Schrodinger's Cat

end of autumn

Four weeks to go til the end of term, looks like I'll be concentrating on my course til then - I couldn't get a gig booked for June but have two in July. I'm going up to Auckland to see Sonic Youth the day after the course finishes, and should play there a couple of days later. Will be good to do some work on music over the holidays but in the meantime I have some more news stories to write and I'm way behind on my shorthand.

Sunday was a pretty good day, I went along to the South American drumming club and joined the circle. It seems a good way of learning about rhythm, which is applicable to any kind of music practice, and there are roles for beginners as well as experts. My playing's so undisciplined so it should be good for me to learn about patterns and things - it's fascinating to hear the layering and gradual changes in that music that comes from people doing simple things that become a piece of a puzzle rather than being upfront & individualist.

I also phoned Elisa in the evening and talked to her for the first time in months - no mention of anger or recriminations, just catching up, letting some tension evaporate. She was unable to take a job on King Kong as she'd lost her driver's license for speeding (in both senses of the word). She's back into cafe work, so hopefully she'll be a nicer person again with less pressure on her. She's talking about going off to teach in Korea in a couple of months, sounds a bit like running away from something as the band she's in, mr sterile, are moving to the Czech Republic next April which would be a once in a lifetime opportunity if she sticks around for it.

I like the way autumn's about stripping things down to the essentials, getting rid of the old dead layers. Then there's The Winter, where mysterious & often wonderful things happen in the dark. Then comes spring, and the days expand back out again towards summer. The nice thing about the timing of the semester break is that it's just after the solstice, so it's the beginning of the spring rebirth. But before then I've got some homework to do.

http://fiffdimension.tripod.com

character armour

The last couple of books I read were biographies of psychologists - one on RD Laing and one on Wilhelm Reich. Both interesting characters who had some good ideas but ended up in discredit. I've also been flipping through Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces , and the last two novels I read were The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. All good stuff.

There were some things I could identify with in the ideas of Laing and Reich. I'd read Laing's first book The Divided Self which has some fascinating descriptions of the way schizophrenics and schizoids (a milder state where the person is still largely in touch with 'reality') see the world. There was a passage I remember, but can't quote exactly, about the schizoid feeling dead inside. They envy everyone else for their life force, and wish they could possess it but also hate it. It's a paradox, and seems to tie in with the myth of vampires.

Wilhelm Reich, early in his career before all the business with the bions and orgone accumulators, wrote a lot about sexuality. He was a big believer in achieving mental health through having good sex - it's a release valve for psychic energy which turns sour if its kept bottled up. I think this echoes the law of thermodynamics that entropy increases in a closed system. And he meant good sex, as in a cleansing & sharing & mutually pleasurable experience; meaningless sex without communication fails to release the energy so tension perpetuates. That would explain why cynical one-nighters or sex with prostitutes are unsatisfying and therefore pointless. And I never responded to porn, it just looks stupid.

I'm writing this around 3am Sunday morning. Friday and Saturday nights I went out, met a few new people but failed to click with anyone. Mind you I dressed very casually, unshaven etc. I haven't been to the gym for several days and I ate too much chocolate this week. That kind of thing has consequences - Reich talks about 'character armour' being the result of unreleased energy. If too much of it gets built up, eventually the person is trapped by it and can become psychically dead.

I've changed a bit since last year, I've overcome most of my natural shyness (getting a stimulating fulltime job where I had to communicate with people was a major help) but on the other hand there's an unresolved tension in my mind resulting from getting dumped. It even has a physical manifestation, the pain I get in my left wrist whenever I get tense. In a way tension has traded places for depression as the negative mental state I have to watch out for and deal with. My ex-girlfriend met me for a coffee a couple of weeks after she left me last year, and said 'you look older'. It was true. I've now got lines on my face that literally appeared overnight when she left.

The trouble with tension is that it causes blockages. I find creative writing difficult these days, and when it's difficult the quality goes down. I end up writing nothing for long periods, interspersed with the odd paragraph of banal humourless crap. My most productive writing period was when I was in a relationship, having high quality sex on a regular basis and so not preoccupied with it. Mind you I also had a lot of time, being unemployed. Eventually the stress & indignity of unemployment outweighed the benefits though, and the relationship went down the toilet.

Tension blockages also ruin social interaction. It's still possible to communicate, but hard to get close to another person. There's information and then there's subtext. Like good writing, connecting with another person (or to put it more bluntly, scoring, though scoring is really only a subset of this) is actually the easiest and most pleasurable thing in the world - when it goes well, everything is natural and just flows, and the two people want to get together because it feels good. But with tension in the way, nothing happens. So there's a paradox, or vicious circle, that not connecting with other people both increases the urgency of doing so and makes it more unlikely to happen.

