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... iji-pool.jpg" alt="Pool-side in Fiji"></p>
                                             ^

Source: http://wintermute.com.au/bits.atom

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<updated>2024-03-23T10:59:04Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Peter M Howard</name>
<email>peter@wintermute.com.au</email>
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<generator>home brewed by wintermute; powered by 11ty</generator>
<subtitle>Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist</subtitle>
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<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2024-03-23:feelings-at-the-door</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2024-03/feelings-at-the-door/" />
<title>Feelings at the Door</title>
<published>2024-03-23</published>
<summary>
In which an old friend comes knocking...
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
My latest breakthrough at therapy was identifying that I’m not the affect-less even-keeled person I’ve assumed I was for the last 20 years. And figuring out that not only do I have feelings, but importantly this is okay, they don’t have to be locked away.
Coming out of this latest session my anxiety came back something awful, and it took me a little bit to figure out why. But it’s like I’ve had all these feelings knocking at my door, and I’ve been going «no that’s a stupid feeling» and trying to rationalise them away, when all I’m really doing is slamming the door on them.
This morning one in particular knocked at the door (whether the front entrance or the door to the closet I’ve kept them/him locked up in) all «oh I hear you’re ready to see me», and I pushed back at first but they kept knocking so eventually I was like «ok fine but you’re waiting in the lobby until I have time».
And I still haven’t actually dealt with it but wow just acknowledging it made so much difference! It’s still there waiting in the lobby, a constant presence in my head like everything else I need to get around to, but it’s not doing that huge hammering on the door that just spikes my adrenaline and pulls me into my head and out of the real world.
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<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2024-01-28:on-unfinished-thoughts</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2024-01/on-unfinished-thoughts/" />
<title>On Unfinished Thoughts</title>
<published>2024-01-28</published>
<summary>
In which something...
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
I have so many unfinished draft posts, gathered over the years. And snippets of things scrawled in notebooks, now taking up space. Between <a href="/bits/2023-12/rebirth-or-reinvention/" title="Rebirth, or Reinvention">resurrecting</a> this site and doing some cleanup at home I’ve been rereading some old stuff, and thinking about the ways and reasons I’ve stopped writing (or especially, publishing) so much.
There’s definitely a thing where, for a while, I’ve felt like I shouldn’t publish anything I haven’t fully thought through, that I’m not ready to defend from all angles, or at least make clear that I’ve thought about a lot of them. Some of this is the toxicity of mass social media, but there’s also a bunch of unhealthy stuff I internalised and really leaned into in my thirties.
It’s weird reading some of my earlier stuff, ’cause I can see clearly that I was on a journey, was starting to see through a lot of bullshit. But I was challenged to have to make an intellectual argument — feelings that something is askew isn’t good enough. Part of this is toxic masculinity (the idea that men can’t argue from feelings), part is weird old Catholic notions of ‘Natural Law’ (which is the same thing basically: a rationalisation of big scary feelings whenever one’s observations of the world don’t match one’s expectations).
But anyway, here I am now, not really a man and definitely not caring for intellectual gatekeepers that will only hear arguments from people (men) who play by their debating rules.
So the weirdly revolutionary thing I’m going to do here is publish something I haven’t fully figured out.
Some of what I liked about Twitter was that its short-form constraints lent itself to putting unfinished thoughts out there — but as it expanded and its social rules changed it also became a place for second-guessing oneself. I’m off Twitter, I’m not convinced mass social media is healthy, and I’m gonna try using my personal blog space as somewhere to figure out my thoughts, even if it remains a place of <a href="/bits/2006-03/some-justifications/" title="Why I Do This; Some Justifications">neither fact nor fiction</a>.
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<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2024-01-08:superpowers-or-empires</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2024-01/superpowers-or-empires/" />
<title>Superpowers, or Empires?</title>
<published>2024-01-08</published>
<summary>
In which I wonder how we describe hegemony now, and for the next few decades, and how Australia fits amongst global players
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Overheard a random American accent saying something vaguely like “China will be the next superpower within 50 years”, which struck me both as absurd and as something I’ve been hearing from young white Americans (and related hegemonists) for nearly 30 years now.
And I realised that the actual problem here isn’t their grasp of the relative power of the US and/or China, but actually the concept of a Superpower at all.
