tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83896547478977462282024-03-13T12:25:55.067-07:00Behold! The Theatre of Cometsmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-29585396552695633482014-11-02T13:12:00.001-08:002014-11-02T13:12:12.569-08:00The sky and modernity<br />
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Days ago I got home early from work. There was still daylight so I took my new daughter Mei out to introduce her to the infinite sky. It's easy to do at her age, on account of she's too young to sit up in the pram and so she lies on her back looking up at everything.</div>
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Everything, on this particular day, translated into the infinite sky, cloudless, that dense radiant blue.</div>
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We walked north on streets. There were hills with houses on them. Whenever there was a chance to go higher I took it, and we ended up on curves traced high through that blue: long arching curves like the path of a flat stone thrown across a river, arcs in that ocean.</div>
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Mei's eyes, coincidentally, are the colour of an ocean in winter and she was taking everything in through them.</div>
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The sun was doing that thing it does where it explodes for billions of years and makes everything. It was hot on me but the air wasn't. We walked up a longlong alley, one of those alleys the nightmen used to travel. It went on and on. It was dry and bare and fig trees hung over fences like toughs leaning out car windows. They were green. Seemed fair enough to me.</div>
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I found a spring garlic just sitting there all by itself in the middle of the alley like a talisman against demons from the old country so I put it in the pram: you never know when you might need garlic.</div>
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We turned eventually back onto the street and headed downhill toward the creek. We passed a gap in the houses, a long mown swathe dozens of kilometers long. It had electricity pylons in it. We were in the highest part of those hills. Once upon a time that would have been reserved for a church but all this happened back in 2014 and electricity was the holiest thing to us back then and so instead we had those giant spires devoted to it and to passing it along. They watched over us while we walked to the creek and down the path that runs along it.</div>
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Mei wanted to sleep and so she did. The thing I appreciate about babies is they don't give a shit about modernity. They don't care the enclosure movement created a vast population of landless peasants with nothing to sell but their labour, that those labourers congregated in cities and were mechanised by the factory, what that did to time and space and how we understand ourselves. They don't care that at 9am you might have to be somewhere without vomit on your clothes, they just wake up and want milk and holding, because they're mammals.</div>
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There's a whole literature dedicated to getting babies to fit in to the same rhythms of eating and sleeping we moderns have been disciplined into, but I reckon fuck that. Babies let you see the world outside modernity and we should thank them for it. They invite you into deep time, and also into the rhythms the body found before all this foolishness with clocks, the rhythms of love and wanting and hunger and holding. Plenty of folks can give you a critique of modernity, but babies teach you how to just blithely ignore it like it isn't even there. It's good practise. One day it won't be there any more. And the babies, unperturbed, will still gaze up at the infinite sky and drink it all in like they always have. X</div>
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michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-73135813758825939072014-10-30T13:14:00.000-07:002014-11-02T13:14:51.590-08:00Heists<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I am a big fan of the pleasures found in heist movies, though I like escape films better. Heist films tend to assume access to the best people and gadgets: "This here's Billy. He's the finest safe-cracker in seven counties!" - that kind of thing, which is to say they assume wealth. That wealth isn't always current, but it's at least anticipated. A heist movie tends to revolve around the idea that if a bunch of highly-skilled people either get paid by someone rich or work for free, they'll be repaid with a share of things that don't belong to them. Which, y'know, is an idea that hasn't exactly had wonderful results in our society JUST SAYIN.</div>
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Escape films offer the same pleasures but don't assume the same privilege. An escape film is like a heist film but the only resources are patience and careful observation and trust and collaboration and the ability to turn what one has into what one wants.</div>
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What are the pleasures they share? Finding the weak points in systems of control - gaps in routines, and the sleepiness those routines induce in the people - guards, say - who have to carry them out. The pleasures of MacGuyverism and bricolage, of seeing the new uses objects and surfaces can be put to - the way the leg of a prison bed can become a screwdriver if you take it off and squish the end flat and so on. The pleasure of being part of a gang, a secret society, of planning together. The pleasures of spectacle and diversion; the associated pleasures of choreography and theatre, of dressing up, of impersonating part of a system of control so as to subvert that system and escape its clutches, to seize something it prevents us from having.</div>
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So I like those things. I have a basic anxiety about film though, which is that so much of it is cathartic in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Old-fashioned catharsis is when a drama gives you the feeling of having done something when you have not - it's a discharge of energy. That's great when the energy being discharged is murderous or jealous or otherwise nasty, as in the old Greek tragedies. It's a problem when that energy is the energy required to challenge systems or escape systems of control. Like, watching a film I identify with the ones who resist, with the ones who plan, the ones who escape. I watch The Shawshank Redemption and I feel those feelings of planning and resisting and escaping. I watch Star Wars and I feel like I helped blow up the Death Star. Those feelings are, and that energy is, discharged. Do you, gentle reader, after watching these things, go on and resist and escape? Or do you, like me, feel happy and satisfied, like you've already participated in doing what needs doing? Yeah, that's what I thought.</div>
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With all that in mind, you can imagine what a good time I had last Wednesday.</div>
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I got up at 6 and put on a suit and went to an anonymous little bit of park near ANZ's international headquarters. There were about seventy other people there all dressed up in suits and frocks, laughing at each others' corporate disguises. Reader: we looked great. We planned the final details of how to drift in to the building in dribs and drabs, what the signals to converge would be, reminded everyone what would happen once we converged again, got the phone numbers to call in case of trouble. And we heard from Mikaele Maiava and Raedena Solomana, Pacific Islanders who'd come to Australia to confront the machine that threatened their homelands through sea level rise and drought. This was their day.</div>
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WAIT, DID YOU SAY ANZ BEFORE? I hear you ask, and I'm like YEAH, ANZ IS AUSTRALIA'S LARGEST LENDER TO COAL AND GAS PROJECTS, to the tune of $6.75 BILLION lo! these last few years. And you're like O RLY? and I'm like YES WHAT DO YOU THINK I KEEP BANGING ON ABOUT ALL THE TIME.</div>
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We split into groups of six or so, who'd look out for each other and converge together. We told each other why we were there that day. For most of us it was about justice. The idea that our rich country was helping dispossess the people of poorer countries because we weren't prepared to stand up to fossil fuel companies and the people who lend them money made us sick; the chance to create a space where people from those countries could speak to the power that was dispossessing them made us excited and we wanted to be a part of it.</div>
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We talked about whether we were prepared to get arrested or not. About three in my group were; I wasn't. That was all good: there was plenty of fun to be had by people who didn't want to get arrested.</div>
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Each small group had a key contact: we'd be watching them for the moment to mass together. That sorted, we left and sauntered in that morning light, under that pale blue sky, a sky gradually thickening with carbon. About a minute from the building we split into ones and twos and quit talking about climate change and started talking about television and renovations and such.</div>
