thegreatunfinished
The Great Unfinished
BASED IN WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND. REFLECTIONS ON CREATIVITY, ART, ENTERTAINMENT, AND A VAGUE CONCEPT OF TRYING TO BE A BETTER PERSON IN A COMPLICATED WORLD.
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Ingrid Goes West; satire goes south
Spoilers
Satire relies on two elements: clarity and perspective. In Ingrid Goes West, what is ostensibly a satire on shallow social media culture gets undone by the lack of both clarity and perspective, and a couple of narrative choices that cripples the whole affair.
In Ingrid, the titular character is a mentally unwell millennial with a history of forming unhealthy attachments with people she doesn't know, but who she assumes care as much about her as she does about them. When she realises that they don't care about her, she experiences it as a personal betrayal and exacts revenge. This story is told within the first scene of the movie with her relationship to someone she used to go to highschool with, and then the same story is told over the rest of the movie with an insta-famous LA socialite. In the first iteration of the story, Ingrid attacks the girl with mace at her wedding - harsh, but the stakes aren't that high. So when the exact same arc starts playing itself in the main bulk of the movie, there's isn't much tension - macing isn't that bad, in the grand schemes of things crazy people in movies can do.
It's the decision to make Ingrid mentally unwell from the beginning that is actually the biggest handicap to the satire. Because we know she's clinically diagnosed, her subsequent decisions are driven by her mental affliction, but it's not mental affliction that this movie intends to satire, it's social media. A more potent satire would have social media driving someone insane; instead, we're left with what would instead be the format of a b-grade thriller, but it's not a thriller that this movie is trying to be.
The lack of clarity in this satire is further accentuated by the fact that the story seeks to satirise everything that comes in front of its lens - every character is a buffoon, whether they intersect with the story's main focus of satire or not. The only common thread between the characters is that they're all pretending to be someone they're not. That's potent stuff, but not explored. A more successful satire would have followed one of the two following threads:
1. Ingrid integrates herself into the LA insta-famous crowd by being false, because she believes they won't accept her. There, she realises that those people are even more false and insecure than she is, and she chooses to instead commit to honesty, which either gains her success or sees her kicked out of the community.
2. Ingrid is an honest girl who realises that she can only get into the insta-famous set by being false, and so by the end of the movie commits to dishonesty to become one of them.
The story, as it is, is about a woman who's already detached from her own projected persona who meets others who are the same, but she realises nothing about herself or about them, and she's only ultimately unsuccessful not because of the choices she's made that relate to the theme (honesty/dishonesty), but because of a ridiculous deus ex machina revolving around a drug-crazed character who has little to do with the main plot and ends up blackmailing her, which forces her to kidnap him, which leads to him revealing her true identity and motives to her newfound friends. None of this says anything about the core themes. This plotline is weak, though perhaps it would have worked if, say:
1. The blackmailer had exposed her on social media, revealing her to be a real threat to the people around her.
2. The blackmail videos go viral and she becomes successful.
3. The superficial LA crowd embrace her, regardless of the fact that she's a threat to them, solely because she now has a large following. The blackmailer (who perhaps in this version of the story isn't an evil cartoon character but perhaps the one honest character in the movie) is ostracised.
As it happens, the movie ends with a predictable and weak conclusion: Ingrid films her own attempted suicide, and wakes up to find herself a viral sensation. Which proves what? Only that both honesty and dishonesty can both be provocative on social media, but that revelation means nothing to us or the character. As for her suicide attempt, it lacks narrative heft because, again, it's presumably driven more by her own mental illness - established at the beginning of the movie - than by the events of the story. So the viewer is left ultimately asking: for all the swipes at social media, LA celebrity, art culture, drug culture, and everything else - what was all this actually trying to say? Shrug emoticon.
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Toe-dipping into 3D & Blender after 15 years away
I trained in 3D back in the mid-00s, and after graduating I worked for a small scale educational resources firm 3D-illustrating kids' books and the like. I also taught Blender, the open source 3D programme, to kids at school holiday classes. Honestly, the whole thing was painful. 3D software at the time promoted technical know-how over artistry, and the whole venture felt less like the freedom of scribbling and creating and more like building an engine and running experiments.
Blender, in particular, was painful, and I was often stressed at the experience of teaching a dry, ugly piece of unintuitive software to kids who just wanted to make Shrek. In my own training I had learned Maya which, while still pretty unwieldy, at least had an understandable UI. Of course, no school holiday course can afford Maya for every student, so Blender it was.
Eventually I dropped out of 3D. It was too hard, too technical, and didn't offer the kind of joy that I think of as "being creative."
Smash cut to now. I have had, for years, the passing urge to revisit 3D, especially when I see great artists creating really fun stuff, like this or this. But then I'd download a trial version of Maya, immediately remember how hard it all was, and go back picking up a pencil and drawing instead.
Until this last weekend when, for some reason, I downloaded Blender. I opened it expecting it to be the same horrible mess it was in 2005 only to find, lo and behold, what an amazing piece of software it had grown into being. And not only powerful (which I suspect it always was, even if I didn't know how to make the best of it) but also user-friendly. Everything (or most things) made intuitive sense. I felt joy.
I found a YouTube tutorial series for beginners from Blender Guru a friendly-enough chap who shows you how to make the above donut scene, and in doing so walks you through modelling, texturing, particles, lighting and rendering. It took me two days, going slower than I would have liked because I remembered less than I would have liked, but I had a good time the whole way.
So I hope to do more. I think what the Blender team have achieved over the past 14ish years is remarkable - first they built a tool of immense power, but then they worked to get the tool to be something that empowered the artist rather than getting in the way. It's something that was well overdue in the 3D market, so bully for them.
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Perfect
A short science fiction piece published for Idealog magazine, you can view it here!
They also made an audio-theatre version of it, which you can listen to here!
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Maraetai Beach in Myth & Legend
A semi-autobiographical (but highly whimsical) piece that I wrote for the team at Up Country, 2014.
The expansive bush that stretches between Maraetai Heights Road and Rewa Road in the semi-rural Auckland village of Maraetai Beach contains the following features for the eager explorer:
a variety of tracks of varying difficulty and reliability.
peaceful streams and waterways, straddled by fallen trees that are definitely, probably, fine to climb over.
native flora that perform well as resources for building dams, forts, etc. Native fauna that will cease singing to look down from the branches as you walk by; you the invader, they the keepers.
escaped convicts, dressed in rags and with yellow, rotting teeth, hidden in shadows and grim of thought and deed, who carry rusty knives made for cutting the tender bellies of unlucky children who stumble upon their camps.
a tall (reports indicate around seven foot), broad shouldered alien, recognisable by his lumbering gait and his ability to light the ground where he steps. He is slow and silent, but his intent is considered to be sinister. Caution is recommended.
a witch, though she mainly resides at the lonely dead end of Maraetai Heights Road, near the line of trees that mark the beginning of the massive bush area.
The casual inquirer may observe that this seems a lot for one expanse of rural New Zealand wilderness to contain. But this information is supported by eyewitness statements painstakingly collected over years of my childhood as well as deductions made after hours of sitting at the window of the second story lounge, gazing out at the thick green carpet of secrets where the trees, mysteries, dangers and adventures, started.
The convicts are perhaps the least surprising inhabitants. Although it was a small and unassuming neighbourhood in the 1980s, Maraetai Beach was mentioned on the Channel One News with some degree of regularity. Growing up, my hometown seemed a favourite destination for nogoodniks evading the authorities. I've never quite understood why. Perhaps it was those large areas of rugged nature, into which escape must have seemed easy. Famously, a helicopter of serious looking men with guns once landed on our school's soccer field. We were all ushered out to watch. They were there to track down a baddie on the run, and he must have been a real bad baddie this time. My older sister and I walked home that afternoon, closer and closer to the bush where I knew in my heart that this baddie was hiding, peering from between the branches like a scared, angry cat. I probably should have tipped off the men with guns.
