. While sitting at my desk reading about Renaissance meteorology and perfectly able to concentrate on the dense text, I felt the emotions stirred by the dream still firing throughout my body: they were circling around in my stomach, tickling the creases of my inner arms and, believe it or not, warming me just behind my eyes. Cynics will no doubt joke that I am experiencing the early symptoms of stroke. But perverse as it may seem, these dreamy vibrations feel really good. This dream mapped a large area of my emotional landscape: it wasn’t about work, love and life, it was how they  feel. My invisible interior life, that is really only visible if I blush or tremble, was translated into an entire dreamscape. I woke this morning with the implicit understanding that this dream was an inchoate representation of how I feel about several key aspects of my life as it is today (yes, including the Gladiators and the bath-house-train-station). It has left me with something to think about and work with. It was emotional epiphany of sorts even though I don’t know what I came to realise as such. So for now, I will just keep thinking, imagining and hoping. And spending my nights dreaming and my days reading and writing about meteorology.

If you made it this far, thank-you for indulging my emotional-innards blog post. I promise to return to blogging about death and carbon taxes ASAP.

Queues

During the Howard Years the label ‘queue jumper’ was applied to anyone who tried to enter Australia via ‘unofficial’ means or ‘illegal’ passage. For the most part these people are refugees. So, anyone who fled their home and country for fear of prosecution, but who also failed to fill out the correct paperwork before arriving in Australia was labelled a ‘queue jumper’. Rather than just being an offensive gaffe by some loose lipped Barnaby Joyce-type politician,forgotten well before the next election, this phrase has entered common usage in the Australian vernacular; indeed it was a phrase key in winning Howard the next election. It is a tragic misnomer for a range of reasons but most tragically in relation to refugees: one cannot queue to flee. However the phrase stuck because it made sense to a shameless majority; it played into the imaginations of many Australians who, it turns out, are afraid that the wide brown land is too small to accommodate people in need.

********

I was in a queue the other day, but it was a queue of a very different order. I was queuing for coffee at a cafe in Chippendale. But at first I didn’t see the queue. A girl walked in, looked at me, and walked straight past me to a line that was trained along the counter. This line was obviously a queue. I noticed this almost immediately and joined the queue behind the girl who had walked in after me. ‘Is this the queue?’ I asked. ‘Yes it is’, she replied quite definitely. I wasn’t too disgruntled that she was in front of me in the queue, even though I’d been at the cafe for a few minutes longer than her (and she knew that!). But it did make me think a little bit about the mundane, interpersonal politics of queues and how this might relate to the concept of the ‘queue jumper’.

My basic point is, even if you can join a queue (i.e. because you aren’t ‘fleeing’ or because it’s a sunny and peaceful Friday morning and you can wait ten more seconds for a decaf flat white), you can’t join the queue until you know where it is. Then, when you do find the queue, no one actually cares how long you’ve been looking for the queue. When you do join it you have to get on the back of the line. That’s the rule. There can be no way to register when you decide to start looking for the queue, because if you knew how to register, you’d know how to find the queue. What struck me was that the girl could have offered to let me in the line, but she didn’t. She knew where the queue was, I didn’t. She’s gotta wait too. Why would she want to wait any longer?

It is here, in this mundane, more or less every day unspoken rule, we find the base and wretched political power of the phrase ‘queue jumper’. It doesn’t matter that many of the people labelled ‘queue jumpers’ don’t even know there is a queue (if we can even speak of the wait to immigrate to Australia as a ‘queue’, as such). Furthermore, anyone seeking refugee status would not be able to queue anyway: queuing to ‘flee’ imminent danger is impossible by definition. It doesn’t matter because while you’re average joe is waiting for his morning coffee, and reading the daily tele’s latest wretched story about ‘queue jumpers’, he’s linking the idea of the refugee to his coffee queue; he’s thinking about what he’d like to do to anyone who dared extend his wait time for his mug-o-cino and using that ‘basic instinct’ to interpret the plight of those displaced by political turmoil. It may too banal and too base but I feel like there’s something in it.

I’m looking forward to watching ‘Go Back to Where You Came From‘ on SBS tonight.