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I walked in with Deborah Hart. We were like, "Let's get into some debt, baby!", and the machine that creates debt opened its doors and let us in. We'd made it hungry! I knew how it felt: I was hungry too. I bought a croissant from the staff cafe and put bits of it in my mouth. It was flaky and good.</div>
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People got coffees and sat around looking at their phones or reading the paper or having fake meetings. In time I saw my group's contact stand up and wander over to the centre of the lobby. Casually, but without wasting any time, a whole bunch of meetings around the lobby came to a natural end and people wandered over as well. There was a gradually thickening group of us, chatting and drinking coffees. I ambled in and stood there eating my croissant.</div>
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A minute later we sat down and got our signs out. Wouldn't you know it - we formed a stage. We were a thick circle, around a smaller circle of five people linked together with white PVC pipes they'd smuggled in in bags; they'd been locking themselves together while we'd stood around casually, providing cover. In the centre of that smaller circle were Mika and Aaron Packard. Their shirts were off and their chests were painted; Mika's paint made the point that ANZ IS FUNDING THE DESTRUCTION OF MY COUNTRY.</div>
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And then there we were. Mika did most of the talking after that, though the rest of us did a bit. His voice echoed through that vaulted space like it was a canyon. He thanked everyone. He apologised for the disruption, but made the point that it was tiny compared to the disruption caused to his homeland and culture by digging up and burning coal, and that ANZ was one of the more powerful forces in the country helping that happen. He invited the folks on the top floor to come and give him a hug.</div>
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Can I just say, gentle reader, what a joy and privilege it was to be that bit of political theatre? To turn the giant atrium of that headquarters into a machine for amplifying a voice? And to keep at the centre of our circle someone our current way of doing things would rather was on the periphery, always over the horizon and invisible so we can't see his homelands flood with the king tides, see the salting of their earth? To tear up that horizon for a few hours and unsettle the polite silence evil requires?</div>
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Because it was a joy. It changed me. I recommend it. X</div>
michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-7863500206713508022014-10-02T13:16:00.000-07:002014-11-02T13:17:36.136-08:00Mobile phones and the enclosure movement<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I think the reason mobile phones caught on so fast is we spent most of our evolutionary history able to instantly communicate with the people we loved, because they were always around. We were in little packs or little tribes or little towns and you could just wander over and say "What are you having for dinner?" or "What is that thing he's wearing doesn't he know how silly he looks?" or "Look at what my cat is doing haha!" or "Wanna come back to my place?" etc. Like it's de<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">eply in us to be able to talk to the ones we love at short notice.</span></div>
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That gets destroyed, for my ancestors anyway, by the enclosure movement. Land that was previously understood to be commonly accessible was forcibly enclosed by the wealthy; walls and fences were put around it and trespassers were prosecuted. But that was the land we ate off - we hunted and fished and foraged on it. Once that was gone we couldn't feed ourselves; to feed ourselves we had to swap our labour for money and go where the work was. We went to the cities and the cities grew and our families fragmented into little bits.</div>
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For a long time we kept a lot of these habits though, and got to know the people who lived nearby even if our families were far away, but it gets eroded more and more as we have to keep going where the work is. After enough generations of that geographic churn who knows anyone? And who has their family and all the ones they love within walking distance? Not me. You're all dispersed through space.</div>
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So of course when things come along to collapse that space, to make everyone present and immediately available for conversation again, we leap at it. It's what we've done for millennia and instincts like that don't just go away. To the people who got used to the loneliness of the recent past it seems weird, like WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO BE ABLE TO TALK TO EVERYONE CAN'T THEY JUST BE ALONE FOR FIVE MINUTES but they're the odd ones, if you live in deep time. Being comfortable to be alone is only a virtue in a society that wants to split everyone up and starve them so they have to go where the money is. The rest of us want to be with the ones we love. We want to talk to each other. X</div>
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michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-44096417816079759672014-09-27T13:19:00.000-07:002014-11-02T13:19:36.876-08:00Let's pretend it's 2014<div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;">
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Our aerial was never very good and we kind of stopped watching TV and then cos we never watched it eventually we got rid of it and now I don't know what to be afraid of any more sorry. It's a problem sometimes. Like when I had to go to the security office at work one time and they'd hung a big Australian flag above the front desk.</div>
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"New flag?" I said.</div>
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"Mm," the guy said, looking stern and harried. "You know, because of everything that's been happening." He fussed around with s<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">ome papers.</span></div>
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"Mm," I said, and looked out the window. I had no idea what the fuck. As far as I could see the sun was still shining and gravity was still holding everything more or less where it belonged. I was still four billion years old: fuck yeah. Capitalism was still eating everything and shitting out commodities but it hadn't eaten everything yet so there was still time to stop it doing that: fuck yeah that too. Air moved around and I could breathe in and out: fuck yeah that as well: what was all the fuss about now then.</div>
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That was a while back; now let's pretend it's now. C'mon it'll be fun! Let's pretend it's 2014. Let's pretend you're alive in 2014, and all this is happening in real time, so you can feel the seconds pass. Like you can actually feel them happen to you.</div>
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Let's pretend you're alive in this glowing world, feeling the seconds. Let's pretend you also feel separate from the glowing world and from me and from all the rest of life and from the past and the future.</div>
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Pretend there's something called space that makes that separateness possible, then pretend there's something called time that stops everything happening at once. Pretend both those things can only have names because of something called language. Then pretend language completely messes them both up, so that sense of separateness just falls apart when you peer into it.</div>
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I mean when and where are the words I'm typing and you're reading? C'mon people. I am typing them here and now and you are reading them here and now. So you and I and here and now are all fused together in these words, in these twin acts of the glowing world writing them and the glowing world reading them. The glowing world's all through you. What even are you but the glowing world? It's gorgeous. X</div>
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michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-63583279443530616442014-08-12T13:20:00.000-07:002014-11-02T13:22:19.959-08:00Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands<div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;">
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Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands, feet, eyes, ears, a working nervous system. Not being paralysed. Not being bombed. No-one I love died while I was asleep. Water at the turn of a tap, a five second walk from here. This water won't make me sick. It has no shit in it, no fracking chemicals, nothing radioactive enough to worry about. I can't set it on fire. Connected to those taps are reservoirs with water in them; it's years since the last drought.</div>
