Media Explosion at Pike River Mine

It is virtually impossible to say anything about the Pike River Mine incident without sounding patronising, trite, clichéd or a combination of all three.  Twenty-nine men are buried 1500 metres underground.  Immediate rescue impossible.  As the hours haul themselves around the clock, brows furrow and greyness sets heavily into the eyes of friends and families.  Hope beds itself in for a long haul.

In reality there is little more to be said, and yet there would be barely a soul to say nothing.  That is a sure indicator of the deep shock these kinds of tragedies hammer home.  Even the most reticent are compelled to utter, to mimic even, in order to speak of "unspeakable things".  People, previously unknown to pray, miraculously begin to offer prayers.  News reporters, as if by reflex, ask passersby: “How are you feeling?”

There is a time when words become empty tokens, expulsions of breath with no force of meaning.  They tread close to becoming unintended insults, unwanted injuries.  Perhaps that time is much closer to the event when sympathy, prayers and sorrow do not require the gesture of speech to be shared.  Such time rather for “the news” to step back, watch and listen.  Pike River is not a media explosion.  It is the everyday lives of ordinary people being played out against the background of something awful.

The Girl in HR

They rarely play a straight bat but they are ubiquitous so you have to take notice when the TV news tell you that the job market is getting tough.  It’s getting harder for people who already have jobs, more difficult for those looking for jobs, and damn near impossible for older people in the workforce to stay there.  Nobody needs TV to tell us what's going on, but there is an uncomfortable comfort in media confirmation of our less favourable fears.

They say, that if you have a job, you’ll be working longer hours.  They say that if you don’t have a job, you’ll be spending longer trying to get one.  If you’re around the age of 40 and looking for a change of direction . . . good luck with that.  If you’re over fifty looking for something new, forget about it.  No matter how much of a "silver fox" you think you are, you’ll be pushing it all sideways and upwards to get your CV past the girls in HR.  If you're not sexy, get on welfare.

Employment is yet another one of those vital social organs, those sphinx-like edifices, being rapidly dissolved by the desert storm of adolescent vanity.  At least so it would seem from the perspective of job seekers.   It must be galling for an experienced senior professional to have their CV vetted, their credentials picked over, their remaining career years held dangling in the magnificently sculpted fingernails of the girl in HR.

The Moleskeine Effect

The Moleskine has an illustrious history as the notebook of choice for some of history’s great artists and writers.  The "nameless black notebooks" fell into obscurity until 1997 when the new owners of the old company cranked up their marketing machine and put them back out on the bookshelves.  Moleskine are a “family of notebooks, diaries, and city guides”.  They're subject to high quality control standards such as “traction test, weigh check, glue and ink examination, cover thickness measure, rubber band resistance control”.  What do they do exactly?  Nothing.

Despite their relative passivity in the act of creation, they have become a defining accessory of the urbane and innately “creative”.  Fair enough.  Dressed in its beautifully cut black leather jacket, the Moleskine does cut a handsome figure.  It is well proportioned, stupidly expensive and its mythology goes almost so far as to suggest that the notebook itself is the source of creativity.  But the Moleskine reality is a story of aspiration and posture.  A Moleskine can be high self-parody, an empty briefcase at a ruthless job interview.  If it was a person, it may be a recent resident of Ponsonby or Grey Lynn.

I've only owned one Moleskine.  I love the look and feel, its black leather European-ness, its modern classicisms.  I’ve had it three years and most of its 180 pages remain blank.  I'm scared to soil it with my scrawl.  Weighing in at forty dollars, it felt too precious to write anything in.  So I didn’t.  By contrast, the humble 1B5 exercise book, at 70 cents for 80 pages, offered far more scope for experimentation.  For the price of one Moleskine, I could buy 57 1B5s, a whopping 4,560 pages.  Pound for pound, there is simply no contest.  In my book, the 1B5 closes the chapter on this creativity myth and calls out Moleskine “the anti-creative”.

Devoutly Non-Mormon

Church College is the well-known Mormon secondary school at Templeview, just outside of Hamilton.  The school and the community are a story well worth telling for many reasons, too many to list here.  I taught there as a devoutly NON-Mormon student teacher almost ten years ago.  I was overwhelmed by their fellowship, the friendship that was extended to me and also by their easy acceptance of my own beliefs.  It felt good to be called “Brother” by complete strangers, students and staff alike.  It was a nice departure from the more stentorian “Mr.” or “Sir”.

