Fun with PR

The sort institutions and media outlets that receive press releases, are the sort of organisations that are highly unlikely to take any notice of a website created by someone they never heard of that doesn't have a commercial angle and hasn't had any press already. Media outlets especially, typically don't give press to anything that would make the story by doing so, they want there to be a story there already. And in general I have found that professional organisations work with mental scripts; if something doesn't arrive from a channel they recognise or in familiar form, they cannot make any sense out of it, regardless of what it might actually be.

Such it is with the new website I just finished, Melbourne Street Art 86.

Aspects of the site would seemingly be an ideal resource for tourists interested in street art, but I soon discovered a number of websites related to Melbourne tourism, that could in theory have an interest in the site, have shuttered doors and windows for email contact... with the exception of a hatch ready to receive press releases. Okay, I thought, I may as well do one of those for the site. And it might be fun too... in fact, doing it felt a little like like dressing up in one of those period outfits with big frills around the neck, when actually you are just a dude in a tee shirt with a serious minded attitude to a project.

And much as it felt silly doing it, because Melbourne Street Art 86 is something I  put together in my spare time for fun, not some slick operation housed in a mirrored glass office building staffed by I-phone toting clones, it is a legitimate website of use to the public with a certain bit of polish. So why not do the PR thing like the big boys do... is what I have to communicate any less important than those in whose shadow I walk?

So this is one of those curious contradictions - a press release that is a kind of parody of a press release as much as it is a genuine press release too.

It is not hard to make something look as though it is a press release from a major organisation, though this one is a little more flowery than most of those. I just looked at a few on line and whipped this up in about 15 minutes on Word. I also added some sample maps and guide pages, which I won't show here (see the site, they are on most suburb pages).

It is a little like those shows when the heroes flash fake FBI badges and act the part and everyone treats them like they real thing. Except I doubt that will happen here.

I had a bit of a chuckle today wondering what some of the places I sent this too, including a couple of newspapers, will make of it, when it looks at first scan a little like something from big street and then they read it is a community website that gives everything away for free and has a URL of "blogspot.com'.

Those sort of things shouldn't really matter, but often enough in our sort of world, they do.

Perfection and collection

I recently read the autobiography of Ronnie Corbett, And It's Goodnight from Him, which is also a part biography of his partner in comedy performance, Ronnie Barker who passed away in 2005.

For those from other lands and times of upbringing, Corbett and Barker were The Two Ronnies. They had a comedy sketch and variety show on the BBC for about 15 years during the seventies and eighties. At one stage it had over 20 million viewers - something that, given the multiple media channels of today, is never likely to be seen again in the United Kingdom (something Corbett points out). Apart from their work on The Two Ronnies, they also had long and successful careers as comic actors and performers, and in Barker's case, he also undertooksome dramatic roles in film to great acclaim towards the end of his life.

In the book, Ronnie Corbert highlights two aspects of his deceased partner's character a number of times - his perfectionism in his professional life - mostly writing and performing comedy of various types - and his passion for collecting antiques, postcards and other such things.

It rather struck me in recent days that it was an interesting coincidence that I was reading about these qualities in someone else during the past two weeks, when I have very much been experiencing them in myself across the same time period. The reason why is that I have been away from this blog for the best part of that time putting together a website that is a sort of guide to street art on Melbourne's 86 tram route (the last post is all about it, and how it came about). Prior to that time I was also working on the project, though with not quite the same intensity.

Perfectionism and collecting have, during that period, been quite central feature of my existence, as has been the case before when I have been deeply engaged in bringing a project to fruition.

The perfectionism has manifested in a hunger to drive the website ever further towards being greater in scope and more fully realised in creative and functional vision - essentially the most comprehensive site possible showcasing street art on the 86 tram and with sense of polish and attention to detail I had not entirely imagined when I commenced the project. For that, it was necessary to collect more examples of street art with my camera, which in turn meant multiple evening and weekend explorations in different light conditions, of various roads, lanes and alleys in seven Melbourne suburbs. I wasn't just looking for more examples to collect for the site, I was also looking for the right conditions in different locations to get photographs that were full lit and clear or showed the works off to their best advantage - something that is very difficult with changing weather conditions and numerous different orientations of the works and shadow conditions at different times of the day.

The thing about perfectionism, I find at least, is that it is not necessarily about getting the work perfect, not really - at least with a creative project rather than the construction of a pre designed object, you do not entirely know the outcome of in the beginning. You don't know what perfect is when you start; you have to work enough on the project to see what perfect might be. So perfectionism, it seems to me in this circumstance, is fueled by the constant discovery of more you can do as you complete each iteration or version of a project and thus can see more clearly what the subject of your energies and attention could become. Collecting somehow marries with that process too, because what you often notice in that drive for perfectionism, it what the project lacks in order to more fully realised, and that triggers a desire to find or create something to fill the gap.

Anyway, the site is basically finished now, allowing for a few things that need to be done that are more extras and touch ups, than something essential.

I suppose it is quite possible I was taken by some kind of mania in attempting to bring this project to fruition in a short space of time (I had to get it done quickly, because I have other things do do), and I ponder a little whether what I have created has the value I hope it does as a community resource for Melbourne residents and tourists interested in street art. But the great thing about this project in particular is that a completed website, whatever its value, isn't the only benefit I have ended up with.