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No gas or oil or c<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">oal underneath my home. No coal trains in breathing distance. No nuclear power anywhere nearby either.</span></div>
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A fridge full of food. A cupboard full of food. Discovering, thanks to Charlie Wood, a sweetener that doesn't give me hellish despairing mood swings, and which therefore grants me the ability to eat cake mm cake. I went twenty years pretty much without eating cake, so I appreciate it. Cake is fucking good. So is hot chocolate.</div>
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= excuse me a moment while I go and make a cup of hot chocolate =</div>
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A window from which I can see the sky. The sky itself, huger than thought, huger than the huge clouds in it. The sun poking through those clouds. Life. LIFE. Billions of years of ancestors successfully cheating death and fucking each other and giving birth to each other and then to me. Thanks guys!</div>
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Having lived in places full of mice or flies or ants or cockroaches, I am grateful that right now I do not. I'm also grateful that snakes don't come in unannounced.</div>
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Having been taught to read. Having been taught not to believe the first thing I think. Having been taught to write. Having been taught to play drums in a world where everyone's looking for a drummer, and therefore finding a path out of the weird loneliness of high school. High school. Primary school. Kindergarten, even though there was that weird girl who said her dad was a cop and he'd shoot me. There were pieces of fruit cut up bite-size and we got to have naps on the floor.</div>
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Having experienced loneliness, anxiety, despair, depression, confusion, directionlessness, heartbreak: suffering. It makes you less arrogant, and it's so easy to be arrogant. Suffering is the bridge that lets the world in over your weird walls. I'm grateful though not to have so much of it that I can't think.</div>
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My lovely daughters Mei and <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1465300055" href="https://www.facebook.com/alaska.drenth" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">Alaska Drenth</a>. My lovely partner <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000910266934" href="https://www.facebook.com/hanna.tai.7" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">Hanna Tai</a>, who puts up with me. Friends and family, without whom I'd have, and be, nothing.</div>
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People who try. The gloomier the news gets, the more grateful I am to the people who try anyway. The labor movement. The women's movement. The peace movement. The environment movement. Thanks to the love and sacrifice of these good people I get to have a decent life and so do many of the people I love. Thanks to these people I can imagine something other than destruction and despoilation.</div>
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OK there is much more but this is long already. The rest can wait for other days. X</div>
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michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-16664796008667178752014-06-19T18:31:00.000-07:002014-06-24T21:19:15.896-07:00WaterRiding home the other night I wanted to be a river and so I was a river. And the place where that wanting happened was right where I saw the mysterious owl a while back. I was wondering if those two moments are connected.<br />
<br />
All I can think of is it's a spot where the network of roads and paths meets a much older network of creeks and rivers - one made by the restlessness of my human family, the other by the restlessness of water. And since we're mostly water maybe there is just one restlessness? It won't stop wriggling. We rely on that restlessness to ferry oxygen and whatnot around the network of creeks and rivers inside us.<br />
<br />
(Sure we have a heart to move that stuff around and the world doesn't. The thing that moves water around the world is heat and gravity, which is to say everything in the universe. So the world's heart is everything in the universe, including us.)<br />
<br />
What I wrote the other day and then deleted was that when I was a river I wanted to pour myself into the world's wounds. It seemed too grandiose a thing to write just like that. But fuck it: rivers have grandiose feelings: that's just how it is: they just pour themselves endlessly into the mother ocean: deal with it. Don't pretend they have tiny feelings about work and mortgages and renovations and waiting for tradies, cos they don't.<br />
<br />
Anyway it just seemed a natural thing. The wounds were there. Why not pour yourself out and into them? Why not?<br />
<br />
When I was a mountain the stuff just oozed out of me. It seeped out of the high places and ran down rocks and poured itself out into the world like a giddy cyclist crossing from the road to the river path, guarded by the memory of an owl.<br />
<br />
Later it was 2014 so I was at work. I was staring at a big steel garbage skip and then I was the steel, full of old crap like broken chairs and bent racks and such. All I felt was homesickness, a dull aching want to be ore again back beneath the soil. Down there we felt the pull of two suns. One we'd never seen but was rumoured to be way out somewhere beyond our home. It was hard to imagine but that's what the old stories said; now I was steel I saw it every day, so I'd have something to say when I got back home, that was for sure. The other was its child: the molten core of the living earth. It kept us warm. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-30668814173093166282014-06-19T00:52:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:52:52.882-07:0014 loosely-connected thoughts on how that KONY2012 strawman is full of shit1. So a few times this last week I noticed one person or another casting aspersions on online campaigning with some smug variation or another of a line like 'Hey, online campaigning slash clicktivism is cool. We got Kony, right? KONY2012!'.<br />
<br />
2. Maybe it's been going on longer than that but a) I am not that perceptive and b) I keep getting distracted by the majesty of the fucking sky. Seriously, that thing is amazing. I just stare at it like a fool.<br />
<br />
3. If you don't know what KONY2012 was, it was an online campaign based on lies. The lies got found out and so it failed. What I am calling the KONY2012 strawman is the notion that because that campaign failed, online campaigns are necessarily a waste of time.<br />
<br />
4. No-one actually puts it as bluntly as that, because if they did you might realise they are full of shit, but I will and you should and they are. Because here's the thing: the magic ingredient that causes a campaign based on lies to fail when the lies are found out is that it is based on lies and those lies are found out. It being online or offline makes not the tiniest fucking whit of difference to that.<br />
<br />
5. I have noticed that some of the people making that argument - such as it is, since it's not spelled out - are people skeptical of the ability of anyone to do anything useful about anything. Some of those people, like Helen Razer, make a living by eloquently expressing that skepticism in print. Others are seduced by the combination of said eloquence and their own paranoia into repeating the argument. It's still a bad argument.<br />
<br />
6. By paranoia I mean - and I'll go into detail about this another time - if you're alive now in a rich country you simultaneously suspect a) you're not doing all you could to help keep alive the thing-of-all-things that gave and gives you life, and b) that maybe there's nothing you can do OMIGODWE'REALLDOOMED.<br />
<br />
7. re a), you're probably right. My humble suggestion is that repeating bullshit is not the way to deal with that. My humble suggestion is that instead you walk outside and gaze up into the infinite sky and ask the thing-of-all-things if it could use a fucking hand not bleeding to death and if so what it suggests and then see what it says and then go and do it. That will bring you as much peace as you can reasonably expect from this life.<br />
<br />
8. re b) this is an old argument. It's half right. Our salvation lies in the other half. The half that's right is that there are forces larger than us and we don't have perfect freedom - all our choices are constrained by history &c &c - and many of those forces are dire.<br />
<br />
9. The other half is fuck you, don't try and wriggle your rich-country way out of doing what you can with what freedom you have. It's 2014. You have so much power. DON'T FUCKING WASTE IT.<br />
<br />
10. The thing-of-all-things is saying this through me. I asked it to speak through me and now I just say whatever shit comes out of my mouth. It's also saying it loves you very much: I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. BUT SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP AND QUIT WASTING TIME.<br />
<br />