Fortunately writing non-fiction is much easier than creative writing. It's basically a trade: journalism is about producing information as a finite and quantifiable commodity. I spent Friday at the Kapiti Observer in Paraparaumu doing some work experience - seems like a good workplace, friendly people. I got offered two weeks (low) paid work there in August so they must think I'm at least competent. Oh well competence is a start. But even if it's true that genius is 90% perspiration to 10% inspiration, the 10% is still indispensible. 3.30am, the people with partners are in bed with them by now, I'll have to make do with a hot water bottle. And go back to the gym asap.

http://fiffdimension.tripod.com

matariki / solo

It seems to be a tradition for me since moving to Wellington that I enjoy the second half of a year better than the first. This would make sense with the seasonal changes, spring rather than autumn. I seem to get more done. December is party season with my birthday, Christmas and New Year, reconciliations etc. But we're in the dark part of 2004 now, not too far til the solstice. Matariki is being celebrated from this weekend which is good – it gives a sense of newness, much more logical than an arbitrary date like January 1st.

The year so far's been good, the journalism course was probably a good choice for things to do, and the timing was right - having turned 25 I get a student allowance that I can just live off. So that's going ok, but things are good rather than great. Two things are missing, and they're pretty much my favourite activities in the world: sex and playing live music.

The shortage of gigs has been frustrating. Forming a band last year was one of the two things, along with a career change, or three things if I count paying off my student loan, that made 2003 the best of times as well as the worst of times. The Winter seemingly ground to a halt though after our last gig at the end of October, when Mike put a veto on gigs so he could write his novel. I exiled myself to Paekakariki while I waited to find out if I had HIV and wrote peripatetically. Now we're all supposedly keen to play together again but we can't seem to get our schedules together - it's only three people, how hard can it be? This time it was Simon who pulled the plug on this weekend's jam, pleading other commitments. We'll sort it out eventually. The gig at Photospace on the 7th was great fun, whets my appetite for more.

I'm having to get back into playing & writing solo, inventing new material. A sixth album is beginning to take shape in my mind, though it's only a vague distant blur at this point. I'm at the 'conceptualising' stage, which can take months or years, and I have to arrange the scraps of half-ideas in my notebooks into workable compositions. I'm slowly reasserting the creative drive that I had in my early 20s and which took a major knock when I got dumped last year. Clawing my way back to mental competence has been a difficult process, but necessary. 'That which does not kill us makes us stronger' - except in a way it did kill me. The photo of me at Bats on my previous blog entry was taken on the first night of the Speakeasy show; ten hours later I had the encounter with the transsexual prostitute described in the first entry on this blog. I performed the second night, with my ex in the audience, under the awful knowledge. I kept the secret from most of my friends. What's disturbing is the way I gambled on my own life, playing Russian Roulette with nothing to gain and everything to lose. Somehow I had died inside. Two of the tracks on Loose Autumn Moans were recorded post-encounter – it did the job of getting some duende in the performances. How’s that for method acting?

I spent the summer thinking about what would happen if I had contracted HIV. Suicide seemed a feasible option; I imagined swimming out past Kapiti Island and just keeping going. An odd thing gave me hope though in January, a week or so before I had the blood test – I cut my finger surprisingly badly with a kitchen knife, and burst out laughing in a strange kind of happiness. The cut left a scar. The scar is something new that didn’t exist before I was 25, so it meant that I was out of the 2002/03 yin-yang vortex. And the blood test turned out OK, so I got off with a warning. Since then I’ve also developed a couple of small warts on my right hand – another new thing specific to this year.

So I seem to be pretty well adjusted now, this is a far more stable year than last. I miss having the band - that was just as much of a relationship as having a girlfriend in its way, but the music’s now developing a distinct identity different from last year’s sound, in the same way that was different from 2002. I should do a couple more gigs in June, then more in July.

As for my love life, nonexistent would be the word to describe it. I’m way past the being broken up over breaking up stage. Now I just feel like life is pretty good, but would be better if I had a companion to share it with. I’ve had a few dating encounters so far this year:

1) Emotionally repressed 24 year-old commerce student living with her parents – no spark, nothing in common.
2) Good first date, my ex saw us kissing at the bus stop so good for political purposes. Second date a dull drinking session, I’m not that keen on heavy alcohol consumption. I didn’t hear from her for a while – turned out she’d made a suicide attempt, apparently an unrelated issue. I didn’t want to get involved with someone who’d put that kind of pressure on me, plus not interested in matching her alcohol intake. She says she’s fine now.
3) BNZ human resources worker earning $60K salary. My age, has flash car and a mortgage. Two dates, both ending in very pleasant prolonged kissing sessions in the car. But she changed her mind, said she wanted to be solo for a while. We got on well but she seemed a bit disdainful of my more modest living standards and single bed.
4) 39 year-old writer, ex-druggie now into fitness, likes younger men, intellectually stimulating but apparently a platonic thing.
5) This one doesn’t count as a date but there was a seriously attractive female I met last year who’d just moved to Wellington and who I had a good chance with - good conversation and she kept dropping unsubtle hints about being horny. Unfortunately this was while I was under the possibility of having a deadly disease so morally had to go home alone. I saw her again on Valentine’s Day this year, with new boyfriend – triggered one of my very rare drinking binges, to the point of being comatose.