I have spent many summer evenings and days outside walking, exploring and photographing when I would normally be in front of the computer or sitting in a chair somewhere; I have got to take a lot of photographs, improve with my use of the camera and build up a sizable number of shots not related to street art from all the photo opportunities I saw on the way - which I had wanted to do anyway over the summer; and lastly I have lost quite a bit of weight and am now fit enough to run for a tram without getting out of breath from all that walking.

Perfection and collection could be the death of some, but fortunately in this case it wasn't the death of me, it was actually quite the opposite.

Melbourne Street Art 86

The following is a cross post from the new website I have set up for the photographs I have been taking of street art along the Melbourne 86 tram route - it is a kind of visual guidebook. Accordingly I will be removing the pages for this I had on this site (there never really belonged here as they are all about the work of others, not something I have taken the time to do myself).

The site can be found at:

www.melbournestreetart86.blogspot.com

Reading the post over there will probably make more sense, as it refers to some aspects of the site, but it is also the blogpost on this site for today, as its tone and fascinations closely reflect the sort of thing I often post on here.





Welcome

Its funny how ideas and inclinations develop sometimes.

And its an odd thing how something can be all around you but you just don't see it. Human beings tend to follow scripts - familiar patterns of perception - and there are times when following these scripts makes us blind to the most obvious things.

To give you an example, I once trained as a fire warden and the trainer asked us what we thought people typically did in a fire.

"Run away", we all said.

"No, what they usually do is go towards it." and he showed us a video of numerous examples of people doing just that, including a women taking a pram with a young child into a convenience store that was going up in flames. Most of us have no script for what to do in a fire, and many of us can miss the obvious in many other circumstances for much the same reasons.

At least that is my excuse...

I had no idea until recently, that Melbourne is one of the major street art capitals in the world, and the work of its streets artists is a major tourist attraction. I also knew very little about street art. I had seen photos of it and heard about it in the news, mostly in relation to Banksy whose art very much appealed to my political sensibilities, but I wasn't really aware of how significant and widespread an art form it has become. 

It had never occurred to me there was much street art in my home city or to go exploring to see what was there. It certainly never occurred to me that the 86 tram that I take to and from work each day passes through areas with some of the richest concentrations of these vivid and evocative images in the city.

The reason I made this belated discovery is that I bought a small but effective digital camera in November 2012 and have spent many evenings and weekend days since roaming my local area and parts of city taking photographs. With a digital camera you can just snap away happily at anything that sits pleasingly in the frame. 

The first day I went out with the camera -back in late November -  in my home suburb of Northcote, I caught the following on film.

Street Artist working on piece at the South end of Eastment Street in Northcote in November 2012

It is quite possible this formed a kind of seed somewhere in my unconscious mind, but at the time I thought not much of it. As I took more and more photographs I started to look through them, partly searching for themes among them that might make interesting blog pots for my new website. After a while I started to notice how many street art pieces I had either photographed directly or caught accidentally in frame.

I also started to notice how similar a lot of this art was to the illustrations I had tried to create when I was a computer graphic artists in the early 1990s. I became more curious and read a little more into it.

Often dreamlike, vivid, striking and highly imaginative, it is an art form uniquely of our era, postmodern at times but often very cutting politically and expressive of the conscious and unconscious landscape of our times, in particular for those not part of the mainstream of our society. It breaks the convention of art belonging only in a frame and being coveted in the homes of those affluent enough to afford the work available in galleries and shows. Street art is never exclusive, it is always available in its original form to anyone who takes the time to find its location. It also has the power to transform dull or blank surfaces and entire buildings into something unique. In areas of where it is has become common it has often been embraced by the local community as bringing colour and life to the urban environment. For some street art has become a part of local culture to view with pride...

Though in others it has instilled anger and calls for increasingly harsh retribution and many local councils are forced to spend millions of dollar removing it and its sometimes inseparable cousin, graffiti, from the environment.

Street art is highly controversial as it is created in public or semi public spaces, often upon the walls and surfaces of private property. Some street art is created with the permission of owners, but not all. Anything that claims and re-invents a space owned or considered private property is likely to clash with our society and its laws and mores elevating property rights and the fruits of material gain far above more human considerations. Street artists caught practicing their art without permission can be looking at a two year jail sentence, a pretty stiff punishment considering the sorts of crimes that attract far less penalties.

There is also the issue of whether street art is vandalism, eyesores that citizens are forced to endure as they go about their daily lives. Some feel this way about even the most intricate and beautiful examples of the form. And where does the perhaps less than pleasant effect of multiple messy, badly executed tags making a wall look like a mess of dirty scribbles, cross over into something that is art. Is there a black and white difference between the tagger who starts with brief scrawls and with time begins to produce more thoughtful and generous work that the community might admire and enjoy? 

With these thoughts developing. I started to work on a blog post about street art and as I progressed, I felt I needed photographs of more examples and indeed needed see them myself to understand more about what I was writing about. So I started to explore along the Northern suburbs the 86 tram route passes through, and found more and more examples to study and photograph in side streets off the tram route and hidden in alley ways beyond. Before long I had nearly 400 photographs; far too much material for a single blog post. 

Hence I created some pages on my personal website to show case what I had found and realising my personal website was not the best place to include large amounts of the work of other artists, I soon decided to create a separate website.

There are already many other websites that showcase and explore street art; I felt that to legitimately add to what was already on the web I needed to have some kind of theme or focus. I had already been working on creative project relating to Melbourne public transport - in this case Melbourne train stations - so it was perhaps a nature progression to build my site around the street art to be found on a particular tram route that is rich in examples of the form.