The alien was observed by an older kid at school, and described to me while we walked in pairs towards the Maraetai Town Hall for rehearsal of our school play. So confident were the boy's words, so mocking of my ignorance, that I had no option but to suspect he was telling the truth. His friend, walking behind us, was also an older boy and therefore another expert on worldly matters. He confirmed that he had seen the black giant shambling through the trees near my house, just the other night. That evening, and for many evenings later, I was extra-quick to reach out and slam shut my bedroom window, should a black hand shoot out and grab my wrist. Even today it’s a task on which I don’t linger too casually.
The witch I learned about from a closer source: my older sister. She trod lightly upon the details, allowing me to fill in the gaps with images of a decrepit old crone that existed at the dead end of our road, just over the rise and just out of sight. I wouldn't have believed it - my sister already having tried to convince me, only briefly successfully, that Soda Stream syrup was poisonous (she called it "Indian Ink", a perfectly exotic and deadly sounding name) - but her best friend confirmed the hag’s presence also. What choice did I have? By this time, I would have been about eleven, I was already developing a healthy enough skepticism to know that such stories could be lies. But then caution, and an enduring and ill-advised trust of people older than me, encouraged me to lean towards belief and safe avoidance.
These dark secrets were not the only thrilling mysteries of the bush that lined Maraetai Heights Road. We all knew about the wild pigs, big as cars, blood-eyed and with tusks that would cut through a young boy like a toothpick through cheese. Schoolmates warned against crossing certain paddocks that existed on the other side of the trees, lest you run afoul of the gun-toting, maniacally territorial farmers that lived there. Of course, we crossed anyway, either sprinting or scurrying on our bellies. We never saw guns nor crazed farmers, but we believed in them. And there were ghosts among the trees too, though that may have been the one story I myself added. I have always loved and been mortally afraid of ghosts.
That burgeoning skepticism eventually flourished and then hardened, childhood wonder and terror setting into the grey impenetrability of adulthood wisdom. The convicts in my mind started to look less like Dickensian rogues and more like the sad, disenfranchised individuals we see on the front page. They probably didn't wear rags, nor did they cut bellies as often as suspected, but they did once force our door open and steal our potato chips.
I saw an American TV special on aliens in the '90s that starred the exact being that lurked in the Maraetai Beach bush, illuminated footsteps and all. I suppose the story must have been famous enough for my young informant to have read it years earlier in one of those "World's Strangest Mysteries"-type almanacs. Either that or the seven foot ET got bored of scaring tough young kiwi kids and thought he'd try some American ones.
The witch. I've never asked my sister where the terrifying old crone came from, though I'd guess a jumble of Enid Blyton and CS Lewis. Nevertheless, it didn't stop me from repeating the tales and stone-faced warnings to younger cousins, now adults themselves. I should ask them all at our next family Christmas whether they ever think of the old hag that casts wicked magic just out of sight, as I still think of her whenever I see a dimly lit rural road disappear over a rise. Because for all the dull, relentless power of adult rationality, things that get into your head as a kid tend to stay there, fighting for their hard-earned space. I have a theory that people who grew up in isolated areas, particularly near large expanses of untamed nature, forests and beaches and mountains and what-not, have an easy time of imagining shadowy figures and mysterious threats just outside the corner of the eye.
But that may be indulging in self-mythologising. It might be too dismissive of the imaginative terrors harboured by our friends who were raised in suburbs or cities. I still think, however, that the certain type of grim and electrifying sorcery that comes from mixing a child's brain with exposure to wildness is a special one, and New Zealand's landscape gives it a special flavour all of its own.
Because, still. Still , still, still to this day, no matter how worn smooth my sense of childhood adventure and horror is, I cannot look at a wall of trees on the edge of a dark expanse, like that which runs along Maraetai Heights Road, that runs in front of my old bedroom window, that still features so regularly in my dreams, without wondering what lurks, lumbers, crouches or cackles just there, just out of sight, in the wilderness.
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Crumbs
Originally published in Headland vol. 3, July 2015.
I don’t like these shirts, the ones I have to wear to the office. They’re garish, falsely cheerful. They remind me of the uniform I wore when I pushed burgers as a student. They remind me of TV talent show contestants, humiliated but still smiling.
I own six shirts: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, plus a reserve. The reserve’s a happy accident, the result of only buying two-for-one deals. I like to think having the extra shirt makes out like I thought about it. I like to think it makes me look professional.
I’m ironing them. The shirts. It’s late Sunday afternoon. I feel like a traitor, letting my working week slither into my precious free time. ‘Precious’ as an adjective denoting value through scarcity.
Out the window, it’s a beautiful day. I should go for a walk.
I’m not good at ironing, that’s the other thing. Through my efforts, all I manage to do is press the creases more deeply into the fabric. People in the office joke about the thirtyish guy who lives alone and can’t iron. I laugh, but in a jagged way, in a way that says: watch it.
Sarah from next door is weeding her garden. I feel bad for her whenever I see her because she’s so old and her back is hunched, but when she’s gardening it kind of works out for her, I guess. I hang my creased shirts off the ironing board, and tell myself, “One day I’ll be old.” The thought doesn’t connect, just dangles in my brain like a spider in a warehouse.
I can tell it’s warm outside, but it’s cold in my unit. Wellington houses. I zip up my hoodie and flip the hood over my head, walking three steps to the sofa. I fall like a dead tree, hands in hoodie-front-pocket, and pull the fuzzy blanket over me with my feet and knees. My mum gave me the blanket before I moved to Wellington. I think she might have bought the iron as well. I wake up the laptop on the coffee table by nudging the trackpad with my chin. I don’t have a TV, but I watch downloaded movies. I tell people at work, “TV’s dead,” and I say, “I don’t own a television.” I say it in a way that’s casual and cool, so they know I’m not being a dick about it.
“I’m good with people.” I say this aloud, I don’t know why. I’ve only been in Wellington three months. Nothing’s downloaded yet, so I look at the roof and wonder why Wellingtonians are so hard to get to know. Maybe because it’s so much smaller than Auckland, Wellingtonians have fewer social circles. In Auckland, the city’s so big that you need different groups all over. In Wellington, you only need one or two. It’s a socio-geographical fact: Wellingtonians are less open to meeting new people. So.
I let the theory bounce around my brain. It feels sound. It gives me the energy to get off the sofa, blanket draped over my head and shoulders, and step into the kitchen. I push bread into the toaster, finishing off my third loaf in a week. After dinner, I’ll go for that walk.
Crumbs. I see them in the yellow late-afternoon light. Under the toaster, across the bench, on the floor. I realise this with a little surprise, because it’s, like, a lot. They must have been building up for — a week? Longer. A month? I step up and down, crunching the little bits under my slippers.
I click my teeth together rapidly, something I guess I do when I’m a bit unsure. I walk from the kitchen to the bathroom clutching the blanket at my breast like an old Italian woman in mourning. I stand and look, and in a horrible moment, I see. Thick black hairs curled on the tiles, dried toothpaste on the faucet. I peer into the toilet bowl. How long has it been like this? Have all my visitors seen this?
Visitors. The last one would have been Joanna, the librarian, the one time she almost stayed over (she caught a taxi at the last minute, saying that she didn’t want to rush into anything she’d regret. It seemed cute and a little coquettish at the time). That was a couple of weeks ago. No, wait. That was February. February was six weeks ago. Have I really had no visitors for six weeks? Also, what happened to Joanna?
I grab the toilet brush, holding the blanket in place with my other hand, and scrub against the scum of the bowl a couple of times; it moves like wet paint. I think it’s normal not to have visitors that often. It’s just modern life. In New York they build apartments without kitchens now. And that’s New York, so.
My toast pops. I collect it, scrape on peanut butter. If I used a plate, there’d be fewer crumbs. Good thinking. I even take a moment to grab a cloth and brush a bunch of crumbs into the sink — I don’t get them all, but it’s a good first go. I’ll get the rest later, after my walk.
Back to the sofa, blanket over head, toast in hand. The movie has finished downloading, but I don’t want to watch it anymore. I wonder: is it worse to steal something you don’t actually want? I stare at the corner where two walls meet the ceiling, chewing my toast, thinking a whole load of thoughts. Nothing important.
