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Keeping it Weird: A Night Out in Christchurch | Apr 01, 2009 14:37

Warning: This piece contains near-toxic levels of in-joke. Reader wtf-ing is inevitable.

We sat with our backs leaning against the stone of the Bridge of Rembrance, watching the crowd go by. After a moment, my companion stopped frailing his banjo, fished in one of his pockets, and brought out a zip lock bag with a couple of pills in it. "Want some?"

"Bob," I said sternly, "where'd you get those?"

He shrugged defensively. "From Dad's friend, Uncle Alan."

I nipped the bag out of his fingers and over-armed it off the bridge, where the nor'wester took it dancing down the river. "Dude, I said, don't trust that bastard an inch. Fucker told me to fix last week and then dropped the OCR a whole point three days later. Anyway, where'd I tell you to get your gear, young man?"

"From Uncle R-"

"Ah!"

He stopped, and then remembered. He's a quick learner, that boy. "From the Point Chev pharmacy."

I ruffled his hair affectionately. "Good lad. Anyway, what would your Dad say?"

Bob picked idly at his banjo strings. "I dunno. He hasn't been the same since, y'know, the accident."

I sighed, and lit another cigarette, pausing to give the finger to the disapproving old biddy who glared at me. I wasn't smuggling Black Sorbranies into the country to take any shit from nuns. "Tragic waste, that. And so weird, that his prototype generator for extracting energy from the sewage in the Avon would just explode like that. Still, at least he lets me babysit now." I frowned, briefly disconcerted. "Did we remember to bring him in off the porch before we left? I can't remember. Never mind, it doesn't look like rain. Now, what would you like to do? We could go over to Manchester Street and talk to the sex workers, or we could go across the road to the Strip and watch the drunks punch each other."

Bob pinched one of my fags while he thought about it. I considered telling him off, but if he was serious about that career in country music he was probably going to need to smoke a whole lot more of the things. Anyway, if his mother hadn't wanted me to be his moral guardian, she shouldn't have eaten all that unpasteurised cheese. Tragic waste. Especially just after she won the Nobel Prize for Linguistics.

"Maybe we could go to a play or a gig or something," Bob ventured.

"Pah," I said dismissively. "What are you, a Wellingtonian? You know what happens if we stop throwing bottles at tourists and tipping cows. Do you want your rugby team to lose all time? Do you?"

"No," he muttered, lowering his head so his hair fell around his face and emphasised his Byronic good looks.

"Good then, stop being so bloody soft. Come on."

We got our feet, and Bob's face lit. "Look, there's Kate!"

"Ssh," I hissed, ducking down. "She'll hear you."

"She's your daughter, why don't you want to talk to her?"

"It's awkward. I owe her some money," I admitted. "It was a tough year. My book didn't sell very well. I don't s'pose your dad has anything lying around he doesn't remember writing?"

"Nah, don't think so."

"Oh well." I peered across the road around him. "Dear god, what the hell is she wearing? That's way too much cleavage, and if she bends over… wait a minute, that's my dress! No, not the bloody Nissan Skyline, honey, show some class. Go for the Saab, go for the Saab… that's my girl."

Once she was gone, we set off again, clattering our way through a carpet of discarded nitrous bulbs. There seemed to be an even higher degree of muntery about than usual. A few faces I recognised suggested we were about to have one of those 'ex-Christ's lawyer-boy' versus 'ex-St Bedes cockies in for the weekend' fights break out, and while I enjoyed the scoring system (some arcane combination of 'people put in the emergency room' plus 'girls got off with' multiplied by 'number of ancestors on First Four Ships plaque' minus 'number of mates passed out on road' divided by 'arrest record') I had a duty to protect Bob. Even if he was taller than me these days.

"Change of plan, my young shaver."

"I told you not to call me that."

"Sorry. Anyway, let's go to that coffee house by the Arts Centre. You can explain your music to uni girls and I can talk about the development of science-fiction in the Victorian period to that weird guy with the long hair and no shoes."

Bob perked up. "Okay. But do you promise not to lick cream off anything this time?"

"Almost, Bob. Almost."