I think this idea of Superpower nations really is an invention of the States, as a way of diverting attention from Empire, and their Empire in particular. Like clearly, the American Empire suffered its first losses in Vietnam, and its failure to recognise that loss has led to decades of subsequent failures. But at the same time their cultural and market power has lasted a lot longer, so the core imperial middle class hasn’t really noticed the decline until the most recent years, and even that is the source of internal conflict. Meanwhile though, the US Empire had to explain its global position somehow, and was invested in not describing itself as Empire — so it invented Superpower nations, initially about the US and the USSR in some sort of good-vs-evil struggle, more recently about the US and China, though Putin still plays his role as a wannabe Superpower. So much Cold War nuclear-apocalypse angst comes from this source, but is built on nonsense, so it’s weird to see it still play out now in any cultural memory.
All that said, I’ll grant that the current Chinese government, especially as led by Xi, sees itself as an Imperial power, and that is dangerous. But that is now, not decades away after some future American decline, and it is not a global superpower. The idea that the globe can handle just one or two superpowers at a given time is an invented nonsense; we may easily see a number of competing Empires, or power vaccuums where there are none that have any meaningful power outside their ‘national’ borders.
Realistically now the US and Russia are both dwindling Empires, dying out in slightly different ways but still thrashing their <s>dicks</s> power about to the detriment of people abroad and at home. China is a powerful Empire, but it’s limited by a vision of ethnic purity — it’s been awful against the Uyghurs, but any of their colonisation in Africa or the Pacific, for example, isn’t sustainable without mass emigration which they don’t actually have the numbers for. The messiest conflicts in the coming decades are going to be from the wannabe Empires — Modi in India, the Sauds, some of the pan-European fascist movements — none of whom have any compelling ‘glue’ to make an Empire work, but still have violent ambitions beyond their borders...
I don’t have a conclusion here, but back in Australia it’s a clear explainer of so much of our international politics. As a small country we’re kinda destined to be a vassal state, unless we can find a compelling economic reason to retain some independence. For a long time we’ve been a vassal to the American Empire, but as it becomes clear the US is shrinking its borders and its sphere of influence, we’ll have to step back from that. So the question becomes whether we ally with China as an awkward trade partner and supporter of its abuses (we seem to have no problem voting with the US against most of the rest of the world, so there aren’t actual moral qualms here), or try become an independent South Pacific economy, like an old imagined pirate tradepost.
For all the darkness here, there’s a positive view for this country too — Australia is so full of renewable energy potential, both in terms of minerals and sunlight, that in a climate-positive future we really could become an independent powerhouse. That’s gonna require giving up a lot of our existing hangups though — moving away from the US Empire’s dependence on fossil fuels, reskilling our existing population, and letting in a lot of non-white folks who can help with that transition at all levels.
I want to believe that we can do this!
</div>
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<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/" term="myth" />
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<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2023-12-11:rebirth-or-reinvention</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2023-12/rebirth-or-reinvention/" />
<title>Rebirth, or Reinvention</title>
<published>2023-12-11</published>
<summary>
In which I enter a new decade, and invent a new me
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<img src="https://media.wintermute.com.au/bits/fiji-pool.jpg" alt="Pool-side in Fiji">
A couple weeks back I turned 40. Took a few days off, stayed at a resort, something I never thought I’d do, but turns out the low-stakes relaxation is just what I needed.
A couple weeks prior I released a refresh of this website, switching to a static built thing (<a href="http://11ty.dev">11ty!</a>) after years of running on Django and paying for a VM to stay active when I almost never actually wrote anything new.
For the last ~9 months I’ve been in long-overdue therapy, also something I long thought I wouldn’t do.
At the start of last year I quit my job and went freelance, getting in just before burn-out hit, and using the time to focus on the things I enjoy about my work. I’ve loved working on lots of different projects, but I’m almost ready to go full-time again, maybe for someone else, or kicking off a startup (whether a consumer thing or something that elevates and focusses the consulting game).
These things are all related.
<blockquote>
Men will literally <insert something complicated and/or absurd> instead of going to therapy
</blockquote>
^ That was me for a while. Figuring out I’m not a man kinda helped me figure out I could actually go to therapy.
How much of this new re-birthed me I share in public I’m not sure of yet, but after years of keeping me/them hidden I’m ready to write and publish again.
</div>
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<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/" term="personal" />
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<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2023-10-23:sucking-it-up</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2023-10/sucking-it-up/" />
<title>Sucking it Up</title>
<published>2023-10-23</published>
<summary>
In which white dudes...