Tens of minutes pass, I guess. My toast is gone. Out the window, Sarah’s back, and now she’s got a whole tray of bulbs. I’m surprised — it’s almost 5pm, why would she start a new job? She should relax, make the most of the evening.
I’m underneath the thick blanket, still, leaning forward like a wildlife photographer. My teeth are clicking up and down, but it is cold, so.
Outside, Sarah’s grey hair looks golden.
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The Silver Man & the rabbit hole: arriving in Korea for the first time
Travelogue originally appearing as Noun, Verb, Kimchi Part 1 & 2 in Morph Magazine, 2009.
Here’s how it begins:
I’m in a late-model Hyundai on a sprawling motorway in a country I’ve never seen before. The heat is raw, and I’m already regretting wearing the tailored suit I bought in Bangkok on the way over. The driver next to me is Korean man in his 60s with a Bart Simpson buzz cut and a shiny silver suit, the same colour as his car. I don’t know who the man is, though the relief of seeing someone at the airport holding up a board with my name on it was good enough for me. He doesn’t talk, or smile. I’m beginning to realise that he cannot speak English, and I can’t speak Korean. I don’t know where we’re going.
In the West, we don’t talk about South Korea as much as we discuss its more influential neighbours to the left and right, its badly behaved brother to the north, or its more famously travelled cousins to the south. Prior to six months ago, I had never much considered South Korea beyond its role as the setting for M*A*S*H, and even then it was just an allegory for Vietnam.
My new friend reaches into his shiny silver jacket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, offering me one. It’s the first indication he’s given that he’s aware of me since we got in the car. I hesitate. I don’t know it at the time, but I’m at the beginning of what will be a several day-long mix of jetlag and disorientation. It’s a very real expat phenomenon of which I had heard but hadn’t expected to be victim to myself.
I take a moment too long and the shiny silver man emphatically shakes the packet of cigarettes closer to my face. I’m not a smoker, and I struggle to remember the culture guides I had read before departing Auckland. Is it rude to refuse cigarettes in Korea? I know it’s rude to refuse an offer to drink, or to eat, or to sing in a social situation, so maybe… I take the cigarette, he lights it, I put it to my lips. I’m 28, and I’m apparently still prone to peer pressure, if said pressure is applied by mute Koreans wearing shiny silver suits.
After a couple of token drags, I surreptitiously rest my hand on the outside of the open window and let the cigarette burn down. I wait as a police car carrying two impossibly emotionless officers passes before I drop the cigarette. Just in case there’s some law I don’t know about, like dropping bubble gum in Singapore or making a crack about the king in Thailand, something that an ignorant Westerner like me would do. I don’t know why, but I have a paranoid and largely irrational fear of police in Asian countries. The officers both look at me as they pass, expressionless. They pass, I wait another 30 seconds, I drop the cigarette.
We pass an off-ramp sign heralding Seoul, where I thought I was going to be living, and I tense up. I had heard stories like this: expats arriving in Korea to teach English, just like me, and finding out after they arrive that the terms of their employment were not as clear cut as they believed when they signed the contract back in their home country. I knew a girl who got placed at a school in a remote rural area where she was the only English speaker, to see out her contractually obligated 12 months. They’d told her she’d be working in Seoul, too.
Back inside the shiny silver Hyundai with the shiny silver Korean, the Tom Jones disco cover CD that has been playing since we left the airport ticks over into its third rotation. The continued aural assault mixes poorly with the disorientation, the heat, the stomach full of bad airline food and the unfamiliar taste of cigarette. We take an off-ramp that’s written in Korean but points in the opposite direction to Seoul. The driver leans over and pats my leg, suddenly erupting in manic, wide eyed laughter. I start laughing too, I have no idea why, and he gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up. He flicks his cigarette out his window and it hits the window of the car next to us; no-one gets arrested.
My blurry mess of a mind says: This will all make sense soon.
Which wouldn’t be the last time in this country that I was profoundly wrong.
Part two.
So two Koreans are having sex on a balcony. Maybe. It’s unclear. Everything is unclear at this point. Including what I’m doing watching two Koreans maybe having sex on a balcony.
It’s been an hour since my ride with the Silver Man. I know two things:
1. We’re somewhere in South Korea, and
2. It’s not Seoul.
We park in an industrial area. The Silver Man leads me through a maze of twisting alleyways tightly packed behind the massive commercial buildings that barricade the streets. The path is narrow, the doors and the people squatting in them seem randomly arranged. One plus: the disarray of these alleyways reminds me of the cheerful mess of South East Asia, and brings welcome relief from the concrete grey sterility that borders the highway.
Through the alleyway, I feel like Alice chasing after the white rabbit. If the white rabbit were, in fact, shiny silver and Korean.
As I dodge the stray cats and squatting ajumas (old Korean ladies), I wonder: where are we going? Is the school at which I will be teaching located in this weird mess of conjoined houses and meat shops, all so obviously organised as to be hidden from the street? Or is my apartment somewhere in here?
The heat is close, pressing on my skin and breath, and the smell of spices and meat somehow intensify the sticky warmth. Matching my guide’s brisk pace pours fresh new sweat into the dry sweat already encrusted into my shirt and suit, which I decided to wear only because I thought it would make a good impression were I delivered directly to my new school. The increasing mess of my external appearance mirrors the confusion, jetlag, disorientation and cluttered thinking occurring within.
Seriously though, where the hell are we going?
Eventually the Silver Man turns into a small open square amongst the alleyways — a courtyard? He opens a door, points inside. He says the only English word I’ve ever heard him say: sleep.
I squeeze past him and stop. I stop because there’s nowhere else to go. Packed inside the room is a low single bed, a small set of drawers taped shut with black tape and an old TV resting on top. There’s a toilet, a small basin, and a bucket. The God of Obvious Clichés has even placed a cockroach crawling up the wall.
I’m standing in the only square foot of floor, and I’m wondering, Where does my backpack go? Then, Wait, where is my backpack? It is, along with everything I own except this rancid suit, in the Silver Man’s car.
I turn around and peer out the door. He’s already disappeared into the labyrinth like a Korean David Bowie. An ajuma a few doors down waves, smiling. I wave and smile back. Her manner indicates she knows who I am and why I’m there. This comforts me slightly.
I wonder how long I’m supposed to be here. It’s Thursday afternoon, and my contract doesn’t start until Monday. I’m struck by the thought that maybe I’m on my own until then.
I strip off, feeling relief from the unwashed suit I’ve been wearing for two days. The toilet doesn’t work — I eventually deduce that I need to fill the bucket with water from the sink so as to simulate the absent flush action of the toilet. I return to the bed and lie uncertainly for a moment. I stare up at the cockroach, he stares back at me. Having no other options, I put the suit back on.
When I turn on the TV I’m startled by the loud sound of low, guttural moans accompanied by a picture of what seems to be a hand on an unspecified expanse of flesh. A back, maybe? I’m not sure what I’m watching. The screen cuts to a tight close-up of a Korean man’s face, clenching his teeth and grunting. Some kind of sports thing? The scene cuts again to an extreme long shot of two hazy figures ambiguously pulsating on what appears to be an apartment landing, and I realise I’m watching Korean porn.
There are a few painful moments of fumbling — with the TV — as I am suddenly conscious of the volume, and of the friendly ajuma sitting a few feet outside my door. I stab at random buttons then hastily press the power button, which doesn’t work the first two times. Finally the tube blanks and I search to find the volume controls, switch back on the TV to immediate resumption of what I can now confirm are definitely not sports sounds, try the volume controls only to find they’re actually the brightness controls. I find a remote under the bed that allows me control of the volume, and I mute. I can’t help it, I watch for a moment longer, fascinated in my semi-coherent state by this new art form: pornography without nudity, and only a passing acknowledgement that there are even two people in the same place at the same time. I wonder who, exactly, is watching this at 2pm in the afternoon. I switch it off for good when I realise the answer is me.
I venture out at one point, smiling meekly at the ajuma, whose expression I can’t read. I find my way onto the street and look around. In the chaos of signs and banners that hang off every tall building, I can’t see a single English word. In the mass of people pushing past me, there isn’t anyone I can assume I could communicate with. I feel stupid. The sensation of being a stranger in a strange land hits hard. I retreat to my room, and try unsuccessfully to sleep.