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Making a List, Not Bothering to Check It | Mar 24, 2009 00:45

Alright, I admit it, I briefly took my eye off the Australian net censorship ball. Apparently this made it feel neglected enough to go completely batfuck crazy, and when it comes to this issue, my Batfuck Crazy Bar is high. So, let me tell you a little story, and then we may attempt to draw the moral from it.

On the 16th of March, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) black-listed a page on WikiLeaks, which contained a leaked copy of the Danish net censorship black-list. This list had been put up on WikiLeaks, along with the Thai one, back in December last year. I'd seen a version of the list about a year ago that had been reverse-engineered.

The black-listing was a result of a complaint filed with the ACMA by a user of the Australian site Whirlpool. They published their complaint on that site, along with a copy of the response they received, which contained within it a hyperlink to the WikiLeaks page.

Whirlpool is now liable for an AU$11 000 per day fine for having the link on their site. Whirlpool's host had already been threatened with the fine for publishing an earlier link to another black-listed site, an anti-abortion site.

On the 19th of March, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story stating that WikiLeaks had now published a list which it claimed was the ACMA black-list, from November last year. The SMH 'understood' that the list had been acquired from a filtering software company. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is adamant that the list is genuine.

Both the ACMA and Senator Stephen Conroy have come out and said that the list is not the ACMA black-list. Both have pointed out that the list at WikiLeaks contains 2395 urls, where the ACMA list at the same date only contained 1370. It should be noted that neither party has said that the ACMA list contains urls which are not on the leaked list.

Nevertheless, the Aussie net went crazy, because according to the SMH:

about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, [and] Christian sites

MaroochyBoardingKennels.com.au, canteens.com.au ("Tuckshop and Canteen Management Consultants"), and Queensland dentist Dr John Golbrani were understandably pretty concerned that they appeared on the list themselves.

Still, the discrepancy in the numbers, while explicable (duplication of sites, or links added by the software vendor), it was a worry. I held off indignation myself for a couple of days, which was all the time it took for another list to appear on WikiLeaks.

This one is dated March 18th, appeared on March 20th, and contains 1170 urls, including ones people know are on the ACMA list because they lodged complaints about them themselves. It also contains the Peaceful Pill Handbook site, which like the AbortionTV site, would appear to contain no material that falls inside the ACMA's purview.

The prompt appearance of a second, shorter list if anything made me even more suspicious. But here's the key to the whole thing: it doesn't matter if the leaked list is genuine or not.

It was already public knowledge that the ACMA list contains material that is perfectly legal to view – material you could go to a shop and buy. They enforce Section 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act, which includes prohibition of material which contains:

strong depictions of nudity, implied sexual activity, drug use or violence, very frequent or very strong coarse language, and other material that is strong in impact.

There is, apparently, something about the internet that makes mild porn grow horns and tentacles and become super-porn. Denmark's black-list – intended, just like Australia's, to combat child pornography – contains 'normal' porn sites, even though pornography has been completely legal in Denmark since 1967.

But say you have no interest in porn and don't care if even the most vanilla porn sites get banned.

There's an AU$11 000 fine for linking to a site on the banned list.

You're not allowed to know which sites are on the banned list.

The fine also presumably applies to linking to sites which link to sites which are on the banned list.

And let's go back to that dentist.

"A Russian company broke into our website a couple of years back and they were putting pornographic listings on there ... [but] we changed across to a different web provider and we haven't had that problem since," Golbrani said in a phone interview.

He said the fact that he hadn't been removed from the list was "criminal" and he was scared potential customers may avoid him.

Dr Golbrani didn't know his site was on the black-list. The black-list is secret. He could not, therefore, apply to have his site removed from the black-list. What happened to him could happen to anyone.

Like copyright, censorship is about the future of the internet. How, for what reasons, and to what extent do we curtail its gloriously anarchic and largely free flow of great gobs of information, some of it distasteful? What are we prepared to give up, and to what ends?

However genuine the leaked lists are, it's simply a matter of degrees of fracking awful.

Last word to Stephen Fry.

But the internet is a city and, like any great city… there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn't want your children wandering alone.

And you say, "But how do I know which shops are selling good gear in the city and how do I know which are bad? How do I know which streets are safe and how do I know which aren't?" Well you find out.

