Manifesto review

Reclaim the Night article

This one should've been a Women's Column, but got re-positioned & then attributed to 'a salient writer'.

And then the one that was published, but doesn't show on the website 

*sigh* Are there any more ways to cock up the editorial, guys?

Surviving sexual abuse

Being molested as a child is like having cancer, but without there being a way to actually destroy the disease. Paedophilia kills off a part of a child’s natural development, that of self-esteem and self-identity - for the abused person, the ‘other’, the abuser, is always the one in control, the one setting boundaries.

No wonder that those of us who make it through to adulthood (& a huge majority don’t - as a proper investigation of youth suicide statistics would bear out), often bear the scars in the form of disordered personality traits, poor choice-making (or none - the ‘spontaneous’ decision-making, abdicating to peer-groups, that masks anxiety and uncertainty) and low self-esteem that continues to plummet, as abusers identify the ‘survivors’ within their purview, to abuse again. 

‘Getting over it” is not just a matter of a few chats with someone from a helping agency. Just as the grief process cycles backwards and forwards through denial, anger, despair and acceptance, when dealing with death, or another such stressful loss such as divorce or relationship loss, these stages can be seen in the progress of abuse survivors.

Latency in childhood leads to many adults ‘recovering memories’ of childhood sexual abuse later in life; often this is coupled with an experience of current abuse, which triggers the deeper fears, and the deep-seated memories guarded by the psyche.

‘Burnout’ amongst those who are activists in the area of rape support and abuse counselling is often related not only to the gruelling day-to-day contact with survivors of sexual abuse, but also the activists’ personal issues, dealing with their own experiences of abuse.

We live, here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in a culture of violence, where child abuse segues into teenage rape victims, serial rapists who terrorise entire cities (such as Malcolm Rewa in the 80’s) and a casual attitude to rape that allows some moron ad-agency to get an ad funded for ALAC, making a woman who has had a few drinks responsible for the actions of her rapist. (No, SORRY! He committed the crime!) 

Our TV coverage is saturated with advertising that reinforces these ideas - that women alone are necessarily vulnerable, that a trustworthy male is an important accessory for a night out, that macho behaviour is epitomised by the AB’s (who have had several members appear in Court in the past 12 months for violent, abusive behaviour, including domestic abuse) and that our aspirational spending habits would be positively influenced by reference to the above concepts. (Ok, so this could head off into a call for more women to go into advertising exec positions, but that would be a digression too far, even for me.)

As we run into Women’s Fest Week, go out, have fun - and look out for each other. Break out of the sterotypes, and think again about why one of your friends might drink too much, or recoil in horror from smoke blown in her face, or suddenly want to leave a venue you had all been enjoying. Set some ‘safety calls’ before you go out - have taxi money, or a designated sober driver - and never, ever, leave a mate passed out on a bench seat in a bar! (even the really comfy ones at the San Fran!)

Chugging through the book review column at Salient; I'm getting a bit pedestrian here, but there may be an article sometime in the future, if my MA thesis doesn't stop me from writing about leisure activities!

The Essential DTWOF review

cheerio.

Oh, the LILAC library link is here.
Got cut out of my review by the powers that be.

Alison Bechdel's website here, if you'd like to see what else she has been doing all these years.

This was more of a fun one to write, a little tongue-in-cheek.

Linky-love again:

the-alice-b-toklas-cookbook

Nothing flash.

Two Little Boys

Just fillin' space. Next one might be a corker, though.

Thanks to paying attention to the VUW Orientation guide, I had the opportunity on Thursday last week to meet Darin McFayden, aka DJ Freq Nasty, during an on-campus seminar of wanna-be DJ’s and electronic music producers. This turned out to be about a dozen keen musical types, John from Vuwsa, and me (the token journo).

Bryce Mason from Sandwiches carefully shepherding his international star aside, it was an amazing amount of access to get with someone who has a regular gig at Fabric in London, and splits his time between home in LA, gigs in the UK, and a family in Auckland, NZ.

Darin left Auckland for Sydney in the early 90’s, arriving in London in time for the big wave of rave and techno/electronic music production that powered the big club scene through that decade. Of that period, he said new genres were popping up all the time, taking about 3-4 years to mature, then the scene moved on to the next thing - now, new scenes go global much more quickly, there’s no time lag; producing your own work & getting it out to radio stations and club DJ’s is much more of a track to professional fame (and full-time employment), than just playing other acts’ tunes in a club.

The other big shifts he’s seen involve technology - the rise of social networking sites like myspace, YouTube, etc, where new bands and producers can get huge exposure very quickly; and the advent of software that lets music produced on a laptop have production studio quality - so the initial investment in moving form DJ to Producer is becoming less of a barrier. “As soon as you knock out a tune (you’ve produced yourself), you’re ahead of 90% of the competition” - prime advice to the young players in the room.