Galileo versus The Galileo Movement

‘I call on the resting soul of Galileo: king of night vision, king of insight‘ – The Indigo Girls

It is with great reluctance that I write about The Galileo Movement: a conservative protest group targeting Australia’s carbon tax because anthropogenic climate change is a fallacy. The founders were inspired by Lord Monckton (the entirely discredited climate skeptic whose other claim to fame is the ‘Eternity Puzzle‘). I do not like to give oxygen to such groups, but I need to make comment. The group have chosen Galileo as their namesake because he is one of the ‘fathers of modern science’, but their reasoning is so completely bogus I cannot let it lie. They explain in more detail on their website why they selected Galileo as the figurehead:

“Taking his name, we honour his integrity and courage in championing freedom and protecting science. He replaced religious doctrine with solid observable data. His outspoken defence of truth is a rallying cry to all people valuing freedom and objective understanding of the world. His spirit guides us to ensure that we and future generations continue making the world a better place to live — by protecting the environment and making honest decisions based on factual scientific evidence.” [1]

Yesterday, in an article on The Galileo Movement and Australia’s ongoing carbon tax debate, New Matilda point out that the analogy between Galileo and Climate Skepticism is ‘clumsy, unwieldy … and the claims that (the founders) make for it seem, well, more suited to their opponents’ [2]. Clumsy and unwieldy is to say the least. It is clumsy because it doesn’t really make sense historically and I agree with this, but I think there is a much more salient reason why the analogy between Galileo and this Climate-Skeptic movement is entirely wrong-headed, historically inaccurate and tragically perverse. Galileo was a paradigm buster and The Galileo Movement are the opposite (and not in that annoying paradoxical way where ‘opposite’ actually means ‘the same’. I mean they are not even really related they are so totally opposed).

Galileo was one of several key sixteenth and seventeenth century scientists–along with Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newtown–whose discoveries were fundamental in instituting the great ‘The Paradigm Shift’[3] and creating the modern world. The development of scientific method was an important aspect of the paradigm shift in which Western humanity was (or still is) transported from a predominantly Religious worldview to a Secular-Scientific worldview. The cosmological and ideological implications of Copernican Heliocentrism are key to understanding Galileo’s particularly important contribution to modern science: Copernicus’s maths and Galileo’s telescopes, among other things, shifted our cosmological worldview from a closed geocentric classical world to what would eventually become the open infinite modern universe. Copernicus deduced that, due to irregularities in the position of stars in the sky, it is was more likely that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. Galileo’s telescope, among other things, helped make Copernican theory an observable reality.

It is difficult to overestimate the scale of the shift instituted by discoveries like these. They changed the entire Western world. The explicit reason why Copernican mathematics and Galilean astronomy was so totally radical and dangerous is because it quite literally destabilised the institutional authority of the Church and State. And even if it was not his explicit intent, Galileo was arrested because his discoveries fundamentally undermined all institutional authority. Classical Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology undergirded the Church and State in Italy in the seventeenth century; these institutions were literally thought to be a reflection of a divine God-given natural order. The basic tenets of Helocentrism undermined this entire political worldview.

Galileo and and men like him are often championed as great heros who believed in Scientific Truth rather than God. But, in fact, these men were all quite religious and pursued their lines of enquiry despite the clear ‘conflict of interest’ between what they believed about the world a religious sense and what their discoveries revealed about the world in a scientific sense. Both Copernicus and Newton, for example, went to great lengths to translate their discoveries into a scriptural paradigm [4]. There is great debate about whether they did it subversively to allow the ‘truth’ to triumph and avoid arrest, or whether they believed so totally in both paradigms they could not understand how the two could be distinct. Either way, these thinkers were deeply troubled by the discoveries and they contended personally and politically with the incommensurability between what they believed and what they discovered.