In spite of my devout non-mormonism, there were one or two folk who, in great humour, would test the depth of my convictions.  Brother McTavish asked me if I’d like to teach full-time at the school.  “Sure,” I replied “but I’m not a Mormon.”  He assured me that wouldn’t be a problem. “When do you want to get baptised?  I’ll put the call in.”  Knowing that the school preferred it’s male staff members to be married men, I informed him that I was still unattached.  “No worries!  We’ll find you a woman, get you married, not a problem!”  It was a tempting offer, but I managed to resist.

Brother Chase, the school maintenance man, was well into his seventies but with an almost supernatural youth.  “I’ve been married almost fifty years boy.  You marry the right woman, it’s beautiful man, beautiful, paradise!  It's just like living in heaven.”  And if you marry the wrong one?  “Oh, marry the wrong one?  You might as well go shoot yourself.”

The Church authorities in Salt Lake City Utah have since closed the school down.  The buildings are still there, a little older, a little sadder, a little more-grey looking.  There is a stillness around the campus, a resigned type of quiet that I don’t recall.  It’s possible that I was an easy target for conversion, but even as a devout non-mormon with a deep love for coffee, I miss the place greatly and the sense of community I experienced there.  I remember it with great affection.

Feet On The Ground, Head In The Clouds.

On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in Auckland, my friend and I sat, alone, in a tiny basement theatre watching Land of the Long White Cloud, by Florian Habicht.  It is a beautiful, beautiful film about a fishing contest on Ninety Mile Beach.  For five days, the “contestants” (for want of a better word) stand toe to toe with the toheroa and tuatua casting their lines into the boiling west coast surf.  They peer into the ocean . . . concentrating, meditating, waiting.  They dream of catching a fish.  The biggest snapper.

Pieces to camera present these “simple” folk as thinkers, philosophers and theorists.  Sure enough, their social and political commentaries are informed by meaningful things - the roar of the breakers, the huge cloud-filled sky.  A local man shares the secret to his wisdom, his key to a beautiful life: “keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.”    Ossie Perie a large, grey haired man finally catches a snapper. After eight years without a bite it's not the big one, not even a big one, but it's a snapper nonetheless.

Just over an hour later we emerged into the city and it’s bristling, cloudless summer.  The streets were pouring with people, the road choking with motor vehicles.  There was movement everywhere like white noise . . . static.  My head began to burn and I found myself asking why.  It all seemed profoundly unimportant and I wished myself onto the windswept sands, to stand beneath the colour chromatic skies of the far north.  Just to catch a fish.

Mau Paparazzi Madness – Only in New Zealand.

Alison Mau is MAD.  She HATES paparazzi and being photographed and being in the public eye.  Hang on a minute?  Isn’t Mau a media personality, a reporter/presenter whose job is to present the same kind of stories about people just like her.  That alone makes her out and out outrage hard to sympathise with.

Okay so somebody took a couple of photos of her kids.  Tough call.  But if you’re going to play “Who Wants to Be a Celebrity” it just goes with the territory.   From Di on down, it’s not just you in the papers … it’s everybody you know.  Now if her kids were mad, that would be a different story.  They could always write to Michael Laws.

Strange thing is this.  Mau (and fellow media fugitive Mike Hosking) must have reported hundreds if not thousands of comments or stories on other “personalities”.  Does anyone recall either of them ever speaking out against paparazzi before they themselves were personally targeted?  Nope?  Me either.

The real issue is clearly not to do with paparazzi, privacy or the rights of children.  The real issue here is that New Zealand has long suffered from a celebrity drought.  When some guy in a Corolla spends Valentine’s Day taking pictures of news-readers and weather presenters you know, you can only be in New Zealand.

2009 – Year of the Facebook

2009 (thankfully behind us) saw the ascendancy of planet Facebook and everybody, yes EVERYBODY was online and getting connected. Facebook has helped people keep in touch, to share overseas experiences, to show our pictures at Angkor Wat and the Pyramids at Giza to friends of friends of friends of friends.  It’s the perfect tool for stalking ex partners (not that I would but I’m sure others do), or poking them in the eye.  Facebook showed that our lives transcend interesting and fulfilling. It told everyone at once … our lives are FUN!