The industry bogey of downloads vs album sales was raised - Darin emphasized the value of collaborating with other up-and-coming producers on work, and used his own experience with web-published tracks to illustrate that it’s no longer an ‘either-or’ issue for most artists in the frontline, but a strategic use of media to gain maximum exposure. The other great tip from this was ‘cultivate a tech geek, to do your website stuff, so you can focus on producing tunes’. This man is very switched on! We did touch on techy stuff like software to use, bit-torrent download sites and the like, but they were very specific questions that only music producers need-to-know, so I won’t go into all that here.

So, fortified by this rare discussion, I joined the line shaking DJ Freq Nasty’s hand on the way out the door, Bryce whisked him away, and I bought my ticket to the gig.

Rolling into Sandwiches at 11.30pm-ish, I was surprised to see only a few peeps in the bar, and not a lot on the dance floor as the warm-up valiantly tried to fill the concrete box that is the main room. Walked smack into Darin, who smiled & said “So, you made it”, chatted for a minute, then excused himself to prepare for the beginning of his set, up in a few minutes.

The room began to fill as soon as he appeared in the DJ booth, just standing alongside P-Vans, and the 3-hour set that ensued was a mash-up of dubstep, breakbeat, old-school rave, and a bunch of Lee Perry classics. It was all that a good nite on dub should be, sweaty, smokey, amazing light-show (yeah, the lighting guy looked after my handbag; big props to him for the excellent flicks and shades) and a mad collection of dub fans jumping and bumping through the set.

When Dunsta took over at 3am, there was a general move to the bar, and a collective slump as we realised it was now raining heavily outside. I managed a quick last word to Darin after the floor cleared - he hadn’t known what to expect of a Welli Ori crowd, was pleased the floor filled up minutes before he started, and bemusedly said “Come along next time, we’ll bring a bigger show back & do this again”. Yeah, Darin, I will, and I’ll get a few more friends along with me, too...

Samurai’s on Willis Street if you’re interested in picking up his latest production, Fabriclive.42, and I’m reliably informed that they’re stocking a lot of dubstep, if you want more of the genre.

Check out the links below, Darin has made waves by setting up Giveback.net to allow artists to support causes with their musical talents. Great free download to support Tibetan Bhuddists, and see the article on his myspace blog about his efforts to support social justice while still running kickass dubstep parties.

links: freqnasty.com, tribe.net/freqnasty, giveback.net, myspace page.

Another book review I've published in Salient. OK, so not a technical act of aggression against the SIS/GCSB/CIA/FBI/ et al, just a tease ...

Secrets and Lies, By Nicky Hager & Bob Burton.
Salient, Mon, 9 Mar 2009.

This week, I’m going to diverge from recently published works to recommend a work of non-fiction, which carefully investigates and chronicles the actions of Timberlands, one of the poster-child State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) of the 90s, in its attempts to discredit opposition to its clear-felling practices in the West Coast Native Bush reserves during the late 80s through to late 90s. Hager and Burton used Official Information Act (OIA) requests to amass a huge volume of source data, from which this solid fact-finding book emerged. If you didn’t know anything about the derivation of environmental groups in Aotearoa/New Zealand, you might find the narrative difficult to follow; and the information is incredibly dense and heavily annotated.

As a study of how PR firms help corporations to spin and manipulate public opinion, I’ve seen none better. The publication of this book came just before the public mass protests about GE, and long before any of the current protests about state coal mining in Happy Valley, near Westport, but parallels can be made between the tactics used by Timberlands, and those subsequently used against protesters by Monsanto, and Solid Energy: one a huge multinational, the other an SOE with an ostensibly greenwashed public face.

If you’ve ever struggled to make sense of claims of eco-terrorism happening in our fair land, this book will help you to understand the context in which PR firms have popularised the terminology in defense of their SOE and corporate clients. I found my reading copy in a library. I’m pretty sure the book is out of print, so if you’re interested, I suggest a scroll through the catalogue in your library of choice, or take time out to visit the little anarchist library, Revolting Books, based at 128 Abel Smith Street. I can vouch that they have multiple copies, along with a lot of other material about direct activism in Aotearoa NZ, including other works by Nicky Hager.

Misconduct

Linking 'cos I'm lazy, and a bit underslept form Orientation gigs. More about that later ..

Dodgy Slips, Deadly Sleds: the books and the Exhibition

The Exhibition is open until the 27th Feb, in Civic Square. Housed in two conjoined cargo containers, cleverly fitted out with Gallery-style white-painted walls and halogen downlights, it’s worth a look just to see how much innovation the guys at Weta have used to put the exhibit together.

Greg Broadmore has created some amazing artworks for Dodgy Slips, using the limited palette available on the Nintendo DS, and has exercised both his sense of humour, and a genuinely expressed love of the female form.