What you don't need is a huge authority or a series of identity cards and police escorts to take you round the city because you can't be trusted to do it yourself or for your children to do it.

And I think people must understand that about the internet - it is a new city, it's a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don't pull down London because it's got a red light district.

---

Christchurch is Drinking Liberally again this Thursday, 7-8pm at Goodbye Blue Monday. Speaker is Therese Arseneau.

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Boning Up | Mar 16, 2009 18:53

Sometimes, no matter how difficult it might be, we need to accept that amusing stereotypes can sometimes prove true. So let's get it out of the way right from the start. Jo Drysdall is a librarian by day. By night she is Bastet Creations, maker of the most astoundingly beautiful corsets, and she is on a not-so-secret mission to bring sexy back.

Now, I know some of you are thinking, ew, corsets. Okay, sexy in a clichéd kind of way, but hideously uncomfortable and symbolic of the restricting of women's bodies for male appetites. About as classy or genuinely sensual as a Sexy Nurse outfit, right?

We'll have to agree to disagree, because I would wear that in a heartbeat. Try imagining someone wearing that being demure and repressed in anything but play.

Corset-making is an odd profession to find yourself in, and perhaps an odder one to have to refuse to take any more work in because you can't keep up with demand. Jo, through a History degree and an involvement in historical re-enactment, began making corsets along with other historical costuming about a decade ago. The history and construction of corsetry has become an insidious passion.

She's particularly fond of Edwardian and Victorian dress, which is convenient given the growth on interest in things Victorian, especially in Gothic and Fetish culture. Her most recent exhibition, "Corset", is inspired in part by steam-punk, the alternate Victorian science-fiction popularised by William Gibson and Alan Moore.

And what Victorian Adventuress would be complete without this?

There it is: corsetry as strength and power and daring. Despite our clichéd and simplistic views of repressive Victorian attitudes towards sex, that dynamic has always been there. Reading about the history of corsetry, it's difficult not to come to the same conclusion as Jo does:

Corsets have always had an ambivalent symbolism – on the one hand commentaries throughout the last 500 years associate them with chastity and moral restraint (think of the terms "straight-laced" and "loose woman") and yet at the same time they cannot help but be symbolic of female sexuality, with their various designs emphasising the breasts, hips and pelvis. They have always been a focus of male writers' conscious or subconscious obsessions and fears about women, power and sex. At any given time the corset tended to mirror attitudes held about women – it could be used as either a cause or sign of chastity or sexual promiscuity, vanity or modesty, assertiveness or repression.

Indeed, one of the strains of opposition to corseting during the Victorian period was based on the way corsetry interfered with a woman's prime purpose: having babies.

Surely, though, there is something legitimate in the other objections, that corsets restrict a woman's breathing and ability to move, that they pinch and dig in and are just plain uncomfortable?

According to Jo, most women's knowledge of what wearing a corset is like comes from wearing light-weight mass-produced corselettes, the kind that are mostly lace and plastic boning.

Corsets can feel a little odd to us, since we're used to stretch fabrics and loose clothing, but the feeling of being laced into a corset is actually rather nice – supportive and enveloping. They don't pinch or dig in, as they are designed to have a gentle all-over pressure… The bones are spring steel, much stronger than the plastic boning commonly found in formal gowns and corselettes these days. It can't buckle enough to dig in.

One of the things my clients all say when they try on their finished corset for the first time is (in tones of great surprise) "Hey, this is really comfortable!"

For the larger-chested woman, having the weight of your breasts supported by your whole torso instead of suspended from narrow shoulder-straps can actually be remarkably comfortable, and ease pain in the neck and upper back.

Still, there is some restriction when it comes to bending. Jo gives one sage piece of advice to her clients: boots first, then corset.

And not all Jo's clients are women. Some of the corsets she has made for men are to fit a natural male shape, others were made for cross-dressers and designed to emulate a more female shape.

Nevertheless, she still occasionally has problematic reactions to her work. Despite designing for men and women of all body types, she has been accused of making 'prostitutes' clothing'. At the other end of the spectrum, at her first exhibition she found her work being viewed as simply art, static display pieces, by people who were astonished that they were intended for wear. That's perhaps understandable: Jo's work is both beautifully crafted and simply beautiful.