Thus perhaps I went from a single photograph taken of a street artist last November to an entire website. It may well evolve with time. I have a mind to add my own comments and reaction to some of the art and add essays and links to interviews and articles. With many other projects to work on this year, including a book for an American publisher, the fruits of such notions may be some time coming. For the time being I will mainly be working on photographing and presenting the street art in Melbourne and Clifton Hill I have not yet had time to explore and also completely street art maps for the suburbs other than Fitzroy, which I have already completed. As I update the site with this or other things I will add posts on in this blog space.

For now, whatever this site may become, it is basically a kind of online guide book or selective journey along the 86 tram route, hopefully giving inspiration to others to hop on an 86 one morning and spend an enriching and enjoyable day hopping off the tram from time to time to seek out some of the wonders I have show cased here, and perhaps explore further afield and make some discoveries of their own.

best wishes

Kevin Anslow

Northcote, Melbourne

2d or not 2d?

I was, I have to admit, until recently a 3d cinema skeptic.  I saw a number of releases in the format in the year or so after Avatar came out, until I finally gave up bothering with it. Avatar wasn't bad, but in the main all I found 3d movies did for me was leave me with a bit of headache, make the film look kind of wishy washy and left a larger hole in my wallet because of the inflated 3d ticket price. In exchange I got the occasional scene where something looked a bit more 3d than usual and a lot of scenes where it didn't seem to make much difference or it was downright annoying.

These days I am a reborn 3d enthusiast. I look forward to seeing a select few films in 3d in the cinema and re-watching them at home on blu ray.

What exactly made me see the light? There were three main reasons.

Firstly I discovered that there is a massive difference between films actually made using 3d cameras and processes and those faked as an afterthought.  3d cameras are able to provide an illusion of a third dimension on the screen by mimicking the way our two eyes see slightly different viewpoints on objects and scenes. In everyday life the brain does the integration of the two images into a 3d impression. In the cinema the polarising glasses we wear (at least in Australia) create a similar effect (a more detailed explanation can be found here).

So, if the film is actually filmed with 3d cameras there is a second set of visual information that can be integrated to create the effect, because the camera has two lenses set apart in the equivalent fashion to ours in our heads. And although computer graphic animated films such as Toy Story weren't output in 3d originally, the 2d image was generated from 3d modelling software and the data can be reprocessed to output two images at different angles to create exactly the same effect as if it had been filmed using a 3d camera.

Many contemporary 3d films are not actually filmed in 3d, they are converted in post production. A movie filmed in 2d does not have a second set of visual information, it is extrapolated or essentially faked using software.  Basically something is made out of nothing, and I think it is safe to say that most of the time the approach does not work very well. Here is an article about contemporary 3d pioneer bemoaning the post production conversion process often used for today's blockbusters. 

The second factor towards my conversion was that it dawned on me that 3d, like any other aspect of film, might well be a different animal in the hands of different filmmakers. The director and production team need to both take the time and care and have or develop the skills to use the medium effectively. Besides using 3d judicially (eg not having things jumping dramatically out of screen every two minutes) and in a way that enhances the film, rather than replaces it with a cheap thrill, there are a whole host of technical aspects.

For example, sets for 3d films have to brightly lit and darkness added where needed in post production; filmmakers have to be able to think in different ways from when making traditional format films.  All these factors must come together successfully with the story and acting for the film to be effective. In that respect it is no different from any other film but there is more and different things to be considered and not all filmmakers are going to pull this off. 

Even at home using the active shutter technology I find the 3d in Tron Legacy often does not come off as well as it could do, and there are other examples. However, watch Martin Scorsese's film Hugo in 3d and it is a very different experience, he somehow uses the 3d effect to create a vivid and enchanting vision of the world of early twentieth century Paris and echo the intricacy of clockwork mechanisms central to the film's story. Ridley Scott's Prometheus uses 3d fairly subtlety, but effectively to enhance the other worldly nature of the alien environments the film is set in. In director Werner Herzog's documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams about prehistoric cave paintings in France, the 3d effect gives the viewer an impression and understanding of the contours and textures of the paintings  upon rock that would never be possible in a 3 format.  

So yes, a lot of 3d movies might be of less than sterling quality, and trying to bring a wider  audiences by using 3d as a gimmick, but there is nothing new about there being films around that rely on special effects rather than creative care and substance.  

The third factor that converted me from a 3d skeptic was that I bought a new computer monitor that is 3d compatible and it uses a different technology from that used in the cinema -active shutter glasses. Rather than polarising glasses that make light pass through at a certain angle to integrate the two sets of visual information, these glasses only show one frame to each eye at a time at a rate too rapid for the brain to notice, which has a similar effect. When I started to watch 3d movies on this monitor at home, I found the 3d effect was much much better than in the cinema. Suddenly I was actually watching 3d movies over and over again because I was entranced by what I was seeing.

I don't for a moment expect that 3d will replace traditional 2d movies entirely, and as a home experience at least, it is not yet an particularly affordable way of enjoying movies - if you don't watch the movies on a computer you need a special 3d blu ray player, a special 3d TV, a special high speed HDMI cable and a 3d edition of the movie (which is often more expensive than the 3d equivalent).  All the computer option does is cut out the need for the 3d blu ray player, but you still need a pricey commercial media player such as Cyberlink.