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Tim Bray is very much an elder white tech dude, but his discovering and documenting his priviledge has been interesting; here he figures out something:
<blockquote>
That system depends on another class doing shitty jobs for low pay, mostly women and people of color. One of the biggest reduce-racial-injustice policy moves I can think of would be to pay those people more. It’s pretty easy to see how powerful individuals (mostly white) who might not personally be racist are economically invested in the racist status quo.
</blockquote>
And the real kicker:
<blockquote>
I think (you won’t be surprised) the problem isn’t the tech worker bees, it’s the big-money culture. Because big money attracts morally crippled people. There’s the VC-driven winner-take-all growth-hacking buzz of the Bay Aryans, and the world of big finance it feeds into, and neither of those cultures offers rewards for doing the right thing.
...
Is it fair to say that we should have seen it coming? ... That uncritically empowering anyone to say anything to anybody leads inexorably to GamerGate and KiwiFarms and slaughtered Rohingya?
</blockquote>
There’s also an awkward thing where he doesn’t like the “Ok Boomer” tag, which I’ve heard from other boomers but doesn’t really make sense (like, when the label doesn’t apply to you, maybe simply ignore it?)... But I think he gets it overall
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<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2022-09-22:untitled-dispatch</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2022-09/untitled-dispatch/" />
<title>Untitled Dispatch</title>
<published>2022-09-22</published>
<summary>
In which a message is received, from a distant planet
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Time passes. And space.
I awake in a familiar home, on an unfamiliar planet. My eyes adjust to the light, the lenses applying a new white-balance, making the contrasts easier to see beneath the pink-tinged sky.
I take a deep breath, hold it while my lungs re-calibrate. A lot more gases in the air here, but enough oxygen to work with if my filters hold up.
With feeling returning to my limbs, I pull myself up and to the edge of the bed. Not sure if it’s the 1.2 gravity or an after-effect of however much time I’ve spent travelling, but the exertion is a lot.
Fortunately the hab has been productive during our travel. Mushrooms and leafy greens and grassy grains keep my nutrition covered. It’s also recycled the materials from our last posting, and will have more of the base established in another few hours. Time enough to get a walk in and orient myself.
<hr>
I walk in a loop, a concentric spiral expanding outwards. At first just a hundred metres from the hab, then 200, and on. When I’m 500 metres out I turn back. It’s been a couple of hours, and the hab has expanded, with new compartments for keeping clean, growing more food, and—core to this mission—alchemy.
I start in the cleaning station, scrubbing off a layer of grime from travel, dust from this new planet, and skin from the last. I’m paler here, my dermal implants already figuring out I should absorb more light through the pale red atmosphere. I dry carefully — my new skin is prone to break out if I leave it wet, and it’s humid enough here anyway.
Feeling fresh, it’s time to plan my next few weeks’ work. I’d spotted a few mining opportunities in my local loop, and the alchemy lab will have an idea of our priority targets.
<hr>
Time passes. Space is the same though, I think? I know I have a tendency to lose myself in my work but this feels different. I couldn’t tell you how long I’ve been here. Or even been away.
Wait—
What’s the last thing I remember? I look back at my journal — the last entry is from when I first woke here. The memory sounds familiar, but there’s nothing since then. Any earlier is fuzzy too. I’m sure there were missions before this, and I remember my training placement on Luna.
My body’s changed so much that it’s no longer a measure of time. Changes to my eyes to handle the light, to my skin to absorb more or less radiation. I open a mirror and close it again, unwilling to look too long at the stranger who is also me, like this hab on a foreign planet is also home, always has been.
<hr>
The alchemy lab has sent me further than ever today. Six k’s in one direction is a great canyon, and I’m supposed to descend into it. We’ve picked up a fresh vein on the scanner another k deep. I’ve got the ropes and pulleys I need for the descent, but I need to spread it out, find some spaces to rest and adjust to the atmosphere and the changing pressure.
The sun is blocked before I’m halfway down; it feels like night come early. My body adjusts to handle the cold, but it costs me in time, and I’m wishing I’d brought some warm clothes.
Eventually I reach the vein. It’s still dark down here, but if I squint I can see light returning to the sky way above — a shift from purple to pink. I look back to the vein and my ears nearly pop.