11. I have been blessed this last 12 months to get to hang out with campaigners who don't care whether you're skeptical and who are getting on with doing what they can to save what ecological and social furniture they can as the flood of late capitalism sweeps lo! across this earth. All of these people use online campaigns as part of what they do.<br />
<br />
12. Since those people are overworked and operating on the scent of a coaly rag, partly because you have not yet had that conversation with the thing-of-all-things have you and so they are doing it without you, trust me when I say they would not bother a second with online campaigning if it wasn't useful. Seriously. Think it through for more than a few seconds: why would they waste those precious minutes otherwise?<br />
<br />
13. Sure there's all kinds of useful questions to ask about efficacy, especially around turning online actions into offline ones. But when it comes to thinking about those questions I trust the people who are actually using online tools to try and do something useful more than I trust the people who make a living out of putting hopelessness into fancy words.<br />
<br />
14. Whatever your other views on online life, it's clearly a big chunk of how we are social, now, or you wouldn't be reading this. It's not a magic space somewhere else. So the fancy hopelessness people should quit trying to pretend we should cordon it off from how we work to keep the thing-of-all-things from bleeding to death. Because a) if we did that they'd just criticise us for that, because their schtick is critique, not efficacy; and b) their KONY2012 strawman is full of shit. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-87663205194550271122014-06-14T23:22:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:43:27.678-07:00Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river tooRiding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too and so I was, for a little bit, a river on a bicycle, running through the streets. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. I poured myself downhill into the world.<br />
<br />
Then yesterday in the hall I got bored of not being a mountain: "Fuck this not being a mountain shit, I'm gonna be a mountain!"<br />
<br />
And so I was a mountain. I liked it. Time was different. Birds flew around me and found little holes in me and laid their eggs and raised their young and shat on me. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. The wind was just so: whoosh. It was pretty cool. You should have been there.<br />
<br />
Then today I was in the mall. This little red-headed kid was just staring upward, face all screwed up, looking amazed. I looked up to see what all the amaze was about and there was the sky: huge as a motherfucker, just there. I was like fuck yeah kid, I know how you feel. Look at it all full of clouds and such. That's where the oceans go when they get hot or when they just need a holiday. Whole oceans just hanging up there, taking in the view. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-73019200253025271282014-06-05T23:27:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:43:57.874-07:00worldworld<br />
wo(night)rld<br />
wo(ni(river)ght)rld<br />
wo(ni(ri(world)ver)ght)rldmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-62596833847375760392014-06-03T23:29:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:45:00.659-07:00LeoI was at work on Friday and had a visit from Leo Gortz. Leo played a pretty good trick on me the other day: he'd been promoted, see, and given the phone of another manager, a guy called Dave who is something of a micromanager and who is pretty easy to imitate as long as you start by saying, "Hey dude".<br />
<br />
Leo took advantage of the fact that few people knew he had this phone, and that if he called he'd show up as Dave, to ring up and pretend to be Dave a) saying, "Hey dude", b) checking up on my work and c) when that was all sorted inviting me to a poetry slam at his house that night. Which as you'd expect creeped me the fuck out and confused me to great comic effect.<br />
<br />
It was pretty funny and the story had been doing the rounds, but what was interesting was Leo's manner when he visited. Where the old Leo would have basked in the glory of a joke well-played - he has something of a history of playing jokes on the rest of us - the new Leo, in his new suit, seemed a little worried there might be some kind of retribution.<br />
<br />
Reader: it was out of character, and so of course I got curious.<br />
<br />
After he left I thought about it for a bit, trying to work out why he might be worried. Here's what I came up with:<br />
<br />
a) For one thing, he's risen up the ranks; which is great but also means he has somewhere to fall now. Rising up through the ranks indicates trust has been extended by those further up; that trust is probably incompatible with the nature of a practical joker. Leo needs either to change or to not be found out, and he clearly hadn't changed, so there was that.<br />
<br />
b) As I say, Leo has something of a history of playing jokes. Sitting there pondering on it I could think, just off the top of my head, of a good fourteen or fifteen people who'd expressed, at one point or another, a desire to avenge themselves upon him. Some of them had in fact banded together in the past to enact it in imaginative ways, which had certainly had a humbling effect on old Leo there for a while, if their stories were to be believed.<br />
<br />
The point is: there was a resource, a network of people with some desire to see the jokes go the other way for a while. Leo's a smart guy, and he would have realised this, especially as he'd felt the effects of a previous group stirred to imaginative revenge.<br />
<br />
c) I have quite an active imagination, and some experience managing volunteers. I also don't mind writing publicly about things I imagine.<br />
<br />
d) While Leo's new position has clearly opened up a few new possibilities for prank-playing, it's likely it's closed off more. A person with more responsibility is a person who needs to be more careful: that's generally just how it is. Which was an asymmetry a motivated person or persons could take advantage of.<br />
<br />
The upshot of it all was perhaps he was adding those four or five things together and.. well, who's to say just what he was thinking? But whatever it was, it didn't seem to be making him comfortable.<br />
<br />
I mean, who knows? Perhaps he was just thinking about something else. People are mysterious, no? It's hard to work out just what's going on, sometimes - just what exactly lurks in the hearts of men.michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-4125697075096669362014-05-30T23:31:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:54:34.550-07:00Swanston St'If you belieeeeeeeeeeeve'<br />
- Cher<br />
<br />
1. The morning was crisp and bright and clear and cold and I rode to work through it. I was running late for work so I rode down Swanston St even though I fear death.<br />
<br />
2. Swanston St is an experimental sound installation run by buskers. It's a bit like a giant open-mic night, but reversed. In an open mic night everyone plays in the same space, and you distribute the acts through time. In the Swanston St installation everyone plays at the same time and the acts are distributed in space instead. To hear someone else you move a few metres in one direction or another.<br />
<br />
3. Riding along it, like I was doing, was pretty much like spinning the dial on an old-school radio. Every few seconds one signal receded and the next one took over; in between was the thrum of traffic like white noise. White noise separates signals on the radio dial like white space separates pictures in a gallery or words in a poem.<br />
<br />
4. hey<br />
i am<br />
a<br />
poem look<br />
at all the<br />
whiteness<br />
<br />
if i am lucky<br />
i will transgress something<br />
and then i can<br />
be famous<br />
<br />
5. Here though like I said everything was separated by traffic sound, which is the true song of humanity in 2014, the song we keep singing to everyone and everything, beneath our breath and through our breath:<br />
<br />
zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu<br />
<br />
ZANG-TUMB<br />
TUMB-TUMB<br />
TUUUUUM<br />
<br />
6. Anyway I was lucky and I was not late, in either the late-to-work sense or the 'late Michael Pulsford' sense. I am pleased about that because I like being alive. The thing I like about it is being able to experience, also you get to do things. The world unfolds with you in it: just so. It squirms like a puppy. I am scratching its belly by mashing my fingers into this black bit of the world in front of me with language on it and language comes out of it and it squirms into your eyes and you can read it. These shapes are the happy squeals of the world when I tickle it. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-91896510006709201352014-05-23T23:34:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:46:04.388-07:00ScalesYou know, until a few months ago there were a bunch of commentators on the Australian left I'd always been a little intimidated by, in that they always seemed better read than me. If I disagreed with them I assumed I was probably wrong and they were probably right, I probably just hadn't done the reading. Plus a lot of them are good writers, so.<br />
<br />