Doubtless all this will come down in price eventually and there are also new developments in the pipeline that may do away with the 3d glasses. They are not terrible, but I suspect it would be more comfortable watching 3d movies without them. 

3d is however, another option that a filmmaker can use in the right instances with the right material and assuming the production budget allows it, to create a unique cinema experience.  

On a final note, realorfaked3d.com is a website that very usefully tells you whether films recently released or upcoming were filmed in 3d or were faked post production: 

Not in Kansas any more

I took the photograph above this morning.

I did so with a feeling of relief and elation after attempting many times over the past three years to photograph a cockatoo with its yellow crest fully extended. Usually it hasn't gone well. I see one of these birds with its crest unfurled and the moment I point the camera at it, the crest goes down. I lower the camera... it goes up again, and so on.

They were always on to me and they weren't having it... until now.

Cockatoos are one of the few features of my Australian surroundings that still possess the capacity to remind me that I live in a country quite different from that of my origins - I was born and raised in the United Kingdom and you don't see creatures like this in the wild where I come from. I have never seen one in the inner city area I where I spend most of my time either. Out at Bundoora however, 15 or so kilometres from the city centre, there are times of the year when you can see flocks of them, sometimes of two or three dozen of them at a time.

  

I always marvel at seeing them.

Perhaps it is that feeling of them being among the last threads of my experience of Australia as an alien landscape that made me so compelled to capture them at their full glory, on the rare occasions I come across them and have a camera with me.  

Most other aspects of life in Australia I have certainly long become used to; I have been living here on and off for over 20 years afterall. The gum trees below, for example, that seemed so alien and ghostly when I first arrived in this country, usually just seem like ordinary trees to me now - things sticking out of the ground with branches and leaves.

Basically, the distinctive features of gum trees - the aspects that set them apart from the trees I knew where I grew up - have long faded into the background of my awareness. However, I bet if you are not as familiar with Australia as I have become, or other places in the world these trees have been planted, they will appear quite unusual to you.

I am sure others will know the experience of first arriving somewhere quite different from home; so many things seem to jump into the foreground, even if they are far away, and are handled by the attention rather like a child playing with new toys, not yet quite able to make sense out of them and how they work. If you stay in the unfamiliar place for long enough, however, you still look at such things, but somehow you no longer see, at least it the same way you once did.  It takes an experience usual in any setting, or a particular state of conciousness to bring back that sense of these things having a pressing immediacy or unique qualities.

The brain does this, I gather, to ensure we can conserve our attention for immediate matters out of the ordinary that might require assessment and action. It also keeps us from going potty from constantly dealing with overbearing stimuli.

Having said that, it does appear to be a process whose effect can fluctuate and fade somewhat with time. Going back to the United Kingdom after a few years in the spacious Australian landscape, I usually find everything in my home country looks to me as though it is in miniature, as though I had arrived in a kind of ye olde toy land. Little quirks and details of the English surrounds also strike me. I know them from the years of my upbringing or other visits, but I am seeing them again feeling as though they have an odd sense of English quaintness. A few months down the track however, and I am not seeing anything out of the ordinary and the surrounds I have returned to typically being unremarkable features of my everyday existence.

And the last time I returned to Melbourne after several years in Europe, in 2005, I had a kind of charming reverse experience. I had not been back in Melbourne for more than three weeks. It was late at night and I was tired from a long day and attendance at a social event filled with people I mostly did not know.

I was walking along the edges of Fitzroy gardens near the centre of the city and I saw a cat lurking on the grass at the edge of the park.

I bent down to pet it. I was a little startled when the cat ran up my trousers and as I stood up in surprise, clung tenaciously onto my shirt.

There was something weird about the cat: The claws didn't feel as sharp as I was used to, it felt somehow meatier than a typical cat and I was especially surprised when it started to paw at the packet of plain potato chips I had been snacking on. Cats will go for cheese and bacon flavoured potato chips sometimes, but usually they couldn't care less about the vanilla variety.

And I looked down to discover it wasn't a cat; it was a native Australian possum, with its curious dark eyes peering up at me.

By Vicki Nunn (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It was then that I had that feeling that I wasn't in Kansas any more... well not Kansas, but I am sure you know what I mean...

Avoiding Interrupted realities

Continuity errors in Star Wars (1977)

 

On the rare occasions when I actually sit through the credits at the end of a feature film, I not infrequently wonder how the work of so many teams and individuals, and the contribution from their varied professional activities reaches the screen as any kind of coherent whole, let alone as an immersive experience one might enjoy and at times admire as art.

 

Besides producer, director, editor and actors, those whose roles in the filmaking process we perhaps most often focus on, there are clapper loaders, key grips, best boys, Foley artists and dozens if not hundreds of others...

 

How different is this from the solitary labours of the novelist - a kind of ultimate auteur? Yet there are aspects of filmmaking that find their parallel in the construction of novels, and one I bet many haven't much considered is that of continuity.

 

Continuity is a dedicated profession in filmmaking and vital to avoid jarring the viewer and interrupting the flow of narrative reality upon the screen. Films are almost always shot out of sequence, for reasons of production economy.  Thus an actress who walks into a building on location on day one of shooting - and from the perspective of the final edited film, then walks into a room - may actually being walking onto a set thousands of miles away, weeks or even months later.