I’m in the room for around four or five hours. The Silver Man returns and drives me another 40 minutes to my school. There are nine other expat teachers, and a quick succession of revelations fall into place: the Silver Man is the school Director’s father, the room I’ve been dropped off at belongs to him, where I’m to live for a few days while my actual apartment is cleared out. We’re situated about 45 minutes out of Seoul.The other teachers either don’t notice or politely decline to mention that in my suit and sweat and wide-eyed deliriousness I look like the world’s worst hitman just off a failed mission. They’re all wearing jeans and hoodies. I am ridiculous.
When I eventually move, my actual apartment is small but comfortable. In fact, despite the shortage of space, neighbours who get drunk and shout abuse in the hallway at 3am, and an evil laundry man who arrives early in the morning to sing his nerve-shreddingly guttural laundry song, I think I’ve seldom lived anywhere where I’ve been happier.
There’s no moral to this story. Once I got a few decent nights’ sleep, I realised how much of the drama had been constructed in my own disorientated brain. Somewhere between fake-puffing on a cigarette in the Silver Man’s car and watching ambiguously-shot Korean porn with a cockroach, I lost my ability to go with the flow. It’s the beautiful contradiction of travel, in fact it’s almost Zen: you assume greater control over your life in one way, while voluntarily giving up control in many other ways.
I still see the Silver Man every so often. During those first few days, he appeared at my door every morning at around 7 or 8am offering me hamburgers and Coke for breakfast. Not so long ago I ran into him again outside a building. He offered me a smoke. I smiled sheepishly and declined. He erupted in manic laughter and, for the second time in our acquaintanceship, gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up. I accept that whatever joke I am the butt of, I probably deserve it, and I’ll let him have it. It’s his rabbit hole, after all.
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Science fiction
A short autobiographical fiction.
My phone has not buzzed or twitched or mewled for attention, but I still pull it out of my pocket anyway. Ahead of me, above me, the red man will soon turn green, and my brain requires distraction until then. My thumb flicks right, then up, then up again and down. With no conscious decision to do so, I’m looking at one newsfeed or another. There are no notifications for me, but I pull the graphics on the screen down to refresh the app just in case. Sometimes there’s a lag.
The red man turns green. I walk.
It’s a cold winter’s evening, it’s already dark and there’s a haze of drizzle in the air. I don’t mind terribly, it makes me feel romantic. Besides, if that were the sort of thing you minded, you shouldn’t be living in Wellington.
I’m listening to music through earbuds, conscious that it’s taxing my data but in need of something to input into my head. My brain is no longer comfortable to exist without stimuli of some sort. I try to remember before cell phones because I am old enough for that luxury. I remember a music festival when I was fifteen (1996) where we all knew the rule: if you lost your mates early in the day, you’d be buggered trying to find them again. I remember another time (1998?) arriving at a lunch and sitting for an hour before I realised that my date wasn’t showing. I found a payphone, dialled my home answerphone service and discovered an apologetic message left an hour and twenty minutes earlier. We used to waste time like that. We used to plan down to the minute when we’d be meeting a person, and get stressed if we knew we’d be five minutes late because we had no way of communicating with that person to let them know, and what if they thought we weren’t coming, or if they left the agreed-upon spot to go looking for us? I remember an earlier time (1995?) when I needed my dad to drop me off at the shopping centre to meet my first-ever then-new girlfriend. He dawdled and I was forty-five minutes late. She scowled at me, and continued to do so for the next year until we busted up.
Phones. Social media. Buzz buzz, little white numbers in red circles driving you crazy. We went from knowing nothing about each other’s lives to knowing everything. People complain either way.
I’m wearing a merino beanie. My face is cold but my head is too hot. The drizzle turns into rain. I’m walking up Willis towards Aro. I enjoy the reflection of the neon lights on the wet ground. It makes everything look like Blade Runner. Wellington doesn’t often have the opportunity to look futuristic, so it’s important to note these things.
In science fiction stories (and let’s remember that if we could tell ourselves in 1995 what 2015 would look like, it would be a science fiction story) there’s often an advanced race that can communicate with each other through a shared hive mind. As I walk in the wet, slightly hunched and feeling dramatic, I wonder if they all started with Facebook. I wonder if Facebook travels around the galaxy landing on the planets of undeveloped civilisations like the monolith in 2001. Facebook probably bought out the monolith after its early start-up success with the apes.
I used to work in a video store, and an old friendly racist used to stop by in the middle of the day to hire horror movies and chat. His favourite theory was that the Chinese would take over the planet because they had one of those hive-mind cultures. “Like ants,” he’d say, sort of cheerfully. He didn’t seem to care about the impending cultural invasion. “They’ve earned it,” he’d say.
I step out onto a street and pull back just in time to miss a courier van with a blaring horn. A muscular Polynesian dude swears at me out the window, but I don’t quite catch it. What was I thinking about?
The album I’m listening to concludes and within seconds I couldn’t tell you what it was. There’s silence through the buds. I leave them in anyway, but the sounds of the city seep in, a little muffled. I score a few dirty looks as I try to weave through a crowd of people waiting for a bus. An old white guy deliberately steps in my way, presumably to block me in case I’m thinking of pushing in front of the line. He doesn’t look at me, stares straight ahead, back curved and chest and massive belly pushed out. Mine, he conveys, in that way that people and animals do.
Maybe we’re not so sci-fi after all. Maybe we’re closer to the apes than we are to the hive mind. Or maybe we’ve missed a step and jumped straight from just out of the caves to flying spaceships and listening to streaming music that doesn’t actually exist anywhere. Give a monkey a bone and he’ll use it as a weapon. Give him an iPhone and he’ll look up porn in the dentist’s waiting room.
I’ve never done that, by the way. It was just the silliest place I could think of to look up porn. I imagine the dental administrator looking disapprovingly over his or her glasses, and you’d say, “Well, that’ll teach you for only having last year’s Women’s Days!”
Without realising, I’m looking at my phone again, my thumb doing its pre-ordained dance back to one newsfeed or another. It’s exactly the same as it was a few minutes ago, with just one extra story at the top. A friend I don’t like much is saying something annoying. His life is good, apparently, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It’s a sharp little sting like those sour lollies you used to buy on a dare as a kid. I guess that’s why I look, for that little sour hit.
Two young women fall in behind me as I walk. One says, “Yeah, he’s in a band, they’re really up and coming.” The other says, “Ugh, everyone’s up and coming these days.”
In the hive mind, experience is unnecessary because there only exists a single, robust viewpoint, and no need for growth. In the hive mind, art cannot be created because unique insight is impossible. Bees and ants and the theoretical Chinese in old racists’ imaginations never turn to each other and say, “Listen, there’s something I have to tell you.”
Nearing the end of Willis, I turn into Aro, and the city’s gone and now it’s the suburbs. If I were to keep walking, eventually I’d get to the hills with the trees, and then more trees on a steeper hill, and then eventually water, I guess. That’s the problem with New Zealand: you can only walk so far in one direction before you have to turn back. I wonder: in the hive mind, is running away possible? Perhaps, but you’d spend the rest of your life wondering if it were truly you that ran away, or whether it was a function of the hive ejecting an unwanted element. A man on a ledge yells, “Don’t try to stop me!”, and everyone holds up their palms reassuringly and says, “Nono, it’s fine, we’re actually totally on board with this.”
A car drives past, a bunch of young white dudes with thumping music, one hangs out the window and shouts something at me. There is no hive mind, I decide. The bees can see each other, are pressed right up in each other’s little insect faces, but none of them has the first fucking idea of what’s really going on.
My phone buzzes, and in seconds I’m looking at a photo of me I’ve never seen before, from some foreign land I was in two years ago, apparently. I don’t need to look up to know when to turn left onto my driveway, it all happens automatically. All other thoughts are lost.
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What happened when I lost myself, and how I found my way back again.
Originally written in 2016
When I was in my late twenties, a funny thing happened. I forgot who I was.