It’s such a bright glowing colour I can HEAR it, pulsing. The lab only needs a sample but I want to take it all. Hang on. Is this how the prospectors of Old Earth felt? I catch myself, say a prayer to the planet, the pulsing eases. I scoop out a little of the vein. It has a consistency like lava, but it breaks like crystal. That’s unexpected. I pinch off a little between my fingers, and it disappears like fine salt — whether fallen or absorbed I can’t quite tell.
<hr>
Time moves slow.
I’m halfway back up the canyon.
I’m at the top.
I can see the hab. It’s only 100 metres away.
I’m walking up to the lab. Opening the door. Pulling out the alchemy gear for analysis.
The sample is smaller than I remember.
<hr>
What time is it? There’s no light out. I don’t remember a time with no light here.
The lab! I’m supposed to be bringing the sample back.
I’m halfway back up the canyon.
I’m at the top.
I can see the hab. It’s only 100 metres away. I’m walking up to the lab, opening the door, pulling out— No. The alchemy gear is already setup for analysis. It shows a result.
It can’t be, that’s impossible.
I pull the sample out of my bag to run it again. Huh, less of it than I remember. I load it up for analysis.
<hr>
Time passes.
I’m in a familiar home, on an unfamiliar planet. My body is having no problems adjusting to it though, so I must have been here before. The pink-tinged sky is familiar, maybe?
The walls, though— something different. A teal-ish mineral vein, pulsing between the seams. I haven’t seen this before. The hab is supposed to be good at self-preservation; it’s the most consistently grey in all my travels. I reach for it, pinch some between my fingers, it dissolves there.
I head to the lab.
The alchemy computers have gone to sleep, but they whir back into action after a few prods. There’s a test result waiting on the screen. It’s what we’ve been looking for! The «Philosopher’s Stone» is a living salt-based organism, not an empty rock. But I can understand why the ancients couldn’t really describe this substance. Small amounts of it must have crashed with meteorites on Old Earth, but here it was embedded. Even small doses messed with our sense of time — my own and the hab’s computers. This planet was like a black hole in time — pulling in and extending and spaghetti-fying our sense of change. Here we could truly live forever.
<hr>
Time passes.
<hr>
** Message Received — data incomplete, waiting for completion — … — … — signal received — … — ends? **
** Recommendation: cease protocol. Abort Project Ganymede. — **
<hr>
“You have to see this!”
“What—?”
“New signal. Twenty light years out. But it’s tagged for Project Ganymede”
“The project we started last year?”
“The very one.”
They brought the dispatch up on screen. It took me a while to figure out what we were looking at—
“We haven’t even found this planet yet?!”
“We haven’t found this planet yet.”
“And they’re sending images too. This can’t be real, right?”
The images looked like an archaeological dig — a guardian statue in front of an ancient temple. But weirdly other-worldly, a pink sky, and glowing blue veins in the walls of the temple.
“But get this. That ‘statue’ has an ID-sig signed by Ganymede.”
I stared into its face. Its eyes and skin were an unusual colour, but something about it was oddly familiar. My own reflection overlaid on the screen a little too closely.
I’d been thinking about a transfer to the Ganymede project…
<hr>
Time passes.
<hr>
<a href="#top">Reset ➰</a>
</div>
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<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/" term="writing" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2015-03-22:they-cannot-go-back</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2015-03/they-cannot-go-back/" />
<title>They cannot go back</title>
<published>2015-03-22</published>
<summary>
In which a dreamer wakes, a world emerging
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Wrote this this morning. It comes, I think, from the opening of the second act of the new novel. Sam, Kate, and Luke are our protagonists; Kate has been in a coma for the whole of the first act, and when she wakes, things change.
<blockquote class="script">
Kate opens her eyes. Sam is there, talking to another woman she doesn't know. She can't make out the words, but something at the back of her mind tears at her. She wants to speak up, but can't find the words. She wants to yell. Scream. Nothing.
Nothing. Black—
Kate wakes, opens her eyes. Sees— herself, looking back up at her. She's floating above her body, looking around the room. Luke is there, dozing in the corner. Sam is outside the door, arguing with someone she can't see. She tries to open her mouth. No sound comes out. She falls, crashes back into her body. Black—
Kate wakes, but it's dark. Is she in the hospital room, or in that other place? Her eyes adjust, take in the moonlight. The moon isn't as bright as in the other place, she must be here. As her mind catches up with her body, feeling slowly returns. The bed under her is still. The room is empty. She can't tell what time it is, but it's quiet out.