 

Careful record keeping and precise planning is needed to ensure what you see on screen is sufficiently seamless not to draw your attention to the fact that you are watching a constructed illusion. A fairly typical example is making sure the actress in the prior example who walks into the building wearing a red dress, does not arrive in the interior clad in a blue one. More complex examples include the challenges of scenes including actors smoking, leading continuity people to cut various lengths of cigarettes to ensure they burn in a linear and reductive fashion across the number of takes that might be necessary to capture the scene we see in the movie.

 

Lacking the visual complexity of a filmed reality... or unreality, novels do not suffer from quite as many issues as films in this regard, but they do still have issues of continuity. Characters pick things up and put them down, events they experience need to make logical sense and the origin of things they use need to be explained if important to the story.

 

I can certainly attest to the challenge of getting these details right when writing a novel. It can take several years to complete a book, and in that time you might work backwards and forwards through the narrative hundreds of times, writing and rewriting. After some time, certain passages can become blind spots through familiarity, or you might reach a stage of focusing primarily on the flow of prose or particular emotive slant of a section of dialogue and become oblivious to details of the novel's reality that are illogical or inconsistent. It may also transpire that cutting out a scene or passage betters the flow of the narrative, but if you forget a small detail established in that scene, its removal can have unitended consquences.

Sometimes these errors are quite obvious to the reader, at other times the reader may not quite notice them without taking care and attention, but they can still have an unconscious effect - a feeling that something isn't quite right.

Believe it or not, there is actually an editor here in Australia who specialises in this kind of thing. Phill Berrie is a Canberra based writer and businessman, with a sciences background who offers this rather intriguing service

Working like a machine?

I am going back to work tomorrow morning after a break of two weeks; I may not get to complete a written post today, as I have a number of practical matters to attend to in preparation for the week. 

In lieu of thoughts and reflections, here is is a montage I put together late last year of things I often see four days of each working week (Wednesdays I work in a different location).  

09:00 

12:00
  

17:00

17:30

Death is only the beginning

I am going to try something in this post that may not come off at all, or may not come off in some cases or may be Martian to some. I want to present three film clips that for me at least, dramatise an experience I cannot really define.

 

First some context.

Many will probably already be familiar with the idea of death and rebirth, or more specifically, facing death and being reborn, as a central mechanic in the evolution of an individual's character. It features in pretty much every spiritual tradition on the globe. For those not inclined to such notions, it also makes an appearance in some threads of psychology and also forms of therapy and undoubtedly elsewhere I am not aware of - I wouldn't be surprised if it is touched on in management training or workshops somewhere or other.

As far as I have ever been to figure it out, this idea sees us as unable to evolve, mature or recover from trauma or loss without reaching a point of letting go of past notions of who we are, which are preventing a fresh and more integrated and accepting self emerge.

Not that this is an easy process. The sort of villain in the piece (though also an essential part of the overall process), that must be overcome or transcended is usually identified as an 'ego-self'. This driving part of our psyche identifies with the aspects of our personality that are familiar, follow rules and are within our comfort zone. However lifeless and self servicing that persona may have become at a certain stage, the ego self feels as though it runs the entire show and does important work in keeping us safe from uncomfortable or destabilisation influences. It isn't keen on letting go of the reins and allowing some kind of new self emerge it does not know anything about and that deviates from the plan it knows and maintains.

And so death in the spiritual or self developmental sense, is not seen as something negative, but something essential to life, and in a sense not really death at all - our egos die, but we live on, in some way transformed and surpassing our past notions of identity. And then the ego starts to form around new experiences, traumas and tensions and the process goes on.

Many see this point of acceptance and death of the ego as something quite profound, an epiphany or moment of liberation or realisation. Some actually experience it as a deep and wonderful sense of transcendence.

Now back to my initial premise.

I feel as though that is something that has on occasion been dramatised in various ways in film, intentionally or otherwise.

Following are three clips from three of the finest science fiction films ever made - Jacob's Ladder, 12 Monkeys and Looper - that may, in different ways, dramatise this point of realisation or to me feel as though they invoke or touch on aspects of it.

All three clips and my brief comments are major spoilers for the films concerned, so if you haven't seen them, and want to enjoy the films as the makers intended, don't read on - come back later once you have had a chance to see them. Accordingly, I have left a bit o space between this section and the start of the three clips... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final Scene from Jacob's Ladder (1990)

A  Vietnam veteran (played by Tim Robbins) is plagued by visions of horror and demonic beings.  He gradually discovers that he and his comrades were subjected to experimental performance-enhancing combat drugs that have violent side effects. As the film progresses it becomes apparent that he may not actually be living his contemporary life but rather a kind of extended vision in the moments before his death in Vietnam. In this final scene he is essentially reaches the point of acceptance of that death.

 12 Monkeys (1995) Airport moment \ beginning

 

In 12 Monkey the main character (played by Bruce Willis), a time traveler from a plague ravished future, is sent back to find a pure source of the virus to enable a cure to be developed and repopulation of the planet to commence. I couldn't find the actual extended airport scene at the end of the film, but during the film he experiences a childhood memory which is the essential component of it. Basically as a child in the past he sees his future self die. There are philosophical conundrums versus what I am suggesting regard death and rebirth in relation to this, but I suspect that for some viewers, it still might invoke aspects of the experience of death and transcendence.

 

Looper (2012) First and Last Scene

Note: The clip begins with the opening scene of the movie... The scene I am discussing follows.