I don’t mean that in a literal sense, like a b-grade thriller with a poster of the protagonist’s face reflected in shattering glass. But I don’t mean it in an entirely abstract sense either. Slowly, over some time (weeks? months? I’m not sure), I completely lost a sense of who I was in terms of what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I wanted, what I didn’t want. I forgot my own opinions. Where I did remember something, i.e. “I like going to the movies,” it was immediately followed up with: but do I? Is that actually a thing that I like? Or is it a thing that I’ve learned to like? Or is it a thing that I used to like? Or is it a thing that I do merely to avoid doing other things? (That last one was a biggie for me).
Most often, however, those questions didn’t arise, but neither did the initiating statement. I just purely lost all impulse or instinct for self-identification. It was somewhat alarming.
On reflection, I can see the years of factors that lead up to it. A five-year relationship had come to a close not long before this. It had done so in quite a dramatic way; without going into gory details, let’s say that not only did the relationship end, but so too did a tight group of friends that I had known since I was an early teen. They both blew up at the same time, and I was quite alone, and without the half-dozen or so people I had unconsciously depended on to help form my view on the world.
The irony was that the relationship probably should have never been anyway. Her and I just sort of tumbled together and stayed together, in the way that certain unfortunates have a tendency to do. A similar situation occurred in my work life: at 24 I stumbled into a white collar office job that I was not in any way interested in, and just sort of…stayed. I was at that job for two and a half years. They sold medical equipment. I still, to this day, don’t really understand how the machines worked or what they did.
(My least favourite character flaw: I can stay too long in situations that have long since become unsuitable. My other character flaws are far more entertaining.)
So it’s perhaps not surprising that at 27 (out of the relationship, still in the job, without the core network of friends I had depended upon for the last fifteen years), I suddenly had very little idea of who I was.
Old assumptions about myself just fell away and weren’t replaced with anything new. I remember one instance. Always a keen gamer, I went out and bought myself a Playstation 3 to cheer myself up. I took it back to my pokey Newmarket flat, set it up, popped in the disc, got instructed that I was about to go rescue the princess and…didn’t care. I profoundly didn’t care about the princess, or the multitude of demons I needed to destroy to get to her. Nothing seemed like a bigger waste of time than playing a game. It occurred to me that perhaps I had been playing games during my twenties as a way to avoid dealing with real life issues. I sold the console on Trade Me, taking a hit on the price.
The next thing that disappeared was going to the movies. Previously, I’d go all the time — at least once a fortnight. Even to stuff I didn’t care about. But now, I suddenly realised I didn’t care about the movies at all. I remember sitting in the cinema, waiting for a movie to start, realising that I was going to be required to care about new characters, learn a new story, thrill at a new plot twist. Like the princess and the demons, I just didn’t care. I got up and left. I didn’t go to a movie for a full year after that.
My flatting situation worsened and I left. I’ll spare you the details, but one flatmate fell in love with another flatmate and got weirdly aggressive. At the same time, yet another flatmate decided that we weren’t paying the landlord enough rent (!) and convinced the landlord to raise it (!?). I had, at this point, vague ideas of travelling so I decided not to move into another flat. Instead, I dropped my stuff off at my mum and dad’s place, and scored a housesitting gig. This brings me to the pointy end of the story.
I’m surrounded in this housesit by the artefacts of someone else’s life; in this case a late middle aged couple who had gone away for a few months on holiday. At this point I really did feel like a ghost, a formless thing with no personality, no wants or desires to speak of as his own.
It was a nice Howick house, and the one thing it did have a lot of were CDs. Classic middle aged white person CDs — The Pretenders, The Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and a tremendous amount of Bob Dylan albums.
I’d heard Dylan of course, but had never paid him much mind; in fact I believe I condescended to him pretty badly when peers at university started to discover him (a defence mechanism of someone who doesn’t have a clear idea of who they are, I’ve discovered, is to criticise the tastes of others while offering no alternatives of their own). I put on one of the CDs (a Best Of, if I remember rightly). I suppose I didn’t have anything else to do right at that moment.
I liked it. (Like a) Rolling Stone. That was the track that I first heard that I liked. Again, I had heard it before of course. But this time, I liked it.
It’s hard to describe how this felt, to feel the sensation of liking something after months of experiencing very few feelings — particularly opinions — at all. Would the sudden colouring of Dorothy’s world in The Wizard of Oz be too cliche? At least a little dramatic. It was not a glorious technicolor wipe-over of my entire life. It was more like a tiny, isolated piece of something that might be colour in the grey. A glittering in the dirt.
Having stumbled across this miniscule vein, I kept digging. I listened to more Dylan. I found I liked some more of it — the electric stuff more than the folk stuff, though Don’t Think Twice I enjoyed, perhaps not surprisingly given the content.
I watched the arthouse biopic I’m Not Here on DVD — another find in the strangers’ house. I loved it. I watched it again, and again. I realised that some people hadn’t liked it at all, and that didn’t bother me. I still liked it, and liking it in the face of others who didn’t thrilled me. I became obsessed with Dylan. I purchased knock-off Ray Bans from Trade Me so I could look like him. I tied my entire personality — the limp, weak sprout that it was — to the music of a rock/folk icon at least fifty years old.
Things started to happen from there, in fits and starts. I realised I did like some things that I used to think I did — though not always in the same form. I did like movies, for example, but I didn’t need to see every movie that came out at the theatre. I’d wait until there was something I really wanted to see — that way, my enjoyment of it would be heightened by it’s rarity, and I’d get the added benefit of deciding what was to my taste.
At some point I remember watching the DiCaprio/Winslet movie Revolutionary Road, a movie about the traps of everyday life that scared the crap out of me so bad I went in the very next day and quit my job. I had a vague plan of going to London. When I realised that that plan wasn’t really mine, but was the plan of thousands of Kiwis before me, I changed it to go teach English in Korea instead.
“Korea? That’s so weird!” people would say.
“Yes,” I would say, feeling like it was right for that reason if none other, and doing my best to ignore the nagging belief that if other people thought an idea wasn’t worthy, I should too.
I’ve got theories as to why I spent the bulk of my twenties falling into choices not really made by me (though in retrospect, the act of not deciding is a decision). I grew up creative, progressive and sensitive in a household where those values weren’t reflected back to me, and instead of defining myself as different, I learned to trust the opinions of others and disregard my own.
It’s still a thing I do, sometimes. I still wrestle with trusting my own read of a situation over others, and I can be far too easily swayed by others’ opinions — just sometimes. In fact, I’m writing about this now because I’m going through a much more mild version of what happened almost ten years ago — feeling a little lost and unsure of who I am or what I want.
One of the beliefs that I’ve been holding under scrutiny this time around is that I want to be a writer. I’ve said this my entire life — used it as an excuse to not to commit to jobs, beat myself up over it for never doing enough. A few weeks ago I sat down to do some writing (after putting it off for the entire day) and, after several minutes of routine self-doubt and critiquing, I said to myself: sitting down and writing makes you miserable. It’s the hardest thing in the world to you to do. Why on earth do you make yourself do it?
It was a dangerous thread to pull, because over the course of thirty-odd years I’ve allowed “I’m going to be a writer” to become central to my idea of who I am. But I pulled it. I mean, if you’re going to test the integrity of something, you want to test it at its very core, right?
In this case, however, I know not to panic. Thanks to my experience previously, I know that it’s a process that takes time to work, and that it’ll begin to resolve itself at its own pace. And, after all, it might already be working. After a couple of weeks of feeling blissfully free of the pressure to write, I had an urge to tell this story. Which I’ve just done. It felt nice. Not (Like a) Rolling Stone nice, but nice nonetheless.
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Elon Musk: a poem
Published in Idealog magazine, 2017
Elon Musk wants to send us all to Mars.
Elon Musk wants to break up reality.
Elon Musk wants our cars to tuck us in at night.
He’s quite a man, that Elon Musk, we all agree.
You landed a spaceship on a boat.
I’m told that that was quite a nifty feat.
Your Silicon bros fluffed their feathers over Twitter.
He’s quite a man, that Elon Musk, tweet tweet.
a nice blazer that you’re wearing, emperor
Many fabrics, stitched haphazardly.