Here we find the radical difference between Galileo and The Galileo Movement. The Galileo Movement is a conservative movement and it is aimed at preservation and protection of the current worldview. There is no great space between what these people believe about the world and what they know about the world. In fact they have built their movement on keeping the two as close together as possible. They say they are operating in the name of truth, fact and science but fundamentally the protection of their worldview is what is at stake here. They do not want their vision of the world to change, they aim to protect it at all costs. Their mandate quite clear on this issue. To quote from their website:

“The Galileo Movement seeks to protect Australians and our future in five areas:
- Protect freedom - personal choice and national sovereignty;
- Protect the environment;
- Protect science and restore scientific integrity;
- Protect our economic security;
- Protect people’s emotional health by ending Government and activists’ constant destructive bombardment of fear and guilt on our kids and communities.“[5]

They seek to protect not only science but the nation, our emotions, our economy and our environment. There is no protective impulse in the mathematical equations of Copernicus, and there is no protective impulse Galileo’s telescopes. While The Galileo Movement invokes science in the name of a protecting an established worldview. Galileo’s discoveries instituted a radical destabilisation of worldview. The Galileo Movement is in this sense summoning a mutant version of the Galilean spirit in name only. It is in this sense that the analogy between the Galileo Movement and Galileo is clumsy and unwieldy. And it is in this sense that the name Galileo may be better suited as the ‘Spirit Guide’ for the progressive side of the debate.

******

What is complex here is that the ‘discovery’ of anthropogenic Climate Change institutes a similar kind of paradigm shift in our world today. Climate Change creates a radical fissure between how we generally conceive of the world and how it is. The current political paradigm is radically undermined by the discoveries of anthropogenic climate change. And it is very disturbing and challenging to try and contend with what this means for humans and our existence in the world. The Galileo Movement do not contend with our current difficulty like Galileo and Copernicus and Newton contended with theirs. They avoid it, they recoil in fear. Naomi Klein explored this precise issue back in March on Democracy Now. I quote her at length because she is so clear as to how and why this is the case:

“Why is climate change seen as such a threat (by right-wing ideologues)? I don’t believe it’s an unreasonable fear. I think it is … unreasonable to believe that scientists are making up the science. They’re not. It’s not a hoax. But actually, climate change really is a profound threat to a great many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. So, in fact, if you really wrestle with the implications of the science and what real climate action would mean, here’s just a few examples what it would mean.

Well, it would mean upending the whole free trade agenda, because it would mean that we would have to localize our economies, because we have the most energy-inefficient trade system that you could imagine. And this is the legacy of the free trade era. So, this has been a signature policy of the right, pushing globalization and free trade. That would have to be reversed. You would have to deal with inequality. You would have to redistribute wealth, because this is a crisis that was created in the North, and the effects are being felt in the South. So, on the most basic, basic, “you broke it, you bought it,” polluter pays, you would have to redistribute wealth, which is also against their ideology. You would have to regulate corporations. You simply would have to. I mean, any serious climate action has to intervene in the economy. You would have to subsidize renewable energy, which also breaks their worldview. You would have to have a really strong United Nations, because individual countries can’t do this alone. You absolutely have to have a strong international architecture.

So when you go through this, you see, it challenges everything that they believe in. So they’re choosing to disbelieve it, because it’s easier to deny the science than to say, “OK, I accept that my whole worldview is going to fall apart,” … Imagine actually contending with that. It’s a lot easier to deny it.” [6]

The Galileo Movement are not choosing to accept that their worldview is falling apart, on the contrary Galileo rigorously pursued the tensions between the the competing world views [7]. The Galileo Movement are choosing to ignore the widespread scientific consensus or the ‘proof’, Galileo invented the telescope in order to prove Copernicus’ heliocentric theory [8] The Galileo Movement is stubbornly attatched to an old worldview, Galileo was a pioneer of a new one.

What I want to say to conclude this long post is that I think that the important thing to remember is that Climate Change is a political issue. While often you hear that Climate Change is beyond politics, what Galileo can show us is that modern science has been, from the beginning, a politically charged issue. No scientific fact is impervious to politics. And the only way to talk about Climate Change today is to talk about it in tandem with the enormous and radical political paradigm shift required in order for us to do anything real about it.

[1] galileomovement.com.au/

[2] http://newmatilda.com/2011/05/18/roll-over-galileo

[3] The term coined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of the Scientific Revolution

[4] (Isaac Newton was also a total babe with amazing hair).