Attitude problems are always going to persist when it comes to corsets, even though they're now worn by women who freely choose to wear them and feel attractive and powerful in them.

Given that corsets can and are worn by women of every shape and size (and make the most of every sort of figure!) I'd say they do more for a positive and realistic female self-image than the unrealistically thin models of our catwalks do.

A corset is just an item of clothing, onto which people tend to project their attitudes to the real women who have worn and do still wear them.

Jo Drysdall's Corset exhibition runs at the Arts Centre in Christchurch until the 20th. Get along if you can: photographs cannot do justice to the astonishing artistry and the sheer sense of fun that goes into these works. Photographs used here are by Phil Anderson. You can see more photos of Jo's exhibition here and here.

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The Missionary Position | Mar 05, 2009 15:17

Yesterday I met the nice woman from across the street for the first time. (Not a ninja.) We chatted away amicably for a while, but it made me ponder a phenomenon that seems to happen to me quite a bit. Why do so many people I meet feel compelled to mention their church in our first conversation? Where's our famed Kiwi reticence about religion?

When I wonder this, someone usually points out to me the large pewter pentacle I wear all the time and suggests some degree of hypocrisy. I don't think of that so much as a religious statement, though; more 'fair warning'. It scares off people I don't want to talk to, and anyone who still has a go at me after that is therefore Fair Game. Why yes, pack of teenagers from Middleton Grange, that does include you, doesn't it?

So like any good Kiwi, I'm really uncomfortable discussing religion. Even when people are just being friendly and curious ("Are you Jewish, then?") I get awkward and abrupt. Couldn't we just talk about sex or politics instead?

Nevertheless, I keep meeting people who think religion is an appropriate – almost compulsory – topic for discussing with people you've just met. Worse than that, I keep meeting missionaries.

For a while there, you could just about guarantee that if one of my kids made a friend at school, the parents would turn out to be missionaries. The family of my son's closest friend spent a whole year bringing the Word of God to deepest darkest Sydney.

Our old neighbours were lovely. They'd also come here from America specifically to work as missionaries. Now, maybe there's something I don't understand about missionary work, but this just seems like cheating. Surely if you're going to be missionaries there should be some kind of hardship involved? An essential lack of running water, electricity, and speaking the local language just seem like basic requirements. Also possibly going somewhere where Christianity isn't already the dominant religion. Have you heard the Word of God? Yes, actually, we have. What happened to the pioneering spirit? Is there nowhere you can go and risk getting cooked and eaten any more?

It's possible that I undermine my own argument here. When my son was about five, we were driving through Timaru with my mother. My boy was reading all the street signs we passed. "Church Street," he said. "Mum, what's a church?" This was just a tiny bit awkward, as my mother is a church elder, does the flowers, runs the crèche, and was a Sunday School teacher for years. She was my Sunday School teacher, whatever kind of testimony that is.

So if there's a country where you can move in next door to an atheist witch in a civil union raising her children to be good homosexuals, maybe that in itself justifies saddling up for the Conversion Train.

Then there are the apples.

We love our apples, right? We're famous for it. And you know, if you cut an apple in half horizontally, there's a pentacle inside? ZOMG Satanic fruit! No wonder it was apples the Devil used to tempt Eve, even though the Bible forgot to specify. You think the Latin words for apples and evils are the same by accident? And what's New Zealand full of? Apples. Also cows. I'm working on it. There's got to be some kind of Satan-cow connection. Oh wait, it's the internet: somebody's already done it for me.

Maybe I'm paranoid. I just find it difficult to believe that the number of missionaries I run across is proportionate to the number of functioning contemporary missionaries in the country. Surely I'm getting somebody else's share as well? Or they really are out to get me.

I should add that I don't have anything against Christian missionaries in particular. All kinds of proselytising annoys me. It's just that when the Hare Krishnas knock on my door, they bring samosas. Take a hint.

---

Almost forgot to mention. Christchurch's second Drinking Liberally is tonight, at Goodbye Blue Monday in the Lanes, 6:30 for a 7pm start. Speaker is Phil Goff.

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