You stutter when you speak but that’s okay.
Even Jesus mumbled occasionally.
I want you to be real, Elon.
We’re running out of time and you’re a clock.
We’re climbing the rope ladder to your poop deck.
You’re cooking something; I hope that it’s not crock.
Elon, I don’t want to go to Mars.
Elon, I quite like reality.
Elon, what’s with the fucking cars?
Do they travel interplanetarily?
Hush now Elon, you’ve had a busy day.
You’ve impressed us all, now you need to rest.
We wish that we could join you in your dreamy, dreamy land.
But this reality we’re stuck in, this reality we’re fucked in,
This world that needs our saving, this world that we are braving,
This reality right here is the best.
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Famous last words: placing the final albums of David Bowie and Leonard Cohen side by side in order to better understand their unique secrets.
Leonard Cohen and David Bowie both died this year. You know this. Bowie was the gut punch that announced painfully the beginning of 2016, while Cohen was a weary full stop on a year full of tragedies major and minor.
Both of these deaths made an impact not only because of the respective legacies, but also because the news of both of them rang out just as the artists were freshly returned to the cultural conversation. In Cohen’s case, his final album was released a week or two prior to his death. In Bowie’s, just days. We learned of their deaths, then, just as we were enjoying being back in their company. It was like having a beloved but long-absent uncle come to stay, and finding him unconscious on the sofabed on the morning of the third day.
Small mercies. Both men knew that death was coming: Bowie because he was sick, Cohen because he was old. Both men had time to prepare a final statement: Bowie’s Blackstar; Cohen’s You Want It Darker. In our loss, we’re thankful for that, and it provides a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the thoughts of two men, who were geniuses, and who we loved, as they tidied up their affairs before they passed. Like I say, small mercies.
There is a single definitive difference between Bowie’s Blackstar and Cohen’s Darker, which could inform how we think about them. Blackstar was a creative left-turn for Bowie, a new sound and style at the last minute, following more conventional efforts in Reality and A New Day. Darker, on the other hand, was in line with Cohen’s previous work, really his whole career. Bowie left us with something new and unexpected, Cohen’s departing words were as familiar and comforting as his hat and trenchcoat.
Bowie was very sick, and he had a timeline. Blackstar is drenched in death, probably because of this. Lyrics tell us that you’ll likely be listening to this when Bowie’s “up in heaven.” Bowie’s sung of death before of course, but this is different. His characters have been sacrificed ever since Major Tom (the skull of whom cameos in the video for Blackstar), and he seemed to take glee in killing off Ziggy, among others. But sacrificially killing off characters is different to facing your own mortality, and Blackstar strikes me as a violent burst of anger and sadness, starting in protest but concluding in acceptance and farewell. There are still the messianic themes that Bowie loved to play with, but he’s not sacrificing Ziggy this time; it’s Bowie himself that’s in the hospital bed, walking backwards into the closet.
At this point, we don’t know if Cohen was specifically sick or just ill in that vague way that old people are. Darker talks of age and implies death, but then when has Cohen not? The album is thick with the usual biblical references, with longing for youth (both his own and others), and the mournful violins that make up the final track are as good a funereal dirge as any. But one doesn’t get the sense, necessarily, that Cohen is treating this album any differently to the others. If he expected it to be his last, he’s not showing his hand — at least not in any way that approaches the grim reaper in a fashion distinct to how he’s conversed with him before.
Aside from the particular types of death that were sidling up to them, there exists — and has always existed — a difference in the personas of Bowie and Cohen, and perhaps in their own self-perception, that may ultimately explain the disparate nature of their approaches to their final albums.
Bowie was immortal. He made that clear from early on in his career. His characters lived forever, young and virile, unless they were sacrificed — death in his music was seldom of old age or illness. Bowie himself, in our world, never grew old because it wasn’t the same Bowie as the one you met five years’ younger, this was a different Bowie. No ageing, just transformation. He did write of getting old occasionally, but then he just as often thumbed his nose at it. One of my favourite Bowie-judo moves was, after being praised for the maturity and acceptance of ageing that he showed on Heathen, including on his next album a song which declared that he was never going to get old, so fuck you anyway.
Of course, we will never know how Bowie accepted the news of his illness. But I wonder if, deep down, he assumed that he was as endless as we all thought him to be. Maybe after a career of dealing glamorous death to individual parts of his psyche, he was vaguely surprised when it came back for the final piece, and in such a mundane fashion.
Cohen, on the other hand, was old since the day he was born. I saw a photo of him recently, an old man staring dolefully at the camera, that I assumed was a recent publicity shot; it was from 1990. His songs are endlessly about change and loss and sadness and the past. One gets the feeling that death was not unfamiliar to him, that perhaps his whole life had been a slow and ambling walk towards that final appointment. Perhaps he didn’t see fit to change his style on his final album, then, because it was just so damn appropriate, and always had been.
So what then? Bowie was defined by change and the avoidance of a reasonable death; his final album was one last transformation, fuelled by the shocked outrage of a man confronted with his own mortality. Cohen couched his career in a satisfying consistency and a refusal to turn away from his own open grave; his swan song was sad and accepting, as it always had been. They ended as they had lived.
Forget the analysis. Here’s what it all comes down to. Two great artists died, they knew (or at least in Cohen’s case, intuited) that it was coming, and they had a chance to leave behind a final statement. Both are fine, fine albums. Cohen fans will grieve in reassurance that he went out the same sad, witty man that had been accompanying them through love and breakups for decades. Bowie fans will grieve electrified by a new, unexpected direction, another thrilling transformation in a life and career that was defined by them; they will listen to Blackstar and wonder what would have happened next were he still around, and in that way — among many others — he achieves the immortality he had always felt was his right.
Of course, Bowie fans and Cohen fans are quite often the same people, and enjoyment and appreciation of these final albums are anything but mutually exclusive. We’re sad that they’re gone, but we’re grateful that they said goodbye, in their own perfect, inimitable fashions; a flash of lightning with which to begin the year and a wistful cloud of cigarette smoke and a whiskey-soaked kiss at the end.
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Searching for the perfect version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (spoiler: it doesn’t exist).
In the wake of Leonard Cohen’s death, and in the warm bask of his lovely final album, we as a world turn back to reconsider his masterpiece, Hallelujah.
The song itself is an odd phenomenon. It has been covered in-studio almost eighty times since it was released in 1984, and countless more times live in concert. Although almost universal, it seldom seems to have pierced mainstream public consciousness to the extent of other magnum opus’, such as Bohemian Rhapsody, Purple Rain or Ziggy Stardust. Perhaps it’s because those others haven’t been covered as often or as successfully, making them iconic in their singularity whereas Hallelujah’s power becomes diffuse in its endless variations.
Why did Hallelujah get covered so extensively whereas Ziggy was left to his own devices? Perhaps it’s because, unlike the other tracks mentioned, the identity of Hallelujah seems less tied up with the identity of its creator. It is, also, a near perfect song, building and dropping in an endless rhythm of celebration and despair.
But I’d like to float a secondary theory as to why it’s so endlessly covered: because no one has ever actually got it exactly right. It’s the Everest of pop ballads.
There are three primary versions of Hallelujah that stand out among the many and the most oft-discussed. Cohen’s, John Cale’s, and Jeff Buckley’s.
Let’s start with Cohen. How can an artist not get his own song perfect? In all honesty, I think Cohen wrote a song that was too advanced for himself to perform — his vocal range was never his drawcard. His low baritone struggles to reach the lofty peaks that the song demands, and while there is charm in that struggle (more on that later), it leads to the song feeling unresolved. Modern day listeners who did not grow up with his version might also balk at some of the more eighties creative decisions that underlay the track.
Both Cale’s version and Buckley’s version are each more technically proficient than Cohen’s, but they both lapse into oh-so-much self-seriousness. Cale sounds as if he’s taken the biblical imagery too literally, intoning as if he’s reading from stone tablets. Buckley’s version — which starts with an oh-my-my sigh — descends into the worst of nineties white boy angst. Hallelujah is not a young man’s song, and Buckley manages to transform it into a high school break up track. It’s also particularly painful for those of us who were teenagers in the nineties and remember a) all the girls sighing along with Buckley, and b) all the lank-haired Buckley acolytes playing the song on guitar at high school parties.