She remembers she had to tell Kate and Luke something. Warn them. She doesn't know what it is, but she's sure it's urgent. She has to tell them now! She has to get! up!
She pulls her legs up, has to use her arms for balance. Props herself up on a pillow. Pauses for breath, her arms shaking from the smallest exertion. Deep breath and spins herself off the bed, legs hanging over the edge, and falls into a crouch.
Everything hurts, muscles tired, but she has to get out. Has to warn Kate and Luke. They can't try again, it's a trap.
She pulls herself up standing, stumbles towards the door, and crashes into it. She's suddenly aware of the sound, a high-pitched whine coming from somewhere behind her, echoed somewhere down the hall, and there's a nurse on the other side of the door, pushing gently against her, trying to get in, bundling her back to the bed.
"They can't go back!" she's crying, over and over, but the nurse isn't listening, or doesn't care. "It's not safe there!", as she falls back into a sleep, slips into the darkness.
</blockquote>
</div>
</content>
<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/" term="writing" />
<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/tags/" term="Immortals" />
<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/tags/" term="Dreaming" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2014-04-06:captain-america-winter-soldier</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2014-04/captain-america-winter-soldier/" />
<title>Captain America: The Winter Soldier</title>
<published>2014-04-06</published>
<summary>
The best of the Marvel movies yet
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
We’ll know for sure when we see how it flows through to Agents of SHIELD, but it looks like CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER is the first of the Marvel movies to really change the status quo in their shared universe.
And that’s a big step up, and a big part of what makes this the best of any of the Marvel movies yet. The first round of movies focussed just on introducing their characters, and did so with flair but very simple storylines; AVENGERS went big, but for all the destruction wrought, like most comics stories there was little sense of its impact on the world. Now that we’re in the second round of movies, the creators seem more comfortable telling stronger stories, and referencing more of the world without having to explain all the details. And Agents of SHIELD has been slowly exploring the rest of the world beyond the superheroes, and expanding on the SHIELD mythos.
But WINTER SOLDIER really upturned a lot of the simple mythos that had been established in the movies. Its twists are unsurprising to anyone familiar with the tangled back-and-forth of the comics world, but I was still surprised to see them writ large, and with such pointed satire. The movie’s full of comments on the world’s intelligence apparatus, on the rise of the surveillance state, and the removal of freedoms that brings.
Plus it’s just a fun movie. It plays with the tropes of spy thrillers and of superhero action. It makes Cap a character actually worth caring about. And it elevates Black Widow to so much more than eye candy; Scarlett Johansson’s performance is a tour de force, her character finally rounding out beyond the hints of a mysterious past, becoming a spy-action-hero that stands up to the powered heroes and villains around her, and is often the smartest and always the wittiest in the room. And it introduces the Falcon, a hero who’s inherently pretty lame, and could just be a token black dude, but is filled out and full of heart. It’s a movie that’s about much more than just Cap, and in that is a peak example of what the Marvel world is capable of.
WINTER SOLDIER is full of teases for more of what’s happening in the rest of that world, some explicit and others less so. There’s the necessary credits scene to introduce the next AVENGERS. But I really hope we get to see more of Black Widow, and the cute closeup on her purple high-top sneakers, clearly matching Hawkeye’s, has me (probably over-) optimistic we get to see Natasha and Clint team up soon.
</div>
</content>
<category scheme="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/" term="movies" />
</entry>
<entry>
<id>tag:wintermute.com.au,2014-02-24:ten-years</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2014-02/ten-years/" />
<title>Ten Years</title>
<published>2014-02-24</published>
<summary>
Quietly reached ten years of this website, just ten days ago. My first couple of [...]
</summary>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Quietly reached ten years of this website, just ten days ago. My first couple of posts showed up on Valentine’s Day 2004: <a href="/bits/2004-02/broken-hearts/">the first</a> a link to a Morning News piece; <a href="/bits/2004-02/free-spirit/">the second</a> a link to an illustrator’s personal blog. Both sites are still there, but neither link works, the archives disappeared or restructured, the pieces that drew my attention now lost to time.