The incident of the Biennale boycott changed all of that. Not one amongst the whole babbling lot of them seemed to have actually read the statement by the boycotting artists; not one of them twigged that that action was the result of a shit-ton of research and debate; and not one of them had done anything like that amount of research before they smarmily more-or-less dismissed the whole thing. Because artists, right? They're basically kids who never grew up, everybody knows that. It's one of those things that doesn't get examined, like the idea that the Coalition never wastes public money on bullshit.<br />
<br />
But examining ideas like that is worth doing, and part of your job description imho if you're a progressive commentator. Otherwise what the fuck are you good for? (ps: don't get me wrong - the conservatives were worse.)<br />
<br />
Anyway: in the longer-term, realising just how full of poo those ladies and gentlemen could be on occasion was liberating. The scales fell from my eyes, and since the scales were made of poo my eyes feel much better now. I'm enjoying it. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-63283175152575001162014-05-22T23:36:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:46:19.836-07:00One thing I like about 2014 so farOne thing I like about 2014 so far is good-hearted Australians seem to have gotten over saying they'll move to New Zealand any time something bad happens in our politics. I know it's partly because NZ politics is worse than it used to be but! Still! I don't think I've ever seen the like of it before.<br />
<br />
It's - weirdly - almost even starting to develop a kind of 'we need to sort things out together rather than buggering off' kind of vibe. Almost as though we're a society or something, and that those with the wherewithal to run away and just look after themselves might - oh I don't know, just to make something up - actually be thinking about how to make things less rubbish more generally. I'm enjoying it. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-68058781044775998212014-05-16T06:04:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:46:35.281-07:00The world wants to liveThe world wants to live in your heart. The only way it can do that is by tearing it open, and it's doing its damnedest to do just that. Armour yourself against that if you want. It won't make you happy. Armour just slows you down and makes you clumsy, plus it's laughably tiny before the roiling world. In any fight between you and the world, the world will win, if it has to wait til you die to do it. But the world has all the time in the world, so. At some point, on your deathbed if you wait that long, you'll quit fighting and it'll rush in: the whole beautiful heartbreaking mess of it.<br />
<br />
Why wait til then? What are you hoping for? What are you trying to build in the meantime, with your little self that doesn't know it's shot through with world-stuff? That doesn't know it's an agent of the big living thing that wants to keep living? The thing that made you from itself and will eat you when the time comes? The thing that keeps shouting at you for help? Must be something pretty impressive, man. Must be something pretty urgent. Something somehow more urgent - sorry, I'M JUST BUSY DOING SOMETHING, BE THERE IN LIKE 5 SECONDS, REALLY! - than the thing that made you and lets you keep breathing. It must be pretty amazing, and when you've got a second - cos I know you're very busy - I'd love to know what that could possibly be. Cos when the world put that question to me I couldn't come up with anything, but what do I know? I don't know much. Except that I am a tiny speck made from a world that fiercely FIERCELY wants to live, and for the moment anyway that seems to be enough to keep me occupied. So. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-77776257416260856012014-05-16T05:05:00.000-07:002014-06-16T06:06:05.438-07:00Fuck yeah not dying in one's sleep!Fuck yeah not dying in one's sleep! Always a pleasure. Fuck yeah getting to live at least another morning in this funny place. Also, fuck yeah the sky: it was running some screensaver by Michelangelo when I first walked outside. It's gone now: if you missed it you missed out. But if you wait 25 seconds I'm sure it'll show something good. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-38883132055469105682014-05-14T14:32:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:47:16.192-07:00Work song 21. FACTORIES<br />
The other day I was sitting in an office. Everything I could see had been made in a factory except a) my hands poking out from my sleeves and b) those funny bits of the side of your nose you can see, one side from each eye.<br />
<br />
Also c), Vinod Krishnan. He had a theory he wanted to run by me.<br />
<br />
"So I saw this YouTube video the other day," he said, "and this retired Canadian politician said there are extraterrestrials living among us. That's right: extraterrestrials. So I was wondering what the percentage was and how would we know?"<br />
<br />
I looked at him.<br />
<br />
"I mean," he said, "do you think it's 1%? 10%? 50%?"<br />
<br />
I looked at him some more.<br />
<br />
"And THEN," he said, "I wondered if that's what's driving the increase in fossil fuel use. THAT could be what's behind global warming &c."<br />
<br />
We looked at each other for a little bit more. Neither of us had been made in factories - no! We'd been made in the crucible of LIFE. I gave him my best let's-just-weigh-up-your-theory-about-extraterrestrials face.<br />
<br />
I said, "Can I be blunt? Conspiracy theories bug me. They're an obsession with trying to see behind the veil of things, while the world is being stolen from under us in broad daylight. This place we live is being carved up and poisoned and instead these guys want to search for documents about 9/11 or chemtrails or lizard people or whatnot. You know what I think conspiracy theories are? Displaced environmental grief. We're killing the thing we live in and it's horrible to know that and we don't want to know that so we look somewhere else. You don't need aliens to explain climate change, just us and some bad decisions."<br />
<br />
"It can't be us." he said. "I'm a simple man, but even I know you don't shit where you eat. IT CAN'T BE HUMANS."<br />
<br />
"Sure it can," I said. I was four billion years old and so was he and so are you, so I can speak frankly. Us four billion year olds hafta stick together. "Humans are open-ended. You can turn yourself into a Buddha or Hitler and there's nothing inherent in us that stops that. We're capable of huge evil. Look at the Holocaust: that was all just humans. But being human we're also not condemned to evil and stupidity. We can do something else if we want."<br />
<br />
That settled, we moved on to talk about whether mushrooms are aliens or not.<br />
<br />
2. NOW I'M SITTING<br />
Now I'm sitting in another office, again with Vin, showing him this story. He's laughing- oh wait, he's pulling out his phone.<br />
<br />
"I hafta be somewhere!" I say and he's all, "Nononono, you hafta see this!" and I'm all "No, it's BECAUSE of what you're about to do that I hafta be somewhere else."<br />
<br />
"Yeah yeah yeah," he says, and then it's all "Aliens this!" and "Aliens that!" and "Maybe we're looking in the wrong place, i.e. outer space, and maybe ALIENS ARE ACTUALLY INSIDE US."<br />
<br />
"Dude," I say. "What do you think the word 'alien' even means?"<br />
<br />
"Exactly," he says. "Ex-act-ly."<br />
<br />
3. AS SOON AS I HAVE TYPED THIS I WILL OPEN A DOOR WHICH WAS ALSO MADE IN A FACTORY AND THAT WILL BE THE ENDmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-50232561963424818132014-05-13T14:36:00.000-07:002014-06-19T00:47:45.611-07:00Work song 1I was at work again. This was beginning to be a habit. As I said the other day I have three jobs: a blue collar, a white collar and a black collar job. I am a kind of trinity of demography. Today I was doing the black collar one again: being an audiovisual technician at the convention centre.<br />
<br />
The convention centre is a network of caves by the river, caves temporarily above sea level, caves connected by tunnels and filled with ghosts. Machines project images on the walls. When you are in the caves you only know the outside world through those images.<br />
<br />
The ghosts drift in, they drift out. They eat cookies and drink drinks, just like Santa does; they look at the images, which right now are about haemophilia, and listen to other ghosts talk about them. Sometimes I talk to them. Sometimes they even ask me questions:<br />
<br />
ghost; you just do the sound, you don't know anything?<br />
me: know anything about what?<br />
ghost: o about haemophilia<br />
me: well i had a friend who died from it. apart from that, no<br />
ghost: but did you listen to the talk that was just on?<br />
me: yes<br />
ghost: (indistinct) chromosomes (indistinct)<br />
me: i didn't listen closely enough to answer that. you should ask the flame-haired woman: she's just there<br />
<br />
and so on.<br />
<br />
The cente is an corporate world, which means it's run by machines. I was surprised when I started working there, because I'd just been at art school. Art school is a holy place. You take a vow of almost-certain poverty when you go there, so everyone is pretty dedicated. They're like members of a holy order, guilty when they waste any time on account of they know they could be using it for Art. People at art school talk in hushed tones about this thing they call the Real World, by which they mean the world run by machines. They worry the Real World world will eat them, that they're not up to the job of surviving in it.<br />