Of all the covers I’ve been listening to — and I’ve been listening to a few, for there are many — most of them fall into this trap of self seriousness, which fails to observe one of the key charms of the song: it’s funny. The opening verse itself is a joke, and only Cohen’s original version treats it with the sardonic wit it deserves:
I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It’s a classic Cohen gag: he’s tried to impress a woman with something supernatural and deity-pleasing, and she’s reacted with a shrug. You can almost hear Cohen turn the audience with a cloud of weary frustration over his head, Charlie Brown-style. Both Buckley and Cale’s low monotone on this verse indicate that either they didn’t get the gag, or they thought it was a line of genuine heartache (Cohen knows better: every line is genuine heartache, but they can still be funny). The rest of their versions are both similarly grim.
So I find myself going in loops, scouring Spotify and YouTube for the perfect version of Hallelujah. I am yet to find it; I don’t think it exists. Rufus Wainwright has a couple of good versions, including one with 1500 chorus singers, and kd lang has a good live cover. Bob Dylan has one, but it’s so Dylan it’s barely the same song. There’s a new one that’s gone viral from a reality show band called Pentatonix; it marks the high water mark of self-seriousness, transcending even Buckley’s dewy-eyed ballad in its po-facedness. Honestly, it’s fucking awful.
Maybe Freddie Mercury could have belted it — he has the pipes — but he might have leaned too far into the kitsch to land the heart; the opposite end of the spectrum to Buckley. Bowie similarly could have taken a shot, but I imagine he’d favour the sarcasm and steal away the warmth. It’s a song that needs to be both quiet and loud, both scratchy and bellowing, both exultant and weary. The best version probably lies with some unknown blues singer in some tiny smoke-filled bar somewhere. That’s a comforting thought.
Leonard Cohen’s live versions, particularly as he ages, show a man increasingly unable to reach the notes; notes that he never could reach in the first place. In listening to version after version of Cohen’s attempts to conquer the song, I’m lead to believe that it’s the unconquerable nature of Hallelujah that is it’s greatest asset — and Cohen may just have known that. After all, the song is about the false perception of love as a perfect thing, so it follows that he’d deliberately create a song that could only ever be imperfect (even when it’s performed perfectly). The song feels unresolved because it’s unresolvable, just like love.
Which loops me back around, then, to the beginning. In the end, it’s Cohen’s original that’s still my favourite, missed notes and all. His version is the only version that sounds to me like he feels the words of the song (sorry Buckley, you try a little too hard). He gets the sadness and he gets the joke. It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.
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It’s slippery in here: Twin Peaks, Trainspotting, and the dangerous complexities of nostalgia
The following contains spoilers for Twin Peaks and T2: Trainspotting. Weird combo I know, but hear me out.
2017 was the year of toxic nostalgia. We were desperate to escape into the past, to reject the heartbreaking complexities of the modern world, to make things great again and to take things back; so on and so forth. But it hardly ever worked out the way we wanted it to, and our world has got stuck in some weird sort of twilight zone, full of men holding plastic tiki torches and madmen building walls where once we had torn them down. Going back, trying to unnaturally force the toothpaste of time back into the tube of history, is always a little trickier than it first seems.
Two pieces of narrative art captured this wicked dichotomy: the seductive urge to go back and the realisation that even if you could, it mightn’t be a good idea. Ironically but entirely appropriately, both were resurrected remnants of the youth of Gen X & Y. And while the third season of Twin Peaksand T2: Trainspotting appear, on surface, to have not much to do with each other (weirdly, there are more drugs in the former than in the latter), the respective arcs and fates of Coop and Renton and friends might contain exactly the type of subtle, conflicted examination of nostalgia that our rose-coloured bespectacled world needs right now.
Director Danny Boyle indicates to us early on in T2 that nostalgia is going to be the central theme. The opening shots reach further back than even the original movie, giving us the first glimpse of our familiar protagonists as childhood friends. It’s a surprisingly saccharine opening gambit for a return to a world that we know of as anything but innocent, but it’s effective, and of course it’s just setting us up for a bitter rebuke later on. We cut to modern-day Renton: healthier than we once knew him but literally running at full throttle on a treadmill. Suddenly, his breathing gets tight and he falls, the implication being that his drug-ravaged body hinders him even in his new life. In these directly intercutting scenes, the past is both beautiful and dangerous, and it’s not done with him yet.
The first shot of Twin Peaks seasons 3 is also from the past: young Laura Palmer tells young Dale Cooper that she’ll see him again in 25 years. The next thing we know, Dale is old and he’s sitting across from the Giant-cum-Fireman, who’s really old. The shot’s in black and white, indicating to us that something weird is happening with time. As MIKE will soon ask Dale: is this future or is this past? We’re never quite told. Laura returns to say to Coop: you can go back now. Go back? Where? When?
The characters of T2 navigate their past like tourists, remembering odd moments from the first movie as they walk around their city like pasty Scottish ghosts. But this nostalgia is presented to us as quick, teasing and frustrated: we hear the opening beat of Iggy Pop, but we’re not allowed to hear any more. In Twin Peaks, our beloved characters are mostly held back from us for hours, and when they do appear it’s fleeting. Dale, a hero who’s existed in fans’ minds for decades, is taken from us as soon as he arrives and replaced with a clueless doppelganger. In both cases, we feel the storytellers struggling to engage with this exercise in nostalgia, and we’re told: this isn’t going to be as easy as you think. This isn’t Gilmore Girls.
In T2, the characters’ fondness for the past is expressed as an emotional stunting. Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud are all entranced, obsessed and traumatised by what happened before, and compelled to revisit it — like us, the viewers. In Twin Peaks, the storytellers use our desire for easy, clean nostalgia as a weapon against us. While Renton toys with totems of his youth (Iggy, heroin), tempted by their allure, Dougie Jones has moments of recognition of his own totems: coffee, pie, case files. Renton tries heroin and the results are anti-climactic. Dougie soon forgets his moments of clarity and returns to a stupor. Meanwhile, we watch on, grasping for totems from our past, and feeling increasingly conflicted about it.
The storytellers aren’t telling us that nostalgia is all bad, however — that’s far too simplistic. Spud’s nostalgia, and his ability to record it, saves him, while Bobby Briggs decodes clues from his dead father by investigating his own childhood. In both cases, nostalgia looks like it saves the day — though in actual fact, the revelations come from moving past the past, as it were, rather than staying stuck in it.
Both texts tease us for our desire to return. In T2, Diane appears briefly and wilfully non-consequentially — it’s not until later that a brief cutaway scene exposes Renton’s deeply-held regret at the loss of her in his life. In the most brutal case of pure nostalgia-baiting in Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost make a middle-aged Audrey dance for us, explicitly calling the moment “Audrey’s Dance”, though of course that’s a title that exists in our world, not theirs. It’s as if they’re almost saying to us, with a sly grin: this is what you wanted isn’t it? Is this what you came for? The sequence, unsurprisingly, ends with a nasty punchline (setting us up for the exact same type of punchline that with which they’re soon to end the show).
Before the end of their running times, both texts will show us the very worst case extremes of unhealthy obsessions with the past. Renton and Sick Boy visit a bar full of nationalists who literally sing and stomp their feet about wanting to return a simpler, more racist time. In Twin Peaks, the worst side of nostalgia is represented maybe — just maybe — by Agent Cooper himself, who insists on literally travelling back in time to change the narrative of the past and save Laura Palmer. It’s an act for which he is punished, or at least is required to pay a great personal price for. Whatever you think of the ending of Twin Peaks, I find it hard not to read Lynch and Frost’s attitude the inability to let go of the past, as at the very least, deeply ambivalent, and possibly directly condemning. But whose nostalgia are they punishing? Coops? Theirs? Ours?
T2 ends in a similar fashion. Renton, having moved back into his dad’s house and staying in the same bedroom he was trapped in back in the first movie, finally succumbs to listening to Lust for Life, the audio lifeblood of the original movie. We’re left with the impression that Renton has reconnected with his past, and has found some peace, but at what ultimate cost?