[5] galileomovement.com.au/

[6] http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/9/my_fear_is_that_climate_change

[7] Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632

[8] It’s worth noting here that Galileo wasn’t exactly right either. He did not get as far as infinity. His universe was still closed, it is just that the earth was not at the centre. This, of course, has interesting implications for how we understand ‘truth’ in a scientific context.

Cars

I have spent the day trying to construct a talk about my WALK project for The Right to the City Symposium this weekend. My project is entitled “walking in the rain” and is, as it says it is, a walk in the rain. The walk will happen rain, hail or shine along the Cooks River in Canterbury. I chose the site because of a range of reasons, but largely because the river is one enormous drain. Also I thought it would be interesting to think about rain in the city in relation to the infrastructure designed to drain it all away. I’ve been trying to think about my work in terms of the politics of storm water management, private property and urban planning. But it is really hard to construct a talk about a work that is not yet finished. So today I’ve been easily distracted from this task by Google Images, Flickr and YouTube. I was looking for engineered urban river systems, to help me think differently the particularities of the Cooks River system.

When thinking of urban waterways The Seine and the Thames of course came to mind, as did New York’s Hudson River. But as soon as I saw the picture I realised that the Los Angeles River is really the most extraordinarily stark example of a river that has been engineered in order to suit the water management needs of a modern industrialised city.

Los Angeles River

It is the epitome of ugliness and hasty, unsustainable urban planning. But it is also spectacular in its own way; for me the scale of the concrete system is almost sublime. It is a drain that is so big that it is iconic. But this is not what this post is actually about. This post is about cars. The Cars that Flooded Toowoomba.

In the process of looking for my urban riverscapes, I came across a video of the Toowoomba flash flood from earlier in the year. This footage was replayed over and over on TV at the time, probably under the headline ‘Inland Tsunami’, but I had never heard the original audio until today. The audio is a discussion between a group of colleagues, one holding the camera and the rest looking on in awe, while the flood waters rush into their work’s car park.

If you watched the video, did you notice that the discussion only refers to the flood waters a couple of times? Did you notice that for the majority of the clip entirely about the cars parked in the car park? This struck me as a telescoping of all media representation of disasters; ‘Nature’s’ fury doesn’t make sense to us unless pictured in relation with what ‘she’s’ furious with, in this case it’s the cars. Watching the footage of the Tsunami in Japan recently was the same for me; bridges crushing boats, suburbs of houses swirling around together like crumbs in a sink hole were the things that enabled me, with my limited human capacity, to begin to understand the scale of the non human wave.

While I think it is a banal, base and impulsive response, and (in the Toowoomba clip at least) it is also a funny response, it is nonetheless meaningful. If there was nothing meaningful in that relation between the natural event (wave, flood, storm) and the damage (houses, bridges, cars) what’s the difference between the footage of the Tsunami and images or footage of Niagara Falls? The ‘disaster’ is the relationship between the two. In fact, one scale for measuring the force of a tornado turns the basic human perspective into a kind of scientific method: the Fujita Scale measures the intensity of the cyclone by the amount of human infrastructure and vegetation it destroyed.  For me the video of the flood in Toowoomba is a wonderful example of this curious human reflex.

As someone trying to write a thesis about a storm, I actually long for the opposite to be true. My entire thesis tries to circumvent this basic impulse to account for the human and not the storm. I am in engaged in a struggle to account for the storm itself; but then most of my observations have to begin with the drama of human perspectives that plays out within it/beside it/below it. I wonder what would need to be different for the basic reflex to be the opposite? I wonder what it would take for most of us non-experts to be able to imagine the storm instead of the broken power lines, the bush fire instead of the roadblock, the wave instead of the devastated town and the flood waters instead of the cars (the rising sea-levels instead of the politics?).