I no longer read either site, and nor has my little space on the internet followed the pattern set by those first two posts: before we re-badged self-publishing ‘blogging’, I was inspired by the community of writers sharing links and ideas. I wanted to be a part of that. But I’ve since discovered that it’s the reading and the writing I really love. I can’t maintain the discipline or the ritual of ‘link-blogging’, or the regularity required to develop any sort of following. But I’ve loved having my own little space to practice my writing, and to publish, even for no-one.
Curious, I went looking at my archives — I know my writing has come and gone here.
<img src="https://media.wintermute.com.au/bits/ten-years.png" alt="Ten years of posts and words">
The orange line graphs the number of posts each month of the last ten years; the purple graphs the number of words. There are nearly three years worth of ‘months’ in which I posted nothing at all.
But still, a couple of interesting patterns. The big burst early on, having spent 2005 on exchange in France. The lonely burst in the first half of 2009 — predominantly my post <a href="/bits/2009-05/on-chatter/">On Chatter</a> — a long-form piece that’s dated but still topical, and which somewhat appropriately talks to the virtues of short-form, which was to subsequently take over a lot of my writing. Since around the same time I’ve written a lot on Twitter instead of here. But then late 2010 / early 2011, and I’m back in France — writing <a href="/bits/2012-02/unseen-city/">the novel</a>, and keeping a <a href="/bits/2011-01/">travel log</a> while the words insist on flowing.
In the time since, this site has lain fallow again. A lot has changed, but then, the topics I’m interested in are still familiar, and when I take the time I enjoy the writing. So I’d say (not for the first time, nor the last!), expect to see more writing around here.
(Aside: in only my <a href="/bits/2004-02/semantic-web-fetish/">fourth post</a>, I quoted from a comment against an interview with Paul Ford: “your fetish with the Semantic WEb is just an excuse not to organise your thoughts hierarchicly, as God intended”... This has in particular been front-of-mind again, as I delve into content strategy on a few different fronts, and discover again that nothing is ever really new!)
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<title>My Sydney Festival 2014</title>
<published>2014-01-27</published>
<summary>
This Is My City In Summer
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I always love that the Sydney Festival has such a wide variety of arts and events — means there’s always something new, and lets me discover some dance and music and theatre all at once. But this year it felt like the offering was even broader. It may have just been coincidence, but it feels like my deepest, richest, experience yet.
<h3>Parramatta Opening Party</h3>
I started off my Festival out in Parramatta. I always like heading out to the heart of the west (perhaps knowing I’m returning soon), and there’s a strong community feel to the opening party. Last year’s didn’t feel as strong, partly just let down by the rain. But this year the weather came out, and the scale was just a little smaller — for the better, as it meant all the action took place within a couple of blocks.
I wandered down the river first to visit the Rubber Duck who’d hung out in Darling Harbour last year. He looked quite at home in the idyllic river-and-willows setting.
Then in the centre of Parramatta, caught Ben Caplan & The Casual Smokers. A raucous folk quartet — Ben Caplan is mad, and energetic, and with a gravelly throaty voice; he’s supported by Jaron Freeman-Fox on electric violin, who I’ve since discovered makes some great new music (with bits of world/fusion thrown in).
Boxwars was another impressively weird display for such an ‘official’ event. It featured a whole array of people dressed in cardboard armour and wielding cardboard weapons, or steering massive cardboard war machines. They marched down Church St to wild music and fire crackers, before setting up in the park for an all-out battle.
But my opening night finished early; I had to get up early for...
<h3>The Calling</h3>
The main reason I’d gone out to Parramatta. The Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) ran a mini-bus tour at the crack of dawn, repeated across the first couple of weekends of the festival.
The tour was an exploration of some of the expressions of faith in the local region. Intensely personal (and idiosyncratic, we were reminded repeatedly, as though to disclaim it), it wasn’t trying to explain or even compare the different faiths, but it was powerful in its closeness. Only twenty or so people went along on the bus tour, to four different stops, each selected by a different producer from the ICE team. At each site, we were spoken to by leaders of the relevant faith community, and while they can’t help but proselytise, it was primarily to hear about their particular practices and communities.
First stop was the Auburn Gallipoli Mosque, where the imam also made a private call to prayer. Then a Lebanese breakfast, and on to St Mark's (High) Anglican in Granville, with an a cappela gospel song by a Samoan-Australian tenor. Next to the Sydney Murugan Temple, and a Hindu devotional dance. And finally to a Tibetan Buddhist centre where we also meditated for ten minutes.