The naked ladies in Dodgy Slips are portrayed in all the luminous variety of womanhood - I’ve seen a lot of porn depictions of women, artificially displayed to appeal to the male gaze, to create desire and longing, and this selection of images was completely the opposite - natural variations in the forms of women, amazingly apt facial expressions, and more poses than I ever saw in gymnastic competitions. I could almost accuse Greg of having a feminist subtext, if I didn’t know better!

Christian Pearce’s contribution to the project, Deadly Sleds, is another dose of clever use of design limitations, and in-jokes abound for anyone familiar with the vernacular of chop-shops and drag racers. I discovered, eavesdropping on other participants at the opening night drinks, there are some drawings based on real, half-finished classic cars owned by other Weta staffers. There are some real cute spray-jobs in there, too.

There are 99 pictures by each artist (the number of slots Nintendo DS holds in memory at once), and originals are for sale, as well as the books of prints, at the site - all items priced at $99, eftpos on site and all sold items can be collected at the end of the exhibition period. The production standards on the books are excellent, a truly worthy effort to cater for those who may not be able to afford a block of the grouped prints. As a ‘side project’, unrelated to current production at Weta Workshops, the exhibition has full support from Richard Taylor to his artistic protegees. The exhibition is staffed by a rotation of volunteers, who are all local artists.

check the website:
http://www.99ds.net
play the slideshows!

Due to some misogynists causing bigotry in the Salient office, my e-mail address was blocked, and the Women's Issue editor, Tania Sawicki Mead, didn't receive my contributions until a week after they were sent. I'd had the 'flu when I sent them, so hadn't followed up in person, 'cos I didn't leave the house that week

So, two pieces were published:
Rita Angus: an Artists' Life
Plum Green EP review


And this one wasn't. Finally, I've decided to publish it, as it was written; this is my response to all the good, bad and indifferent stuff I've seen in the media around the White Ribbon Day events which took place around the country.
[For an example, try this: White Ribbon Day Windup ]

The post was ok, but the comments went into bigoted overdrive almost immediately.

Surviving sexual abuse

Being molested as a child is like having cancer, but without there being a way to actually destroy the disease. Paedophilia kills off a part of a child’s natural development, that of self-esteem and self-identity - for the abused person, the ‘other’, the abuser, is always the one in control, the one setting boundaries.

No wonder that those of us who make it through to adulthood (& a huge majority don’t - as a proper investigation of youth suicide statistics would bear out), often bear the scars in the form of disordered personality traits, poor choice-making (or none - the ‘spontaneous’ decision-making, abdicating to peer-groups, that masks anxiety and uncertainty) and low self-esteem that continues to plummet, as abusers identify the ‘survivors’ within their purview, to abuse again.

‘Getting over it' is not just a matter of a few chats with someone from a helping agency. Just as the grief process cycles backwards and forwards through denial, anger, despair and acceptance, when dealing with death, or another such stressful loss such as divorce or relationship loss, these stages can be seen in the progress of abuse survivors.

Latency in childhood leads to many adults ‘recovering memories’ of childhood sexual abuse later in life; often this is coupled with an experience of current abuse, which triggers the deeper fears, and the deep-seated memories guarded by the psyche.

‘Burnout’ amongst those who are activists in the area of rape support and abuse counselling is often related not only to the gruelling day-to-day contact with survivors of sexual abuse, but also the activists’ personal issues, dealing with their own experiences of abuse.

We live, here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in a culture of violence, where child abuse segues into teenage rape victims, serial rapists who terrorise entire cities (such as Malcolm Rewa in the 80’s) and a casual attitude to rape that allows some morn ad-agency to get an ad funded for ALAC, making a woman who has had a few drinks responsible for the actions of her rapist. (No, SORRY! He committed the crime!)

Our TV coverage is saturated with advertising that reinforces these ideas - that women alone are necessarily vulnerable, that a trustworthy male is an important accessory for a night out, that macho behaviour is epitomised by the AB’s (who have had several members appear in Court in the past 12 months for violent, abusive behaviour, including domestic abuse) and that our aspirational spending habits would be positively influenced by reference to the above concepts. (Ok, so this could head off into a call for more women to go into advertising exec positions, but that would be a digression too far, even for me.)

As we run into Women’s Fest Week, go out, have fun - and look out for each other. Break out of the sterotypes, and think again about why one of your friends might drink too much, or recoil in horror from smoke blown in her face, or suddenly want to leave a venue you had all been enjoying. Set some ‘safety calls’ before you go out - have taxi money, or a designated sober driver - and never, ever, leave a mate passed out on a bench seat in a bar! (even the really comfy ones at the San Fran!)

Oh, and then November turned to shit when Clint Rickards was admitted to the Bar in Auckland:

Rickards becomes lawyer at Auckland ceremony.
But not without comment from the Dompost editorial .