My main priority is working towards going travelling next year so I’m not looking for anything permanent, but would rather not be solo at this point. I had a somewhat stunted development not having siblings in childhood, being somewhat naturally shy, and in adolescence going to a conservative boys’ school, so I’ve never learned how to pick up women. The two really good relationships I’ve had were both the result of the woman asking me out. My problem’s maybe that I’m too willing to go with anyone who’ll ask me (hence perverse transgender encounter, which also flies in the face of my hetero-sexual orientation), although those occasions are few and far between. Otherwise there's just the usual problem of women ending up with creeps and good guys ending up alone.

This just makes me sound neurotic and isn’t going to help my cause is it? 25yrs, 6’3”, unattached, good physical shape, creative, likes the outdoors, seeks…

more explanation / holding pattern

Couple of pictures here from our show, Speakeasy, at BATS in the Jazz Festival last year (the Wellington Word Collective with music by The Winter and Shakespeare's Bitch). Word Festival in July should be worth looking out for.

(excerpt from a correspondance follows - someone overseas finally bought my albums...)

...Scratched Surface I think has some good stuff and for the not-so-good parts I can plead that it was my first effort and I was 18 at the time. It has the most straightforward writing, with songs structured to have lyrical setups & payoffs. The musical content's pretty minimal. The other albums are more open-ended. If you listen to them in order you should be able to hear how each one is a reaction to & development from the one before. Loose Autumn Moans is the most recent and seems to be a fusion of all the other four (plus the 'string section' giving it a distinct sound of its own). So the next album should be something different.

Each album has a basic theme, I guess Scratched Surface's would be growing up. The Marion Flow's about the unconscious mind, I was working along the Carl Jung line of developing a 'personal mythology', and the move from a small town to the city (note that it's divided into 'pastoral' and 'urban' halves). Then Mantis Shaped & Worrying's about memory & morality, Parataxes about co-operation, and Loose Autumn Moans is just what the title says. All them have a kind of innocence vs experience dynamic that comes from William Blake.

Interesting that the music seems different from the writing. The good thing with writing short stories is that it's a way of getting across to people who won't listen to my music. This year I'm narrowing the gap a bit, doing more spoken word performances of stories with only a little musical backing. Could be because in 2003 I relied a lot on the other guys in the band and didn't do much new writing; it was great to be part of something bigger than myself but the next logical step in reaction to that is to reassert my own individuality a bit. The other factor though is that this year I'm busy so don't have as much time for music as before, but it's coming together. The gig the other week was great fun, I should do hopefully three more in June.

There's a Wellington guy Richard who I've spent a bit of time with. We had most of the same influences as teenagers - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Will Oldham, free jazz etc but we took them in totally different directions. He got really into learning folk-style guitar techniques and developing a repertoire of blues and other old songs, whereas I was interested in taking elements from my different influences and putting them together to create something new. I always emphasised originality but don't have a lot of technique, whereas he became a classicist, and in the end we were unable to play together because of the different philosophical motives. The last recording of his I heard was pretty intriguing though - a live rock cover of 'Sara' by Bob Dylan, with Kurt Cobain sounding vocals and a Neil Young sounding guitar solo. He made a collage whereas I took the same people and put them through a blender?

Basically I'm a dabbler, I haven't chosen any one area to master. There are plenty of people who play way better guitar than I - I think of the guitar as one of my tools, along with pen & paper and my laptop, rather than a main focus. The short stories are kind of caricaturish distortions & selective misrepresentations of things from my life, while the music is maybe more my 'inner' thoughts & a direct experience. The other thing I'm doing a lot of this year is writing non-fiction which is totally externalised and only minimally subjective (though the choice of subject matter tells a bit about my interests). That has the advantage that the subject matter's provided, so all the angst & dithering around trying to think what to write about can be dispensed with. But overall the different writings are all 'me', and to work out who I am you just have to make a composite picture from all the different sources rather than focussing on one. I should even get back into making films one day.

http://fiffdimension.tripod.com

Kakariki politics part 2

ends

I got invited along to Mana Island as part of the media to write the above story. There were people from Porirua News, Kapi Mana, The Dominion Post, and a freelancer. We got out to the island - the helicopter had already come and dropped off the birds - and went up the hill to a Manuka grove at the northern end. We took photos of the birds being released (I didn't manage to get any of them in flight) and asked a few questions, all in a very orderly way. Hopefully I'd been forgiven for the mess that ensued with the last kakariki story.