The blend of architecture and art and various forms of music or dance, all with at least partly recognisable ritual, made for a deeply spiritual experience. The commonalities in ritual were remarkable, as of course the personal meaning that each speaker wanted to impart — overwhelmingly a sense of self-discovery and -improvement enabled by their faith or practice.
At first I wondered at some comments: at times they seemed a bit too defensive; each had some particular misconception they were eager to disabuse us of. And they were seemingly minor things — the call to prayer isn’t sung, they insist; the Hindu divinities are just avatars of the one God. But I remembered some of the same qualifications we make of Catholic belief, like the insistence that we don’t actually worship Mary. There are all these practices and beliefs built up from centuries of tradition, with layers of nuance, and contemporary interpretations and understanding that give context to ancient (and in many cases, barbaric) pronouncements.
So it got me thinking about my own rituals and beliefs too, of their context, and of the meaning they impart. But more than that, these shared rituals are about community, and about a shared journey. There’s a great power in this shared experience (my own preference for hermitude even dampened on learning that mainstream Islam is very anti withdrawal from the world, a reminder of the import of engaging with one’s society).
<h3>Am I</h3>
Closing out the first weekend of the Festival, I went to the Sydney Opera House for Shaun Parker Company’s Am I. Perhaps I’d been primed for its themes, but it was a remarkable dance work.
The dance itself was fairly simplistic — all understated, a handful of dancers together at any one time. But when they did come together it was about unity and shared experience (again). The lead dancer narrated, or provided commentary at least, rarely actually dancing herself. The music was performed live, raised above the main stage such that we rarely even saw the performers. That, combined with a rear panel of LED lights, in constant animation, gave it a beautiful otherworldly feel, set against a starkly modernist design.
The dance and music shifted between primal sounds and movement through to contemporary hip-hop inspired breaks and beats. And the show’s commentary sought to tell the experience of humanity, or the experience of the Self amidst humanity.
I’m not sure I could say whether it succeeded in its objective, whatever it was trying to actually say. But in my own experience I found it powerfully moving.
<h3>About An Hour: Gudirr Gudirr, Forklift</h3>
For the middle weekend I made it to Carriageworks for two of their ‘About An Hour’ performances. And fell in love with the venue. I’d been out to Carriageworks for a few things before, but while I was there this time I really got a sense of the venue as a diverse contemporary arts centre. It’s helped along by a frankly insane installation called Chance — a massive set of reels and scaffolding invoking a newspaper printing production, with black-and-white headshots of new-borns, flanked by LED counters of worldwide births and deaths. A ridiculous work of art, but at a scale that it just has to be admired.
Gudirr Gudirr was a solo work from Dalisa Pigram, of the Carriageworks resident Marrugeku. Pigram is from an indigenous community in Broome, and in Gudirr Gudirr blended dance and projected images and spoken word to speak of the experience of her community. Some of it was confronting: a community disappearing, horrible suicide rates; some of it was uplifting in its humanity, or simply forced me to reconsider my conceptions. We tend to learn about indigenous history as a prelude to white invasion and settlement, with this crazy idea that Australia’s indigenous population was some amorphous mass, completely isolated from the rest of the world. But Pigram speaks of coming from a background that includes Malaysian and Filipino and the region’s Aboriginal nations. So eye-opening, and just a great form of personal storytelling.
Forklift was a dance piece from KAGE, and had a simple premise: three girls and a forklift. The women climb and writhe about while driving the forklift around the stage, to a variety of music and lighting, at one point changing into glowing neon costumes and performing in near darkness. It was crazy, hilariously sexy, with a driving beat and near constant danger, with acrobatics from a great height or just perilously close to too much moving metal. Not a lot of substance, but all combined it was gripping, too magically easy to get caught up in from start to finish.
<h3>Black Diggers</h3>
Closed the second weekend back at the Opera House. Black Diggers was a theatre piece about the experience of indigenous servicemen in World War I, and their return to the country after the war’s end. It consisted mostly of a series of vignettes — many characters we’d return to many times throughout the play, but it jumped around to different theatres of war and between different groups of soldiers.
At first this was too confusing — the piece is performed entirely by an indigenous cast, so I was thrown on realising that some of them were playing white characters. But once I got past that lazy identification, it was straightforward enough to figure out who was who just from the play’s context.