In this scene, we have both a young version of the protagonist (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the future version (played by Bruce Willis) who has travelled back in time to prevent the death of his wife by killing a young boy who will grow up to be a ruthless personality with incredible ESP abilities. The younger self experiences an epiphany, realising that it is the actions of his elder self that will make the child become a monster and that unless he breaks the cycle the tragedy will plays out forever as a loop in time. Thus he kills himself.

The merciless hatchet of the sociopathic reviewer

Nearly ten years ago I was sitting in a literary agent's lounge room, in his house in a picture post card pretty village in the Oxfordshire countryside. I had just given him the typescript of a novel he was interested in. He was going over some of the basic aspects of the business of publishing and what would be involved if he decided to market the novel to publishers. Among the topics he covered was the possibility that people might write what might seem, or might actually be some quite hurtful things about the work in reviews.

What I prepared for that? he asked me.

Had I answered honestly, I would have said no, but that is not what you say when in a situation like this, which doesn't happen every second Tuesday. You just nod furiously and file away such potential pitfalls in the 'deal with it when and if it becomes a problem' file.

Since that time I have spoken to other writers about what it is like to get very negative or hatchet job reviews and it does not seem to be something many find a casual and unaffecting experience. Most writers seem to feel a fascination, not just about how their work will be received and if it will be received well, but about what people discover and experience when they read the work. Ego most certainly has a considerable amount to do with it, but one thing people sometimes forget is that a writer can only ever experience their own work in the way a reader does vicariously.  They can never be entirely detached and they cannot know the genuine joy of surprise and immersion some readers may encounter in the reading.  

This is of course not something exclusive to those who produce written works; musicians, filmmakers, curators and even owners of various types of business all have to deal with the one thing they can never control, no matter how well they craft something - what different people will make of what they have done, and certainly not what they will say and write about it.

This might not be such an issue if reviews were all fair. Unfortunately, while there are many good reviewers who will be equivocal about most of what they  encounter, a significant proportion of reviewers adopt a position of authority. It is quite possible that rather than admit they don't like something, they are not the intended audience or they just don't really get it, they will shoulder the creator with the responsibility for the entirely their negative experience. There are times when they can be quite vicious about it.

Exceptions allowed for, where there can be a case of genuinely shoddy work or circumstances beyond their control, pretty much all creators put enormous effort and often entire periods of their lives into their work and it may not come off, or they may just not be able to see what was necessary for it to work the way they intended, or they may not have had producers or editors who could address this. And rare is something so atrocious it has no redeeming features or no possible audience.

Reviewers surely know this, and despite the fact that the creator may be a professional and money must be parted with to gain access to the work, the reviewers typically aren't among those having to open their wallets.

Why do people publically attack the hard effort of others with such vitriol, I sometimes wonder? Is it a function of being in a position of power. Is it an envy of others' capacity to create when they  themselves lack such ability?  Well it certainly doesn't have to be the latter I suspect. This kind of behaviour is not necessarily limited to preachers rather than practioners. Some time back I sat and watched an emerging writer talk utterly dismissively about more than one work I found many positive aspects too. This wasn't in a broadcast setting, but certainly there was a finality of there being good and bad and nothing in between.

And I have to admit I have done it myself occasionally, usually as a result of a foul mood. I can even recall doing it when reacting to a film that had affected me deeply, for some reason did not want to admit having been vulnerable to it, and so rubbished it instead.

I suspect the root of this behaviour is not necessarily anything specifically to do with reviewers. You can come across this sort of thing in day to day life after all, when encountering those who react dismissively to the tastes or pleasures of others. An example that always stuck in my mind was a fellow I knew  many years ago who called the American singer songwriter Tori Amos "Tori Anus". I happened to enjoy Amos' work and was also quite aware of her talent and skill, which should surely have been apparent to any thinking person who might not necessarily enjoy the music. I remember trying to discuss this with him, but I was unable to get him to see or admit to the possibility that what she did deserved anything beyond a four letter word verdict.

I like quite a lot of cheesy pop music, so I come across quite a lot of this sort of thing when I reveal my tastes. It just never seems to occur to some people that someone is experiencing joy when they listen to music like this, or that it might invoke meaningful memories or that on its own terms it still might be quite sophisticated. Nor does it occur to these doomsayers that even the cheesiest output in a creative or other field is still bloody hard work to put together and get right to best of one's ability.

Naturally I don't have definitive answers, nor do I have the time to explore this subject more deeply here and it is undoubtedly a case of a number of factors on different levels in different situations, some personal and some wider in nature. There may also be factors such as the increasing lack of depth in reviews, which are often these day short and also hastily done to provide a steady stream of timely content.

However, what I have come to suspect about this phenomenon is that it is primarily about a lack of imagination and at times, if not a form of mild sociopathy, certainly a lack of capacity for empathy.  To comment intelligently and fairly on something surely you have to be able to understand to some degree what someone was trying to achieve, and you have to be able to appreciate how well it works on its own terms however alien they might be to those you favour. You also have to be able to conceive of how a range of audiences might receive the work.

In the final analysis perhaps what is needed most of all is a kind of receptive creativity and some folks have a lot more of this than others.