Two heroes, delivered to the past, with massive question marks hanging over their choices, and their final fates. Two sets of storytellers, compelled to revisit their most famous creations, clearly conflicted over their own desire to do so, the commercial influences which got them there, and the nostalgic bloodlust of the audience that’s turning up to watch.
For my own part, here’s what I think Danny Boyle, David Lynch and Mark Frost are saying to us: enjoy nostalgia, dip into it, use it to anchor you like Bobby Briggs and centre you like Spud, but be careful not to go too deep, to become submerged entirely, like Coop. For though the past may seem golden and the present may seem broken in comparison, we will exist, succeed and fail, live and die, in the future, and the future only.
It’s slippery in here, says Bowie-turned-giant-tea-kettle before Coop literally steps into the past. With Brexit and MAGA and old Han Solo and older Deckard and redeployed Mulder and Scully and on and on and on, it’s getting pretty bloody slippery out here, too.
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Infinite Jest: The Avengers Infinity Wars
Spoilers
Disney’s Marvel’s Avenger’s Infinity Wars is the 117th movie in the story of how Robert Downey Jr stays the same age while the rest of us crawl towards death in some sort of Dorian Gray arrangement. It’s a big movie and there’s lots of characters and the decision is made early to split them all up and have them run around on video game style missions because, well, it’s quite hard to find things for all these characters to do. It’s easy to get the feeling early on that nothing really matters, and you’re right, because by the time they kill off Spider-Man and Black Panther at the end, you realise that the next movie is just going to reverse everything using the time thingie, so, probably best not to worry. You’ve probably had the ending ruined by Reddit anyway, but the ending kind of ruins itself because, like I say, nothing matters.
And the movie kind of knows that nothing matters, because even though half of all the beings in the universe are instantly killed (does it include animals? I guess so) we don’t see how this impacts, you know, the entire earth. Instead of heart wrenching scenes of families being ripped apart and mass panic gripping the world(s), we get our buffed up heroes scrunching their widdle eyes and crying because the face paint floaty man has dissolved. These people don’t care about the rest of us. They never did. They care, at most, about the Gwyneths and Buckys and what happened to Zoe Saldana’s career who directly populate their immediate spheres. It’s a very modern way of looking at things, a very Trump’s America way of caring about the world, which is to say, only as it immediately impacts you and yours. But then, these days even Superman kisses Lois atop piles of corpses, so whaddayagunnado?
So by the end of Disney’s Marvel’s Sony’s McDonald’s Guardians of the Civil War: XXXtra Edition you will be tired and feel sad, but maybe not for the reasons the filmmaker’s think you’re feeling sad, but just because you don’t matter, and nothing matters, and you ate too many M&Ms, and you’re three hours older than you were when it started, and you’re going to keep getting old, and one day you’re going to dissolve into nothing, and no one will care, and Robert Downey Jr won’t care, and he’ll still be Iron Man, because the word infinity in the title does not denote scale or hugeness, not really, but instead smallness and insignificance and meaninglessness. Teenager Groot was funny though.
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Far Cry 5: All Good Generic Protagonists Go To Heaven
Spoilers.
Far Cry 5 is a game where you play as a white dude or a black woman or a black dude or whatever, it doesn’t really matter, because ever since we all scolded the creators for making a complex protagonist in Far Cry 3 they’ve become progressively more timid in having a character that does or says anything denoting a perspective. So in Far Cry 5 you play a mute who has less agency than Boomer the dog, and you just do what you’re told and in the end you’re told you were wrong anyway.
What is important is that you have loads of friends who you can depend on to turn up and clear all the outposts where you’re still hiding behind a rock trying to get your bearings. Far Cry 5 is so easy that it feels like you’re playing in God mode even on Hard, because Far Cry 5 wants to make you feel good. And that’s important, because it informs every creative decision within the game. Unfortunately, games or books or movies or people who just want to make you feel good end up giving you quite superficial experiences. Have you ever met someone who only compliments everyone, including you? What starts out as nice ends up with you not entirely trusting them, or at least not being very interested in what they have to say.
Far Cry 3 made you feel bad, at least some of the time. The protagonist was a cowardly dudebro who didn’t want to kill anyone and was so corrupted by the end of the game that he could no longer relate to the friends that he initially set out to rescue. You scurried and panicked away from Vaas in the early stages of the game, completely overwhelmed and outgunned at every point. The game really made you feel uncomfortable — fearing as much for your morality and mental health as for your physical safety — and approaching an outpost to take down a crop of baddies was tense stuff — you were, after all, all by yourself. Also, Vaas totally had your number, and though he was psychotic and cruel, he made a certain amount of sense, only adding to the disorientation that you feel as you play. Even your so-called companions in the game all have their own agendas, and you have the feeling from the first that you are a pawn in a complicated game that you can’t quite understand. In contrast, Far Cry 5’s villians are so clearly horrific that the game’s regular intimations that maybe they’re right are ridiculous — you just left a farm where the entire family including the dog is skewered by cult artefacts.
Cut to Far Cry 5, where literally everyone tells you what a good job you’re doing, and your buddies crack jokes and weild god-like powers of distruction. Why get good at sniping when you can just summon a sharpshooter to do all the work — and take all the risks? After the first few hours of the game, where you probably have at least a dog and a pilot at your disposal, nothing else in the game is really a threat. Approaching an outpost is less about carefully creeping through the bushes than it is about just rushing in and blowing shit up. Did they trigger the alarm? Who cares, you’ve got a bomber plane buddy!
Much has been said about Far Cry 5’s lack of a point of view, even while dealing with politically touchy topics, but it does have a point of view, and the point of view is: we want you to feel good, powerful, popular. To make the player feel small and insignificant, or even wrong, like in Far Cry 3, is a risk, and risks don’t sell games. It was the same confounding decision made in Fallout 4. What was once a series about feeling like one person against the odds in a violent and unforgiving environment became a game about, again, having lots of buddies and everything being quite easy. Hell, you can have some power armour in the first hour of the game, you earned it.
There’s something appealing about the fantasy not of being powerful, but of being small against overwhelming odds. This is, at its core, the appeal of apocalyptic fiction. That’s why the following games are such memorable, dare I say emotional, experiences: Fallout 2, Far Cry 3, Inside, pretty much every survival horror game ever made. Note that many of these games do involve a power experience, but near the end, when you’ve earned it, and often when the protagonist has paid a price of humanity.
In a sense, Far Cry 5’s eagerness to make you feel powerful and popular via guns and bros ends up being an endorsement of the kind of right-wing NRA-lovin’ Americana that we were initially led to believe it would critique. There is no moral complexity in this game, for the first time in the Far Cry series (3 was about increasing discomfort over your own loss of humanity and 4 was about picking between equally flawed political ideologies). It’s a shame, because this game had the potential for complexity already there: maybe the cult’s arguments could have been stronger if the non-cult characters were more representative of a corrupt and immoral world. Maybe the brainwashing you receive at the hands of one of the villains could have been neatly compared to your tendency to do whatever anyone tells you to do anyway. Maybe the fact that you were plowing through regular folk who had been caught up in a cult just in order to take out one dude at the top could have been more acutely critiqued (especially how some of those poor bastards are just mind-controlled anyway). Anyway, moral complexity doesn’t make you feel good, so out the window it goes.
It’s partially our fault: Far Cry 3 was critiqued for featuring a character that was ignorant of his own racial privelige and general dudebro-ness (though it needs to be considered that featuring an attitude is different from endorsing it, but there you go). Far Cry 4, in response, featured a character with very little agency or point of view (still had a name and a backstory though, which was nice) and then Far Cry 5 features no protagonist of any defining features or world view and an attempt to placate players who may feel more drawn to the bad guys’ point of view. It’s like if Wolfenstein said, “yeah but if you are a Nazi, that’s totally fine, and there’s many good points to being a Nazi. Nice jackets, for instance.”
So, in the end, Far Cry 5 is a game about not offending anyone while also not saying anything. It is the gaming equivalent of “If you can’t say anything nice…”
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