*******

But how to link this impulse to focus on the cars in Toowoomba anyway to my day of thinking about urban storm water management? Here’s an idea. Our cities are built on the promise that we can manage the rain water. But, as French theorist Paul Virilio once stated that the invention of the train was also, in the same instance, the invention of the train wreck; by extension, the invention of the drain in some sense is also the invention of the flood.[1] When the drains fail, be it the drain in the bathroom or the network of drains in the state of Queensland, it is logical that we take note of the damage to the things that the drain was supposed to keep dry. And perhaps recognise the drain itself as a mediator of the relationship between the flood waters and the damaged property; the drain/riverdrain is the conduit of meaning. The drain in this sense is meaningful.[2] But meaningful how? I hope the meaning of the drain and its relevance to my my WALK project, to The Right to the City and to my talk on Saturday will emerge in a dream tonight. Sorry to leave this one hanging.

[1] all machines can be viewed in this way: plane/plane crash, ship/shipwreck, car/car crash. In fact perhaps it is just the industrialised version of Life/Death. Hmmm. That’s food for thought.

[2] It reminds me of this quote from the first episode of Treme “Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster, but what happened in New Orleans was a man made catastrophe of epic fucking proportions”.

War Games

There is much to be said about Operation Odyssey Dawn, the US’s name for the UN sanctioned strikes against Libya. We could start with its decidedly impractical name: How about Operation Support Civilian Protesters? I guess it is likely that Odyssey Dawn is more honest, the first phase of yet another potentially long term military odyssey for the US and its allies. However, on the 8th anniversary of the Coalition of the Willing’s illegal invasion of Iraq, and just over 24 hours into the military action against Libya, I simply want to focus on this image I found on the Sydney Morning Herald website earlier this morning.

Taken from the Sydney Morning Herald Website 20th March, 2011

Just a few days ago, I was discussing with a friend how reprehensible the mainstream media’s coverage of “Shock and Awe” was. I recalled how even though the days preceding the invasion were overwhelmed by mass global debate and protest, as soon as the bombing began, the politics fell out of the mainstream press. By “politics” I mean the US’s  (and the rest of the Coalition’s) Defiance of the UN, the fabrication of the reason for going to war, the massive resistance to the invasion from the citizens of the US, UK, Australia to name a few, and the conflict of military and business interests that Iraq presented the billionaire’s club Bush administration. On the day of the invasion all of this politics was trumped by the spectacular fireworks display that was the invasion bombing of Baghdad. The “Shock and Awe” campaign was designed to send shockwaves through the Iraqi population in order to lubricate the regime change (and wholesale privatisation of the state) [1], but also the “Shock and Awe” was replicated for us to marvel at on TV, only at a much safer distance. It was like some spectacular war game, people I remember would go home after work to “watch the war”. We are right to be angry and cynical about the media representation of the early days of the Iraq war, it was explicitly designed to distract us from the politics. Indeed, that the way in which the mainstream media lapped up the idea of “Shock and Awe” in those early days is possibly the one success story of the invasion. But, the spectacularisation of the invasion of Iraq makes a perverse kind of sense given the objectives of the Coalition; shameful and criminal as it was and still is, Iraq was designed to be shamelessly dazzling. This is not the same in Libya.

In Libya we have a popular uprising violently repressed by a militant dictator, and a concerned international community ‘intervening’ to support the people; or so they say. It is in the meaningful difference between Iraq and Libya that caused my despair upon seeing these images. The series of images captures the destruction one of Gaddafi’s jets, shot down by allied forces enforcing the no fly zone in order to attempt to thwart Gaddafi’s violent backlash against his own people. It is not the destruction of the jet that disturbs me so, it is the captions–”going”, “going”, “gone”–as though the plane was the highest bidder at a high-stakes military auction. For me the captions are an example of a particularly problematic, patronising, post-Shock and Awe, western gaze.

The captions serve no practical purpose; we can tell that the plane is crashing, crashing, crashed without them. While they do not tell us anything about the image itself, they do add something to it. Even though I have no idea who actually created the captions and for what purpose, these captions are fundamentally political. They adopt a moral high ground and neutralise debate around the military action by tacitly assuming that the Allied forces are doing what is right and that whomsoever the soldiers were in that plane got what was coming to them for siding with the enemy. In fact, less than 24hours into this conflict, the captions suggest war itself is a kind of fun game that they are already confidently winning. There is a kind of excitement imbedded in the destruction of this enemy target. The captions, it could be argued, have the same dehumanised tone as the soldiers caught on the wikileaks Collateral Murder video. It seems to me that these images with such playful captions is more at home on some right-wing pro-war discussion board than on a mainstream news website. To me these captions are the journalistic equivalent of Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” speech, only it is perhaps even more pre-emptive. One plane shot down and, mission accomplished, Gaddafi is going, going, gone. Not quite. Not even close.