<br />
So as I say I was surprised when I started working in the machine-run world, because the machines pay you to waste time a lot of the time. You wait for what one machine has said to match what another machine has said and sometimes you wait a long time before you can do anything, but another machine pays you all the same. I had the automatic guilt of an art student when it came to wasting time, but I had to learn how to do it.<br />
<br />
That's all a bit of background. The foreground is this: Walking the tunnels yesterday I flooded them with my mind. I let Greenland melt and the West Antarctic Ice Shelf come off, and the whole place was full of seawater. I replaced the data projectors with iridescent squids that can change their skin to display any pattern. I replaced all the printers with squids too, on account of squids are full of ink. I replaced all the ghosts with jellyfish, drifting along with the current, watching the squids. I turned myself into a squid as well and swam around eating the jellyfish. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-23638006530234960492014-05-09T22:49:00.000-07:002014-07-01T22:50:39.915-07:00Fuck yeah language<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">I did this thing today where I gave away the chance to have an interesting day. I swapped it for money. This was 2014, it was a thing back then. We called it 'work'. I had three jobs of work. Today I was a four billion year old technician in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a giant cavern on the side of an ancient river. The wind blows past it and it sings, it can't help it. It's li</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">ke a giant termite mound just there, all shot through with tunnels and secrets.<br /><br />I was walking around at work, four billion years old and then I got bored and decided to be a system of rivers and oceans, walking around the convention centre. As luck would have it I had an ocean inside me. Some time before LIFE had done this thing where it wrapped bits of ocean in membranes and sent them off onto land to see what was what. I was one of those. My veins were rivers, rushing around. My bones marine fossils or somesuch.<br /><br />This was back in 2014 and we had this thing called language<br /><br />o man<br />It was so fine<br />you could do almost anything with it<br />ah it's hard to explain and maybe you had to be there but man<br />it was really something<br /><br />FUCK Y<br /> E<br /> A<br /> H L A N G U A G E<br />it was so good<br /><br />I was drunk on it, which had its dangers. One time I got too drunk and I vomited a whole bunch of it up, letters and syllables blergh! all over the floor like<br />aft me i a the whe is is is an t y u i o p<br /><br />Outside there was some giant explosion going on. I could see it through the window. It hung in the sky and made things warm. You could see by the light of it. It felt dangerous and daring, navigating by the light of an explosion. I liked it. X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-75399977830144666312014-04-24T04:11:00.000-07:002014-06-26T04:12:18.725-07:00Electricity<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">1. I GOT UP and opened the door. The world outside seemed real, so I stepped into it. The resolution was amazing, the framerate too. I took a few steps - the ground held. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">2. THERE WAS ELECTRICITY inside the house, which pulled on me like gravity. Why leave the house, when all the stories in the world are available to you through the magic of electricity? I left anyway. Gravity is addictive but s</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">o is escape velocity.<br /><br />3. THE SKY WAS radiant grey with a jagged white smirk, probably because from the looks of things it had pissed all over everything while I was asleep. Pretty childish really, but what can you say to the sky? Anyway, sky-piss cleans the dust off everything and if you drink it it cleanses you too. Some places it was traditional that the local visionary would eat something hallucinogenic and everyone else would drink their piss and partake of their visions, and the sky is the ultimate visionary, no? She sees everything. So it follows that drinking that stuff lets you in on what the sky sees.<br /><br />4. I WALKED TO the creek and then ran up the path beside it. Everything was wet there too, everything drunk on sky-piss. The trees swayed gently side-to-side like Woodstock hippies. The grass lay on the ground in a wet stupor. We let each other be.<br /><br />5. THERE WERE TALL electricity pylons running up the creek like me. They looked like wire-frame drawings of church spires, which made sense: this all happened in 2014 when electricity was some kind of religion. Because why leave the house? Why not stay home and commune with electricity &c &c.<br /><br />6. THE CLOCK HAD fallen off one of these spires and turned into a football field. I could tell it was a clock because when I ran past it the other day there was a runner turning slow regular circles around it like a second-hand. The hours and minutes had turned into seven humans and seven dogs. The humans chatted and swayed affably like trees drunk on sky-piss. The dogs ran happily around like quantum weirdness. Today time had apparently stopped-<br /><br />7.<br /><br />8. -BECAUSE THE FIELD was just ecstatic grass, staring wetly up at the sky. Anyway it was fine with me if time stopped a bit, because this was 2014. In 2014 we'd invented this demon called climate change, and it was freaking me out. It was like a fist around the throat of my unborn daughter. I wanted to unclench that fist even a little but I had to talk other people into it too. This was a problem because I'd woken up in a death-cult: everyone had agreed secretly that we were going to kill ourselves and now no-one wanted to talk about it. They just kept smiling like amusement park clowns. It was creeping me out.<br /><br />(I kept running.)<br /><br />9. AND SINCE IT was all a trajectory, a certain movement through time, time stopping suited me just fine. It gave me a moment to think. I had this inkling there were gaps in how the death cult operated, a thermal exhaust port on the death star a skywalker could fly down, and that language had something to do with it. I thought if you could just find the right words they'd be like a bomb thrown down to the heart of the death star and the whole thing could be blown open.<br /><br />10. THE HOLY SKY got cheeky and started pissing on me. I took it like a benediction, wet drops blatting on my red rainjacket. The trick was to cast a spell, that's what it was. There were demons all through us, they'd colonised us, turned us against ourselves. The trick was to shake the demons up but it was delicate. We had the guilt of an occupied people. If you said things wrong people thought you were attacking them, trying to make them feel bad, and they hardened against you and defended their right to die and the spell was wasted.<br /><br />11. I TURNED FOR home, back where the electricity was, where I am now, typing. Electricity is good but it's good to remember your family name, and that's easier outside. Your family name is LIFE and so is mine. Our family is four billion years old. It made us. Thanks LIFE! You're the best. I am too small to find the spell but you are not. I am your sometimes-humble servant, drunk on the glowing world. Speak through me. X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-46223714651666017052014-04-15T22:59:00.000-07:002014-06-20T23:11:11.676-07:00'Noble Consumer' arguments are bad arguments<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">1.If you spend any time in online debates about climate change - and don't, it's all just spittle-flecked men in knee-high socks shouting at each other - you come across some dumb arguments. One of these is the Noble Consumer argument, a name I just made up but which is as good as any.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">2. The crux of this argument is that you're not allowed to ask for</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"> changes to public policy around climate change unless you've attained some kind of purity as a private consumer first. For example, if you ever travel by plane, or ever drive a car, or use electricity generated from coal, you're not allowed to speak about - oh I don't know, just to make something up - a price on carbon, say, because you're a hypocrite. You should get those things in order first, then you're allowed to speak.<br /><br />3. There's a few things going on in this argument. They're all wrong individually and together they're a kind of pie of wrongness: mmm, pie. Let's take them in turn.<br /><br />4. First, it ignores the influence of political decisions upon markets. For a local example, here in Victoria citizens can veto a wind farm within two kilometers of their homes. As you can imagine, this skews the playing field against wind power somewhat, so there's less of it and it's more expensive. According to the Noble Consumer argument, you don't get to complain about this or try and change it until you're getting all your energy from renewables; if you can't afford to do that it's just a sign that you don't care enough. Bad you! You just ruined Christmas.