Although primarily about the indigenous experience, it was a really good piece about war more generally — about the experience of soldiers, of people caught up in fighting for their nation, without really knowing what it was they were fighting for. With that extra indigenous perspective, it became a powerful statement about land and country; I choked up at one moment when one soldier died, a younger boy realising that his spirit would wander, restless, unable to find his way home.
The play really got difficult in its final part, with the soldiers returning from war. “The day I got off the boat they painted the colour back on me,” one veteran observed. During the war, they’d talked up the change they expected to return home to, the acceptance they’d receive. Their disappointment after the war was a punch to the gut. At one point, a veteran gave a speech talking about the progress his people had made, and it was extra hard knowing how little progress has been made in the hundred years since the war.
<h3>Othello: The Remix</h3>
Had my expectations pegged high for this one, perhaps too much. If there’s going to be one dud amidst a series of this size, this is the one. Sitting outside the theatre before it started, I could here The Roots and Common being played to warm up the room, and I took that as a good sign. But as the theatre filled up and we got closer to the start, the rap got whiter and poppier — Eminem, Beastie Boys. On hearing the latter I remembered how much I dislike their style.
And then the cast came on stage and started rapping like the Beastie Boys. It didn’t get better.
It was fun enough, and funny. At times the raps were really clever, weaving various pop and hip hop references with Shakespeare. But as it dragged on they got more and more awkward, just trying to squeeze together the story and the rhymes.
But more than that, it made obvious just how creepy the actual story of Othello is. Sure, Iago as a manipulator is the Loki-esque bad guy, but Othello as someone who would actually kill for his dubious ‘honour’ is pretty messed up.
<h3>The Serpent’s Table</h3>
An incredible experience for my final weekend. Back at Carriageworks, this one featured a series of five short pieces, all around the themes of food and family, all told by Asian Australians, tinged with different mixes of immigrant experience.
This was a beautifully intimate work of theatre. The big warehouse space of a Carriageworks bay was darkened and divided up into smaller spaces with big hanging veils, doubling as projection screens. In each small space, one performer spoke directly to the audience of twenty-something.
Each had a unique experience and storytelling style, unified just thematically, and this added to the strength of the performance: always a new style, a different food. We started with Pauline Nguyen, preparing a soup, “of reconciliation”, while speaking of her refugee experience and her father’s violence. Then Anna Yen, supported by an acrobatic performance, discovering the dark history that came before her father’s yum cha restaurant. Both were incredibly emotional, the bitter smells and flavour of the soup lingering. To lighten things up, Jennifer Wong gave a very funny monologue about growing up in the suburbs, ashamed of her family’s food, while we munched on dumplings. Then Darren Yap, who also co-directed the piece, telling his story as a series of vignettes, diving in and out of his family history, his mother always there with her chicken and mushroom, until she was there no longer; to close he served us the chicken and mushroom he’d reinvented. And finally Indira Naidoo, speaking of growing up in different countries around the world, of taking flavours with her, of an ever-changing collection of scents and spices that come to signify home; we closed with a fragrant chicken curry, and sampled honey collected at the Wayside Chapel.
It was, quite literally, the most sensual work of theatre I could imagine — sights and sounds and touch and taste and scents all combining over an hour and a half, a journey through lives and stories and flavours. Totally not the sort of theatre that could ordinarily be sustained, but so glad I was able to experience it as part of the Festival!
<h3>Sinkane</h3>
Closed the Festival with a trip to the Spiegeltent, visiting the ‘Festival Village’ in Hyde Park only on its final day. The Village itself was a bit of a let-down, and perhaps it being Australia Day, the Spiegeltent was pretty empty, but Sinkane were excellent.
I had no real clue what I was getting myself into, and I couldn’t guess just looking at the band either — the lead on guitar, keys, and vocals, backed by another guitar and bass and a drummer. And they rocked out something fierce, but it wasn’t ordinary rock-n-roll. A curious blend of disco and alt-rock and trippy world/fusion and blues. They opened and closed especially strong — driving beats and guitar lines, but still so mellow, with songs content to just bang, for many minutes. The meandering in-between could’ve become tedious, but that mellow blues feel just rolled right through, with songs exploring different genres and sounds and singing styles, and always with a distinct voice.
Have since found a couple of old Sinkane LPs, and am eagerly awaiting more music — apparently much of what we heard was them trying out new things, which is a good sign.
And that’s what I love about the Festival — that even on a night that barely pulls a crowd I can still find something completely unexpectedly awesome.
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