This war that is less than 24hours old so much is unknown, when and how Gaddafi will retaliate is unknown and the effects are yet to be determined, except for the stated goal of trying to get Gaddafi to stop attacking the civilian protesters other Western interests remain undeclared (Oil?), will the action actually assist anti-government protesters in the end, and how many civilians will die in this process. In spite of the fact that the allied forces successfully shot down one plane with one of the 110 missiles used in the first day of conflict, what will happen in Libya is unknown. At this stage we can only hope that the hubris displayed by our anonymous caption-editor is not the same as those planning the battle, or we might find that it is another Iraq or Afghanistan dawning in North Africa.

*****

[1] “Shock and Awe is often presented as merely a strategy of overwhelming firepower, but the authors of the doctrine see it as much more than that: it is, they claim, a sophisticated psychological blueprint aimed ‘directly at the public will of the adversary to resist’ … With clear echoes of the CIA’s interrogation manuals, ‘Shock and Awe’ states, “In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events”

“Iraq … was the logical conclusion of Chicago School theory: a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees, mostly contract workers, living in a Halliburton city state, tasked with signing corporate-friendly laws drafted by KPMG and handing out duffle bags of cash to Western contractors protected by mercenary soldiers, themselves shielded by full legal immunity. All around them were furious people, increasingly turning to religious fundamentalism because it is the only source of power in a hollowed out state. Like Russia’s gangsterism and Bush’s cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatise the world.”

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.333 & 359

Post script: I spent today at two rallies unrelated to the Libyan conflict: Free Bradley Manning and No more Coal Mines/No Coal Seam Gas. Images here.

The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra

The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra’s first international gig was at The Oxford Art Factory in Sydney on Friday 25th January, 2011. And it was, in a word, delightful. Nine ukuleles and a double bass filled the small stage, as this troupe of talented kiwis charmed the heads off everyone in the sold-out audience. The WIUO is unpretentious, tongue-in-cheek charm meets actual musical talent.

The tongue in cheek obviously begins with the title, which itself is parody compounded upon parody. Wellington is New Zealand’s third largest city, about 380000 people, on the southern tip of New Zealand’s north island; it is the capital city of the land down under The Land Down Under. It is well known that Australia has drained NZ of all its major claims to fame; Crowded House, Jane Campion and Russell Crowe for example. Leaving NZ with apparently nothing but sheep and bungee jumping to lure the crowds. This apparent lack of appeal, when properly harnessed, paradoxically begets massive appeal. They’re the underdog’s underdog. So, in the same vain as Flight of the Conchords, the orchestra capitalises on the perception of New Zealand as some parochial nowhere land at the end of middle earth, and proudly redesigns that apparent geographical deficiency as the key selling point  [1]. Australians will have a difficult time divorcing these folks from Aotearoa.

Then there is the fact that they also claim to be “international”. How is it possible that anything so insular and isolated can be “international”? The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra are the small town equivalent a real or imagined monuments for an “international” order that does not have a corresponding reality. They trade on some shared unconscious perception that it is a modern technological miracle that people in Wellington can know anything at all about the outside world. But they also play up that particular perception of New Zealanders as parochial, humble and polite; they are ironic and entirely self aware of their performance of supreme un-selfaware dweebiness. And as a result, it seems, they have international appeal.