<br /><br />5. Second, it fails as a theory of change. In the above example, riddle me this: how many individual consumption decisions will it take to change that law about wind farms? The answer: those two things are profoundly disconnected, and it doesn't matter how many nice decisions you make as a private consumer. That law exists because of a political decision; getting it changed will require another political decision.<br /><br />6. (That's not an argument against making changes to your personal consumption, by the way. It's just being clear about exactly what things your personal consumption can affect and what it can't.)<br /><br />7. Third, and related, Noble Consumer arguments rely on a too-narrow idea of politics, which is the idea that we should understand our society only as a market and ourselves only as consumers making decisions in that market. We certainly are consumers, and we have power as consumers - witness the consumer boycott - but the idea that we're ONLY that strips from us all our other kinds of collective identity - as citizens, as members of communities and of ecosystems. That way of thinking of ourselves isolates us, turns us inwards and makes us feel individually bad for problems of collective action we could solve by doing the opposite of isolating ourselves. So let's fuck that idea off once and for all.<br /><br />8. Fourth, making more-consistent personal consumption choices and paying attention to politics aren't mutually exclusive. The idea that you have to do one of them before you're allowed to do the other is full of shit. The idea that unless you're doing everything right, doing one thing is a waste of time: also full of shit.<br /><br />9. Anyway! All of these things equal the Noble Consumer argument. Me I say it's just bullshit blame-shifting, designed to make you feel individually bad for your choices in a field skewed against you; it tries to take the political energy you'd use to level that field and change it into self-blame and guilt. It also blames you for not being able to afford what political decisions have made more expensive, which has the additional nasty side effect of making the poor feel worse than the rich, who can still afford the Nice Things or buy carbon offsets or some shit.<br /><br />10. But when you're in a system where the choices you want to make are harder to make, or prohibitively expensive, because powerful players have stacked the deck against you, you don't have to blame yourself. You can, and should, try and level the playing field. And if you want to do this before, or instead of, fixing every little bodgy personal consumption decision you've ever made, you have my full support. Put your energy where you think it'll do the most good, and don't let the muppets bait you into feeling glum or beating yourself up any. Beat them up instead. (What? It's just a figure of speech.)<br /><br />11. This has been a public service announcement. Have a nice day! X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-7620511904305083962014-04-06T23:01:00.000-07:002014-06-20T23:02:42.822-07:00Superhero movies, climate change and popcorn: a listicle in twelve parts.<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">1. Having the preoccupations I do, I end up having conversations with a wide range of people about where, in their heart of hearts, they see All This Going. It's instructive.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">2. One thing I hear a lot is overwhelm, a desire not to engage with things on the scary scale of climate change and the forces driving it, to instead</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"> narrow the scope of one's concern to something manageable. I call it building a walled garden.<br /><br />3. A walled garden can be physical: a little place somewhere you can retreat to, chuck some panels on the roof; or it can be psychic: drawing a line around a bit of the world and deciding, "this is all I'm gonna care about".<br /><br />4. I empathise with the urge, because the world is big and problems like climate change are big and we feel small. I also think quite a lot of people in the world have the right to rely on it.<br /><br />5. If you live in Kiribati, say, it's reasonable that you'd be preoccupied with finding somewhere to live that isn't covered with water. Kiribati has done jack to contribute to climate change, and is beginning to feel the early effects of it; folks in Kiribati got a right to look after their own. All they can do else from that is ask people like us to give a shit.<br /><br />6. Or if you live in China, it kind of makes sense too. China mines and burns a lot of coal, but the average Chinese citizen has very few rights when it comes to changing that. China's not a democracy, and the state has a history of dealing harshly with protest. Also, even if China was a democracy, it'd be a democracy of a billion - mostly poor - people. So I understand someone in China keeping their head down and looking after their own.<br /><br />7. Me I live somewhere quite different. I live in a democratic country which produces 5% of the world's coal but which has only .33% of the world's population: quite the ratio, no? Coal is one of the very largest contributors to climate change, and climate change looms as one of the very largest contributors to avoidable suffering imaginable.<br /><br />8. The upshot of which is that if you're an Australian, you have more power to affect avoidable suffering than almost anyone on the planet. We're fucking superheroes compared to most people, when it comes to how much influence we could have on climate change. That doesn't make it easy, but let's have just the tiniest bit of fucking perspective here: it is easier for us than almost anyone. We have a fair amount of freedom when it comes to speech and association. Most of us are educated. Most of us have access to information and communication technology. Most of us have enough to eat. Most of us have places to live. Getting sick won't bankrupt us.<br /><br />9. There's a multiplier effect in play from these things, from the simple numbers and our freedoms and how they intersect. Australia contributes hugely to climate change given its population; the flip side of that is that your efforts, as an Australian, are also multiplied. Which is to say you have power. You mightn't feel like it, just as the rich don't feel rich when they stand next to the very rich. But even though there are undeniably people with more power than us, we're pretty close to the top of the fucking heap here.<br /><br />10. Me I think it'd be a terrible thing to piss that power away, given how much suffering that power can prevent. I think it'd be a grand thing to use even some of it on behalf of the people who have a whole lot less of it than we do. Because if not people like us, who the fuck is it likely to be?<br /><br />11. This all reads to me like the bit of the superhero movie where the hero is avoiding Their Destiny, i.e. the frustrating bit at the start before it gets fun and the fight scenes start and there are cool explosions. Instead you listen to a lot of whiny speeches about "Aw, little old me?" slash "But I don't WANNA save the world!" slash "Not my problem, dude" slash "But I drive a car sometimes, who am I to speak to power?"<br /><br />12. Me I say fuck that: let's don the capes and underpants and start flying around and kicking the villains around some. Sure our powers are not infinite - it'd be boring if they were, no? No dramatic tension - but let's use what we got. C'mon, it'll be fun! There'll also be popcorn, mm popcorn delicious buttery popcorn. So buttery. X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-77607495470489146432014-03-31T23:11:00.000-07:002014-06-20T23:12:20.830-07:00Twelve thoughts on the Climate Rapture and waiting for people to get it<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">1. If you spend time on the internet talking to people who are unlike you - and don't, they're all awful - eventually someone will tell you 'you just don't get it' regarding some contentious issue.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">2. I have decided that this is code for 'You don't automatically agree with me and I can't be bothered explaining myself to some</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">one who doesn't'.<br /><br />3. I know the feeling, but it's kind of a pity when it happens. Some chance to learn something got cut short, because I wasn't enough like the person I was interacting with. But if I was too like them, neither of us would've learned anything much anyway, would we? We'd more likely have just cheered each other on in our prejudices.<br /><br />4. This point is just a warning that point number 5 is going to be about climate change. This is your cue - if you want it - to go and do something else instead because fuck actually having a conversation about climate change amiright? Of course I'm right. See you next time!<br /><br />5. Still here? Cool. Actually I lied, this one is about gun violence. Every so often there is horrible gun violence in the US. Each time it happens people like me think, "Surely this time people will get it! Surely they'll wake up, where 'wake up' is also code for 'agree with me without me needing to explain myself'?"