Znet and the news in between the lines

Over the past few weeks I have been attempting to build up a variety of hopefully interesting and varied content on the blog, in the knowledge that, as this year progresses, I will increasingly be devoting my writing time to the final stages of drafting and editing my nonfiction book about the science fiction writer, Jack Dann. I have quite a few writing projects on the go, but this is the only one that actually has a publication contract and it would be nice to see three years of work reach completion and finally see something I have written in print outside of a technical magazine.

I imagine I will soon settle down into a routine of posting two or three times a week, but at least there will be an archive of material now that someone stumbling upon the blog can explore if they wish to, if there is nothing more recent to look at.

I have a few short draft posts kicking around that are not too much effort to complete, so over the next three days I will concentrate on publishing those before I get back to work and have to focus my more limited free time on the Jack Dann project. Following is the first of these short cuts, about progressive news sources I follow.

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I am not a political activist; I am far too wrapped up in inventing mythologies for fiction and pursuing interests in the creative arts to dedicate my time to such things. I do however keep up with some of the progressive campaigns and activities going on around the world. Mostly it is through the alternative news platform Znet and affiliated websites.
 

Apart from finding the resourcefulness, dedication and enthusiasm of many activists engaging and at times admirable, many in this field write well and write informatively. Although there are always exceptions, one thing I often notice about more 'left' leaning commentators is a greater propensity for scholarly rigour. As opposed to the those on the opposite end of the spectrum, who not infrequently make statements and claims that might have emotional appeal to some, but do not always hold up very well under scrutiny.

Of course, they often do not have to. The later often have the momentum of the status quo behind them, and they are not required to justify every second statement because it is contrary to 'common sense'.

I also find reading articles in this field gives me exposure to current issues from parts of the world that seldom receive any attention from the mainstream press. Or stories from places that do, but typically have a far too broad or sensationalist focus to actually get a sense of what is going on in people lives and what matters to them. Sometimes I can also find material on sites like Znet that give further analysis and more illuminating perspectives on matters I become aware of from articles in more mainstream outlets such the often journalistically dissapointing BBC News Website, Melbourne's The Age, or The Independent Online.

To conclude, following are five recent examples of articles from Znet (which themselves often come from other sources) from different parts of the world and on greatly varying subjects. Whether any of these would be of interest to a reader of this post, I have no idea, but I think it is fairly likely that there is at least some material in here that will offer a perspective not easily available elsewhere.

• An overview of 2012 developments in Indigenous resistance novements in Mexico
• Problems with sexual violence in US women's prisons
• A analysis of current events in the African country of Mali and issues with intervention  
• The defense of public health care in Madrid, Spain
• Concerns over increasing government repression in Haiti

Worth your weight in stranglekelp

It is a hot night here in Melbourne and my brain is sluggish... so let's see how this goes and whether what is simmering in my brain, makes sense on the cooler electronic vellum of the page.

Have a look at the five sets of 20s up above.

I would hazard a guess that most reading this post would feel some sense of one or other, or all of the images of currency having value or being a representation of something of value. I get the strongest feeling from the 20 British pounds, because I know it is worth more than the 20 Australian dollars and anyway, Australian money is made out of plastic, which has never quite felt entirely real to me.

And what about the 20 green leaf thing below? Does that transmit or possess a meaning of value to you? Probably not. Most people outside of a gaming convention would have no idea what it is.  It is in fact a representation of 20 stranglekelp, a kind of seaweed your character can collect from the sea bottom in the online game World of Warcraft. It can at times, depending on how many are in circulation, be sold to other players through an auction house for a reasonable amount of in game gold, whch can itself be used to purchase everything from spells to flying mounts.

But what makes, say... a $20 note - a real one that is, a thing of value?

Well, I suppose one straight forward answer is that Is that $20 notes do not grow on trees, at least none I have encountered in this neck of the woods. Unless someone decides to give me a $20 note or I find one in the street, I cannot get another without either:

• Doing some work for someone such that they agree to give me a $20 note to pay for my time and effort
• Having an object and finding someone who wants that object enough that they will give me $20 in exchange for it
• Pinching, stealing or extorting it from someone.

And there are some other possibilities, but would seem to cover most of the necessary ground for the purposes of where I am going with this discussion.

I guess another straight forward answer would be that the note has complex patterns and other safeguards that make it difficult, if not impossible to copy. I simply don't have access to the technology and know how to create one of my own and if I did, I would either being sunning myself on a beach somewhere, or sitting typing this from jail.

But consider this, if I were in the United States few retailers and most of anybody would be likely to give me anything in exchange for the Australian $20 dollars. I take my $20 dollars to another part of the globe and it is no longer a thing of value, at least not in the same way it is here in Melbourne. It is too small an amount to many to be worth making a specific trip to exchange it at a bank or such, and will anyway lose a considerable percentage of its value when doing so.

So at the end of the day my $20 only really has value because the Government of Australia says it does in territories where it exercises power.

The value of the $20 note here in Australia is essentially in the confidence the entire nation feels in the Australian economy and system of currency and ultimately the Australian State. Were hyper inflation to occur and people were wandering around with wheelbarrows full of notes in order to buy a loaf of bread, or if the Government collapsed after some form of cataclysm, the $20 would be worth pretty much or absolutely nothing.

Ever have that experience of looking in a wallet and thinking you have a note but you pull out only a receipt? Or, conversely, pulling out all the accumulated receipts and suddenly finding one of them is not just a piece of paper, but a note you didn't realise you had?