Then, of course, there is the important fact that “they” are a “ukulele orchestra”. The ukulele currently is enjoying some time in the lime light, it is the instrument de jour, I have now one and so, it seems, does everyone else. But, the ukulele is a long way away from having the cultural cachet of the violin or piano. The uke is not the main instrument in an orchestra, and the ukulele player is not considered a virtuoso. You couldn’t, for instance, make a film like The Red Violin about an equivalently valuable Red Ukulele lusted over by Samuel L. Jackson and follow its travels around the world over four hundred years. Likewise, Michael Haneke’s fantastic psychodrama The Piano Teacher would not quite pack the same punch, so to speak, if Isabelle Huppert was just a crazy ukulele teacher. It’s strength is that it is low brow, and that it is humorously small and oddly tuned. The uke is both the sound of a the hawaiian sunset and of the minstrel clown, it looks like a baby’s guitar but the strings, G-C-E-A, do not gradually increase in pitch, but rather start on a high G, and then drop to the C below and then climb up again. The fact that this is a entire orchestra of ukes simply compounds all these general oddities. And, of course, the amazing thing about the WIUO is that they are pretty damn orchestral, their songs are “arranged”, with different complimentary parts designed to produce a complex and holistic sound. There is the richness of sound created, as if by aural illusion, by a the nine ukes and a single Double Bass that operates as a rhythm section, only several octaves lower than the the rest. There is also, as in any orchestra or rock band, the epic ukulele solos where the lead uke-ist takes centre stage and completely rocks out, only, on a uke, almost inaudibly, with strange dweeby attention to detail.

Then there is the repertoire. Which is where the real genius lies: the charm, the irony, the dagginess, the orchestral talent, the Wellington-ness, the international ukuleles! They are essentially the world’s most amazing covers band. They played two sets which included some absolute classics and unlikely slices of trashy awesomeness – Dolly Parton’s Jolene, John Farnahm’s You’re the Voice (their special tribute to Australian music history), Salt n’ Pepa’s Push It, The Smith’s This Charming Man,  Bonnie Tyler’s It’s a Heartache, and … drum roll please … Toto’s mega power ballad Africa. The experience of listening to the orchestra play these songs, for tragic karaoke-lovers such as myself, is like a giant collective karaoke session. But the most joyful hilarious version of karaoke.  Have a listen their version of Africa here, and sing along!

Fortunately for the Orchestra, unfortunately for me, it was sold out by the time I sat down to invite people. Next time I won’t be so tardy. This is the kind of event you wanna share with all your favourite people.

[1] So similar is the sense of humour between Flight of the Concords and TWIUO, I was not surprised that Bret from Flight of the Conchords is actually a member of the orchestra, playing with them whenever he can.

Wednesday Morning: A Closet Drama

Dramatis Personae:

• Grandpa – MID 60s
• Grandaughter – 5 or 6
• Cyclist

The intersection of a bike path and pedestrian crossing. Grandpa is walking his grandaughter to school. They approach the pedestrian crossing at the same time as the cyclist. Cyclist stops. Grandpa and Granddaughter cross bikepath and road. As they are crossing the road the dialogue starts.

GRANDAUGHTER: Bicyclists stop for pedestrians.

GRANDPA: Sometimes.

Cyclist rides out of earshot.

THE END.

********

Playwright’s Statement:

I wrote this play because I feel it captures the possibility for the public opinion of cyclists to change in future, even if not in my lifetime. As a cyclist I am constantly confronted by angry pedestrians and motorists who believe that cyclists are there simply to make their day more difficult. Here the hope that things will change is represented as an intergenerational possibility; public opinion can change, but change is gradual. Perhaps cyclists need to be ok with this. We cannot hope for the attitude to change straight away, but perhaps take comfort in the knowledge that it might someday. The urtext is, of course, King Lear. Lear dramatises the transition of the kingdom; in Wednesday Morning we see the roads transitioning to the cyclists, “The younger rises when the old doth fall” says Edmund. Except my play expresses the hope that things will turn out better in the end, and whether or not Lear is a fundamentally hopeful play is debatable. Adapting Lear is a monolithic task for any playwright, I guess this is why I chose to get it out of the way early in my career. My main aim in adapting Lear was to strip back Shakespeare’s main plot to its bare bones, and represent it in a shorter form in line with the desires of contemporary audiences. I might add that this is verbatim theatre; there is a kernel of truth within it and it is that kernel that I aimed to represent in the work. I hope you enjoy the show.