<br /><br />6. Reader: it never happens. Maybe it did once but even if it did the world doesn't work that way any more. What happens instead is that the event gets worked into the stories we tell ourselves about the world. People with different stories from me don't tend to suddenly drop those stories and adopt mine on the basis of a new event; instead the event gets incorporated into those stories and indeed there are whole industries devoted to that intellectual task.<br /><br />7. For an example of how well all this works, every time there's a riot in a detention centre there are people on the right hoping that this time you'll 'get it', and realise we shouldn't be letting asylum seekers anywhere near our country. Do you? Probably not, if we're friends. Perhaps like me you see things like that as the outcome of locking people up in hot places and dehumanising them and waiting to see who will crack first.<br /><br />8. And so well but I can't help but notice that the same kind of wishful thinking pervades the way some of us talk about climate change. i.e., some disaster will come along and then surely people will 'get it'. They will magically start agreeing with us. Maybe they'll even apologise for being such dicks about it lo! these many years. Maybe Andrew Bolt will drop his trousers in the public square and bend over and let us all smack his fleshy Dutch arse with the dead bodies of the hundred thousand fruitbats which fell from the sky a few months back.<br /><br />9. The moment we're waiting for is kind of like the Rapture, for environmentalists - the moment everyone realises we were right about the giant invisible thing in the sky we could see and they couldn't and which will now punish them for their wickedness. Except we don't get to go to heaven when that happens, we just get the satisfaction of being right while everyone suffers. Perhaps they'll install us as rulers of the world's corpse at that point? Now there's something to look forward to.<br /><br />10. This desire - that the facts will speak for themselves, will step out like Marshall McLuhan in the lobby scene in Annie Hall and vindicate us and everyone will realise we were right and they were wrong - is based on a mistake, which is the idea that facts ever speak for themselves. Facts don't have mouths: FACT. They can't type either: FACT.<br /><br />11. "OKOKOK so what do we do smartarse?" say you and me I say "I'm glad you asked! I think people do get it sometimes, but almost never without someone doing something. The flaw in the plan is hoping it'll happen without you having to do anything about it. That's magical thinking. If you want people to be persuaded, you may have to help do the persuading. And if you are no good at it, but you think it needs to be done anyway and that magic won't do it, you may have to learn."<br /><br />12. Oh and don't get me wrong: I'd still like the Rapture to happen. I mean, I'll look pretty silly for having kept this pile of dead fruitbats if it doesn't. X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-53144814091440028492014-03-21T21:17:00.000-07:002014-06-24T21:19:15.901-07:00Dan Murphy's<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">I used to live just near a big Dan Murphy's. Each day out the window I'd see this red-nosed old geezer in brown corduroy pants and a dirty white terry-towelling hat shuffle down the street to the Dan Murphy's and then shuffle back with a brown-bagged bottle of something in hand: mission accomplished. Sometimes he'd stop and lean back theatrically and pour some of the bottle's contents into him but</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"> that was all the variation I saw.<br /><br />In my mind I turned him into a loveable old drunk, and my heart did this happy little origami when I saw him: shuffleshuffle.<br /><br />And of course when I ran into him on the street one day I looked him in the eye and gave him a jaunty knowing grin, a kind of hail-loveable-drunk-well-met! kind of vibe.<br /><br />So it was a shock when what I saw behind those eyes looked like nothing so much as an abyss, an infinite empty void, cold and mechanical, absent of anything I recognised as human. It'd be a stretch to say the abyss even looked back. I guess it just kept the feet shuffling, one after the other: off to Dan Murphy's and back. Or y'know maybe he was just having a bad day and I have An Overactive Imagination. There are signs pointing - no really! - in that direction. X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-4833495539608665302014-03-16T21:01:00.000-07:002014-06-24T21:02:47.479-07:00The mound<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">The other night I dreamed I lived in a big old weatherboard house. I was in my room, trying to work out why it felt weird in there. I looked around and looked around and then decided it was because there was a giant grassy mound twice as tall as me filling most of it. The furniture was all pushed to the side on account of the mound. Once you noticed it you wondered how you'd missed it all this tim</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">e.<br /><br />I woke up and decided the mound was dispossession: a burial mound: a pile of bodies with grass grown over. I decided this was the pile of bodies that haunt everything when you live in Australia, the pile of bodies you forget about because we have a kind of unspoken agreement to talk endlessly about almost everything else except that pile of bodies. You walk around and you walk around and if you're like me you have little projects and you try to make your life better because fuck yeah life etc and then suddenly the pile haunts you and it all seems like a dream, unreal.<br /><br />It's like a whole country built on sand, sand soaked in blood, blood we never talk about. Like in Poltergeist. They were all like "Why is TV so fucking weird all the time? Why every time I watch TV do I feel like my soul is getting sucked out?" and the answer was BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS BUILT ON A PILE OF DEAD PEOPLE YOU DO NOT HONOUR.<br /><br />And me I wonder if this is why Australians are so touchy about uninvited arrivals coming by boat. The whole notion of uninvited arrival points back at the pile of bodies, after all, at the shot, the poisoned, the hung, the willfully-infected, the displaced: the dispossessed. But thinking about that would undermine our belonging, and we have no other home. We'd have to learn some manners.<br /><br />And so we have this agreement to think about other things. I call it a culture of misdirection, an endless procession of - and I do hope you'll pardon my French here - bullshit. It helps us not look at the past, and how our nation got rich through through colonising the land, dispossessing those who came before. And it helps us not think about the future, and how our nation is getting rich through colonising the atmosphere, dispossessing those who'll come after. We get to live in a present that shrinks even as the TVs in it grow larger, large enough to swallow us. The radiant ghosts on the giant screens call to us: "We're heeere.. we're heeere.." with their come-hither looks and their Gold Logies and their Voices You Can Trust.<br /><br />And all the while the pile towers over us, not going anywhere. Like us it has no other home. X</span>michael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8389654747897746228.post-35330534037899892762014-02-23T23:28:00.000-08:002014-07-28T23:29:29.310-07:00Dear forces that collided that I might have another day on this weird living earthLife is short, so I'm quite pleased to have woken up. Dear forces that collided that I might have another day on this weird living earth: thanks guys! You're the best.<br />
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It's also a fine thing, and I'm grateful for it, to be able to walk and talk and see and hear and feel and think. I generally take these things for granted until one of them is impaired by illness or such, but they're fine fine things and I'm damn pleased to have them. Colours! Sounds! Fuck yeah.<br />
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Opposable thumbs: you guys rule. Thanks for everything. Say hi to the rest of the fingers for me, too.<br />
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I am pleased there is music, especially that first Velvet Underground record: it's like a spiderweb glistening with dew, that thing. I am pleased music evolved into language, too. I know language makes things confusing sometimes, but I'm still glad it's there rather than not, and everything it makes possible. Same goes for consciousness.<br />
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And the same goes too for humans. It's easy to focus on what we're not doing that we could, because we're capable of so much. But one day I was sitting in the mall looking at seagulls: how funny they are, how much nuance and complexity there is in their funny ways and social behaviours. And then somehow without meaning to I looked up and saw the humans around me in the same way. Dudes: we are fucking hilarious. Have a look at some humans one time if you don't believe me and you'll know it's true. We are weird miraculous things and even if we never get our shit together I am glad we exist. Xmichael pulsfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14832095204317842606noreply@blogger.com