I'd been out to Mana Island once before while working for DOC last year - one of the good things about DOC as a workplace, people get time out of the office every so often to go and plant trees etc. There were six takahe walking along the lawn at the bottom. We spent the day planting trees and the evening collecting diving petrels out of their burrows on the cliffs to count and weigh them (there's a shelter where this is done called 'the petrel station', groan). We also saw the artificial gannet colony (stone sculptures of gannets to attract real ones) and the stereo system which is solar powered and blasts out seabird calls at night, and found lizards under rocks. If you get hungry on Mana Island there's native spinach growing everywhere.

This time was a little less exciting, being there to make a public record of DOC's work. I had to send my story in for 'fact-checking' and again it got cut down - I had put in a quote from FOMI president Brian Paget about where the Mana Community Trust funding comes from: "We have a vested interest in keeping gambling in Porirua."

I can see how that would have been bad taste to leave that in and could have overcomplicated the story - gambling is a major social problem. It does open up a web of interconnections between different things going on in society though.

In the second half of the journalism course we do one day a week working somewhere in the media industry such as a community newspaper. Working with DOC is an obvious choice for me, a good way to make contacts there and learn more about the ecology of NZ (catching up for failing science at high school). On the other hand I've been told that my job there would be writing PR, putting across the DOC side of any story and minimising any negative aspects. If I want to be an investigative journalist and dig up dirt I should go to a newspaper. So that's something to weigh up and decide on. And don't mention 10-80...

http://fiffdimension.tripod.com

kakariki politics

Catching red-crowned kakariki for transfer to Matiu/Somes Island was the job of ten Department of Conservation staff and volunteers on Kapiti Island this week.

ends

I wrote the above article last week for the Kapiti Observer. Publicising the first kakariki transfer to Matiu was my first job when I worked at DOC last year, so I figured I'd be helpful and write them a story about this year's transfer. I was also keen to go out and see Kapiti Island for myself, as I'd spent the whole summer looking at it every day from the Paekakariki escarpment.

The trouble is, DOC didn't want any publicity until a few days later, as it would cause problems with funding applications for the Matiu/Somes Charitable Trust, who are paying for the transfer. But they didn't tell me that. So I got caught in a crossfire between DOC wanting to hold the story back and the newspaper editor wanting it right away or she wouldn't publish it at all. It turned kind of ugly, as this was all happening minutes before the newspaper deadline last Thursday.

As a compromise I sent the story to DOC for fact-checking, and they cut it down from 730 words to 420 - which counts as censorship. The story above shows the good side of the transfer, and I think restoring Matiu to its natural state is a pretty amazing & inspiring thing. Human intervention can not only destroy but recreate an ecosystem. It's been going on there for over 20 years now... But let's just say that the transfer's not without risks for the birds, and why's the colony already breeding if they only transferred males last year? There was also a part about the Matiu trust funding the transfer, which they took out - odd since that's public information available on the DOC website. It led me to a paragraph about what DOC are spending money on, which includes trying to save the only remaining population of orange-fronted kakariki, in Canterbury. No idea why they'd want that supressed. Maybe it complicates the story - species transfer to offshore islands is not always a solution, and the orange-fronted kakariki live in beech forests which don't occur on islands. I failed science at high school so all this stuff is new & interesting to me.

Censorship's not something I could let anyone else get away with. It left me thinking I shouldn't have taken on the story at all if I had a conflict of interest. How would I handle a more serious story where DOC could be in the wrong? Not everyone's sold on 10-80 for example... This seems to be one of those things where something that starts off well becomes more complicated as it develops. Working for DOC last year was a fantastic mind-expanding experience but their being an unwieldy bureaucracy is a downside. This is the second time this year I've run into trouble with them - in March they offered me a regular part-time contract at the visitor centre, only to pull the rug out from under my feet when they found they didn't actually have the budget for it. I never got anything like an apology.

Anyway, there's a transfer of yellow-crowned kakariki to Mana Island in May, I'll see if DOC are still speaking to me then. I like kakariki, they've got personality. It all shows how much I've learned in the last year. When I first started last May I had no idea what a kakariki was - I assumed it was a kind of tree...

PS I did some work on http://fiffdimension.tripod.com and improved the mp3s there.