Surely it was no coincidence that 2009 the Year of the Facebook, was also 2009 - the Year of the Breakup.   As much as Facebook brought us together it busted us apart.  No more sure way to seal the end of an affair than to change your status from “in a relationship” to “single”.  Keep it between you and your other half, you can always take it back.  Share the mistake with your mutual friends, exclusive friends, groups and networks and it’s permanent.  All you can do is watch your ex move on in pictures. Unless of course he/she banishes you to Facebook wasteland.  Facebook reconfigure our most private lives, in the most public way possible.

Perhaps for that very reason, Facebookers were reminded in ‘09 to update their security preferences.  Like a virtual VIP nightclub, you could decide who to let in and who to keep out.  For a tiny moment in Facebook time everyone got cautious.  But not for long.  The insatiable appetite for page views, friend requests and event invites would get the better of many, prompting them to throw back the cyber curtains giving away full and unimpeded access to their new and improved lives.  Are we being defined by our Facebook fictions, our publicised private successes and failures?  It certainly seems that way.

National's Key to the Tax Groove.

Much disappointment but very few real surprises from National.  Tax cuts across the board and loopholes tightened for residential property investment but no capital gains tax.  GST goes up to 15% despite saying they wouldn’t do it.  But nobody really believed that.  We all know what elections are won on.  Over inflated catch phrases masquerading as promises.

Who does this hit the hardest?  GST hits low income earners and beneficiaries obviously.  Household essentials have pretty much a base minimum price and it’s no lower for poor people than it is for the rich.  Tax cuts?  Not much real difference to a low wage earner facing increased GST on, well, everything.  As for closing the loopholes on residential investment property?  Wait and see.

One thing is certain: it's going to become easier for a rich man to pass through a property tax loophole than for a poor man to enter the kingdom of Godzone (whatever that is).  The cost to landlords will be “absorbed” by tenants - the same people buckling under increased GST, who will make do with the crumbs that fall from the tax cut table.

Sarcasm. Yeah Right.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.  It relies on an exaggerated tone of voice to convey that you mean the opposite of what you’re saying.  Sarcasm assumes “zero intelligence”, which is why it is the “comic” device of choice for dumb people.  It flatters no-one.  But it’s even less flattering when it doesn’t credit the audience with the intelligence to see that it is, in fact, sarcasm.  Enter Tui.

Tui are clearly not banking on the collective intellect of their drinking public. While pure sarcasm assumes that one's audience has the brains to “get it”, Tui billboards don’t.  Their bitey “Yeah Right” end note makes the assumption that the Tui audience need to be told: “sarcasm lives here”.  They need the joke explained   These billboards are almost as bitter as the beer they sell.  They want you to sneer not to smile.  Laugh at a Tui billboard and the jokes on you.

Sadly, Tui may well have judged its audience bang on.  I recently wrote a blurb for a company profile, many a Tui drinker among them.   I mentioned in the piece that “the owners brought the company to life”.  “Oh no!” they informed me earnestly, “they didn’t buy the company, they started it up themselves.”

Moon and Night Sky

On summer nights when it is hot and clammy indoors, when you can feel the sweat beading and running down your back, take a few moments to stand outside and gaze into the sky.  There is so much happening up there.  The clouds, the stars, the colours, the many shades of darkness and shadow and myriad layers of quiet.

It's a rare kind of comfort that comes from the darkness of night, from the coolness of the moon.  It radiates with a light that washes everything in its cool and calming blueness.  It soaks into the fibre of one's being, seeps into your grain, relaxing, soothing and relieving the heat that bundles up in your muscles after the stress of days.

It certainly is a strange kind of an energy that emanates from the light of the moon.  Lonely, cool, calming and soulful, washing over everything like a silver blue rinse.  And it's comforting to look up past the stars, into all that deep night and know that we really are a part of something far huger than ourselves.

Ratana

Today is the anniversary of the birth of the prophet T.W. Ratana.  25th of January every year and the whole of Ratana as well as well wishers from all over the country converge upon Ratana Pa in Whanganui.

I attended the celebrations once with Sister Heeni, a well known and highly respected Maori Methodist deaconess and Charlie Fenwick, a Pakeha man and also highly respected in the Maori community and within the church.  Charlie had been a bridge builder and overseeing road-gangs had built bridges all over the north island.  Most of them are still around today.  He's well known and highly respected at Ratana Pa.