The note has some kind of reasuring resonance or feeling of potential worth; it has a meatiness or gravitas a docket does not possess. But note that that feeling is essentially an illusion; if I mistake a docket for a note and pull it out, I feel sudden dissapointment and the meatiness goes away - and vice versa.   

Back to the strangekelp. The reason why I was thinking about all of this is that a long time ago I went through a period of doing not much else with most of my spare time other than playing World of Warcraft. One day I found myself looking at lots of sets of 20 stranglekelps I had collected in my character's backpack. I suddenly realised that those icons on the screen felt to me the same way real money did. I actually reached out and touched the icons on the screen, feeling only the yielding plastic surface of the monitor, but was unable to rid myself of the feeling of wealth they somehow transmitted.

Curious about this sensation I got a magnifying glass and looked at the icon up close and saw how it was made out of pixels, little squares of different coloured light on the screen.

  

 

 

It was just an illusion - numbers in a computer program generating patterns on the screen -yet the sense of having something of value felt so real.

 

 

 

Nice looking island; I'll have that for my runway

In between other writing and more leisure based activities, I have been working on two or three posts that haven't yet reached a publishable form. Thus, I thought I would rework and post something from the earlier blog that is no less relevant today than it was in 2007 when I first posted it. Unlike many of my posts, this is not exploratory; it is the bare bones of a story about how some powerful folks rather liked the look of an island tropical paradise and thought it would be much improved if they pinched it and built a runway on top of it. And if that sounds a little banal, read on; there is lot more to this than a planning permission issue.   

 

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Bear with me here, but to make sense of this post, I would like you to follow some basic instructions.

1. Open up a browser, or another tab in the one you are viewing this post in
2. Fire up Google Maps
3. Click on the icon in the top right hand corner of the map view and select "satellite view"
4. Type the name "Diego Garcia" into the search box at the top of the page and click on the magnifying glass icon

Shortly the image will resolve into an expanse of inky blue sea, in its midst an Indian Ocean atoll.

Zoom in further on the largest landmass in the south, Diego Garcia itself, and you will be able to see ranks of planes lined up along a runway. They kind of look like the Airfix models I used to make as a kid, or perhaps rows of silhouetted angry snowflakes. I am not going to hunt down a copy of Janes All the World's Aircraft to check, but most likely some of these are bombers. This runway is where many of the heavy bombing sorties conducted during the Iraq war took off from.

This airport is part of Camp "Justice", a US air force base. It has featured in the news in fairly recent times for its use in extraordinary renditions during the era of Bush Jr.

It might seem as though this is going to be another nerf bashing exercise against Uncle Sam and his crimes, or alleged crimes, against foreign parts and individuals. Certainly, when viewing this part of Google's Earth you are looking at a map of the site of one of the great crimes of the twentith century, but the principal villains are not from the western side of the Atlantic, rather they hark from the halls of power in my own country of birth, the United Kingdom.

The base is actually built on land leased from Britain; this is still British Territory and there was a time when 2000 British subjects lived there, albeit the more coffee coloured variety that don't typically get flotillas of warships sent to their rescue when bad things happen to them.

Back in the 1960s, the US wanted the island, the British government of the time wanted support from the US, and so the two got together and figured out an amicable arrangement. The ordinary people who had made their lives there however, never had an opportunity to participate in the negotiations. Their part of the bargain was to be encouraged to leave in a less than polite manner. One of the tactics that always struck me for some reason, is that all the dogs on the island, particularly beloved by the population, were rounded up and gassed.

The British weren't Nazis at least, and resorted to less extreme, if not particularly civlised means to get rid of the human inhabitants, but there are those who might view their fate as the sort of treatment more commonly applied to dogs than people.

Basically after a protracted period of various forms of tough love to inspire voluntary exodus, they were forceably shipped out across the late 1960's/early 1970's, dumped in Mauritius to the southwest and left to fend for themselves. There was talk of money to rehouse and look after them, but very little of it ever seems to have reached the displaced islanders themselves. In any case, I don't suppose they would have viewed it as any kind of consolation prize for having their home pinched and being sent into exile in a foreign country.

What happened to the islanders in the decades that followed has been told in detail by far more experienced commentators than I. Suffice to say, it wasn't pretty.

If you want to find out more about their fate, and more about the whole scope of the case, have a look at the BBC article here, the wikipedia article here, or for a comprehensive telling of the entire saga where images give a powerful impression words might not, the best overview is probably John Pilger's documentary, Stealing a Nation.

Stealing a Nation, a Special Report by John Pilger

This is history, but it is also current affairs. The islanders and their descendents still exist, they are still fighting for the right to return to their home and resume their way of life, and they are being treated by more recent British governments no better than in the days when Harold McMillan was prime minister.

When the islanders resorted to legal means to secure the opportunity to return, Tony Blair, that smiling paragon of human rightswrongs, and his government, invoked special legislative measures to ensure their victory in the British courts would not be implemented. More recently the islanders have taken their fight to the European Court of Human Rights.

And once again, if you doubt the necessity of the work of organisations like Wikileaks, another nail in the coffin of your scepticism might be the illuminating information gleaned from a recent Wikileaks cable -  the establishment of a nature reserve in the islands was supported by the British government specifically to create further hurdles for the islanders' return.

What to make of all this? Well, I will leave it up to you. I guess however, if you live on a nice island and our masters happen to like the look of it for building a runway, don't be making any plans for house extensions - the mentality that led to the events I outline above is not one with a current expiry date.