Walking up onto the marae atea at Ratana Pa on the 25th of January is an incredible experience.  The air trembles and vibrates with the punch of haka powhiri while the brass bands march on ahead splitting the air into matchwood.  It feels like a first contact between worlds, an eerie and profound experience where the crossing of cultures is as literal and present as it ever could be.

The Black Dogs

Strange thing happened to me recently.  I'd been feeling pretty bloody depressed.  It had been making me angry, resentful and incredibly bitter about a long term relationship that had ended some months previously.  For months I had felt extremely hard done by, and violently angry.

And then one day, I came home, put out the rubbish, walked in the door and decided to go evacuate my bowels, ie take a poo.  I closed the lid, flushed and gazed out the window for a few minutes.  I washed my hands and left the bathroom still feeling like unleashing hell upon the world.  I went and sat at my desk, looked at the computer and felt the sun on my shoulder and across my face.  After several minutes I became aware that for the most time in many months I felt completely peaceful.

It was as if a big scary menacing black dog had been living in my house for nine months, walking around behind me.  And then all of sudden, I go to the toilet, have a poo, I come out and he’s disappeared.  Gone without a trace.  Incredible.  Anger, embitterment, resent . . . after almost a whole year of solid intense hatred, it had vanished just like that.  I don’t know how it happened, but I’m not sticking around to ask.

Mind Your Attention Span

They say that these days attention spans are shrinking, that people are becoming less patient.  They say that these days when people read, they do it for information, and the quicker the better. They say that the shorter the text, the more likely it is to be read.

That suits me fine.  It means that these entries will only be half as long as I imagined.  But there’s a problem with that.  Complex issues demand complex solutions - things aren’t always simple.  While it’s a mistake to needlessly complicate things, it’s just as bad to go for the lowest common denominator.  Besides, I can't really gloat about writing in brevity. As Pascal famously (supposedly) said "I would have written you a shorter letter but I ran out of time."

The simpler and easier a solution, the more popular it is.  That’s obvious.  But simple and easy does is not always the best.  We do live in a world that wants its fixes quickly, easily and “effectively”.  We live in a world which says that to keep things simple is to make them better.  We live in world that says “good things take time” but in which we seldom take the time to do good things.

Can You Tolerate This?

My good friend Neil Young lives in London with his partner and their two young children.  Neil and I have been good friends for a long time now after meeting in graduate school at Waikato University.  He’s a gun writer in the commercial and corporate communications world and bloody well read.  Interestingly enough, we’ve probably had more contact with each other since he’s been in England.

Neil’s sister Ashleigh lives in Wellington and is also an excellent writer.  I don’t just mean someone who jots down a poem while the ads are on either.  I mean a highly trained well-qualified craftsperson who goes back to the page time and again honing the language down to a diamond hard finish.

Ashleigh has just published an essay “Can You Tolerate This?” on Turbine, Victoria University’s online lit. journal.  It’s an incredible piece of razor sharp prose.  It reads beautifully and clean with a poetic sense that draws every element of the story into super clear focus.  It’s the kind of writing that can only come from many excruciating hours of editing and re-editing.  If you havent’ read it, you’re in for a huge treat.

People LOVE Paragraphs

The biggest challenge to people who write is the increasingly short attention span of people who read. Those in the know suggest bullet points or numbered lists to make stuff "reader friendly". These are techniques that set apart sections of text and give them greater importance. Removing these parts from the main body of the copy clears them out, makes them easy to see and supposedly draws reader attention.


But if the bulleted pointed sections are the important stuff, why bother with the rest of the text. When we make a shopping list we don't open with a paragraph explaining why. We don't compose a conclusion for our list interpreting our choices in a wider context. We just bullet the items, one under the other.


And this is the problem with publishing lists. They appear as a set of instructions or rules, they point the finger, and warn us not to be naughty, not to forget something.   But they lack depth, have no capacity for detail.  Lacking reason, they simply parcel information into tiny forgettable bites.  The bulleted list sends a clear message: "I might be important, but I'm just a summary, I'm boring but you better not forget me!"


Bullets and numbered lists are useful for summaries and sets of instructions, text that TELLS people what to do. But if you really want to interest your reader, really pull them in, the paragraph is where it's at. There's nothing as effective a well pointed, nicely weighted paragraph. Try it. Your readers will love it.