Posts by Finn Higgins
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Yes as Mr Higgins has indicated, rural youth are clearly allowed to run wild and unsupervised, possibly because their parents wanted time-off for key parties and other tawdry activities they didn't want their kids to see.
I think that's rather a silly angle on it. Rural and small-town kids in general are more free to roam from an early age - that's a big attraction for many parents in raising kids outside of the cities, the feeling of safety in allowing the kids freedom to move. The whole "I can find my child on a map inside five seconds" attitude is a rather urban one that I don't recall being a big part of my upbringing or that of my friends - and that goes both for NZ and for the various rural/small town parts of the UK where I grew up.
-
Of course we all drank stupidly when we were young but that happened in our late teens because alcohol was only available by law to 21 y.o.'s.
I seem to remember some pretty bangin' parties in Hawkes Bay shearing sheds fueled by rather copious amounts of alcohol back when I was fifteen or so, which was prior to the drinking age being lowered. I doubt there was anybody over eighteen in the room...
-
I've not been out at night in Christchurch for a few years - about four, I think - but last time I was there I remember a distinctly uncomfortable feeling about the place. It has a fairly strong whiff of "bored kids looking for trouble" at night, which seems to be something of a common note at night on the weekends around NZ to varying degrees. It was rather a contrast for me coming back from London - where you know that there are some very mad, bad people around yet simultaneously the bulk of the night-life doesn't actually seem as implicitly menacing. In London you need to keep a close eye on the crazies, but at times in parts of NZ it seems like you need to keep an eye on everybody. I'm not sure that's preferable.
-
My take is simply that far too much funding and attention is given to matters of promotion and distribution yet virtually zero to the fact that it's nigh on impossible to learn your craft to a world-class level in NZ as a musician. The teachers aren't there. The paid gigs to keep you going while you cut your teeth aren't there. It's very unlikely that a country unable to produce world-class musicians is going to be able to produce a consistent stream of world class music, regardless of how heavily its pop culture is hyped.
NZ music at its best and most successful is Peter Jackson sans 20 years of professional development, back when he made Bad Taste - a labour of love and inspiration that shines through a lack of experience and technical background, not to mention world-class experienced people working with him. The reason NZ music can't make the next step that Jackson made and actually achieve world class success is all because of structural problems that are entirely fixable if people want to take their eye off the pop culture ball and start thinking about music and the fact that as well as being pop culture it's also a very high-level skill that needs to be developed with education and practical experience.
-
The artists to watch are doing quirky live to air shows on the B-Net, or sitting at home like Greg Churchill..who is putting vocals on his tracks for his UK labels, and had a UK top 100 single, but has always been turned down by NZOA.
But that still doesn't come close to the fact that NZ has world-class professionals who're both independently creating and working around the international industry creating both artistically lauded and commercially enormous pieces of cinema. Not only that, it's grown an industry that has made a great case for bringing overseas work to NZ because we have the professional infrastructure and skills to support it. It doesn't, for the most part, produce world-class musicians of any description. At best it seems to produce one-hit-wonder pop cultural drops in the international ocean or cult-within-a-cult invisible fan bases.
As an example, I managed to rent "The quiet earth" once in a small-town video library in Yorkshire. I doubt there was a single NZ CD available to buy within a hundred miles at the time, and that's being charitable.
-
I have a question.
Why do we think that NZ can produce world-class examples of both artistic and commercial success in the film industry which is not replicated in music?
-
Speaking from the perspective of somebody who trained as a musician in the UK and went through the whole process of having the idea of riches, fame and "the scene" drummed out of my head by teachers who actually made a living from playing, I'd just like to point out that there's actually a good reason for musicians to complain about the way "New Zealand music" is funded.
The emphasis in terms of funding delivery seems to be supporting an industry and a popular culture - not musical validity or the ability for a musician to actually be able to make a living. Working conditions for musicians who actually want to get paid in this country are abominable. The union is - last time I checked - one guy who works from home under the umbrella of a fruit packing union or something, and he mostly sells overpriced insurance that you can get cheaper in the form of a business policy anyway. Some friends of mine in Auckland recently had a gig where an audience member smashed several thousand dollars worth of gear, and then at the end of the night the venue owner refused to pay them for the gig until they re-arranged his bar furniture for him. I've known professional, working musicians from the UK come out here and then give up and go home because the money is so poor - there's a pervasive attitude nearly everywhere that, y'know, musicians should love music so much they want to work for free.
That's not the case overseas. Hell, even the bands that get famous here don't get decent compensation for it. A brother of a friend of mine made it big a few years back. I won't name the band. They won awards, were up on the stage at the big expensive ceremonies with all the names hobnobbing... had #1 singles... and then a year or two later the entire band was living in his mum's spare room because they were too broke to live elsewhere unless they gave up playing.
Thanks to a concerted effort and a lot of public spending there is now a music industry in NZ, but I'm not convinced it does anything else than sweats musicians too bloody-minded or sub-par to leave the country so that somebody else can get the money.
Not that any of that stops people playing, of course, which is perhaps the problem.
-
I haven't seen a dog on P, but I've heard about it from drug squad police at conferences.
OK, hands up who was thinking of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas at this point?
-
Manakura, I'd be all in favour of more female or, indeed, non-white-boy voices basically everywhere I hang out on the internet - but with that said, I'm not sure that specifically asking blogs to include more female or minority-sourced comment is going to yield the best results.
As an analogy, I play the drums. New Zealand had, for a while, a drum magazine run out of Wellington called Drum Connexions, for which I wrote a couple of articles. It was well intended, and edited by a nice lady called Bron who lived over in Wainui with her son, who's a killer drummer. One of the things the magazine would do every month was feature a piece on a female New Zealand drummer, who'd invariably get stuck in a little photo box-out on the cover with the caption "You go girl!" and a first name.
In theory, that's very nice - I mean, I'd love to see more women playing the drums. There's a distinct lack of them, and there's good reason for it: a lot of gender discrimination from musicians, a lack of teachers who're really inclined to push the girls towards the instrument, a lack of female role models on the instrument, peer pressure from other girls who don't get why they'd want to play a "Boy's instrument" etc. There's Meg White, but she can't play. And there's amazing players like Terri Lyne Carrington or Susie Ibarra - but no teenage girls have even heard of them, because they play jazz.
Combine that with the fact that even if you include the boys NZ isn't exactly overflowing with world-class drummers and the result was something I always saw as extremely patronising and hard to look at, albeit unintentionally - some poor teenage girl getting an interview and photo on the cover of a magazine next to a top-tier player like Steve Smith, yet obviously being utterly clueless and not knowing how to hold her sticks. That does nothing for girls in drumming, good intentions aside - if nothing else, it just re-enforces existing stereotypes about girls and drumming.
So while more content from women or minorities is wonderful in my book, I don't think you can just insist on an equal quantity and hope that it'll all work itself out - it has to come to whoever is going to publish it at a comparable level of quality. Different is good, but worse isn't. So while emailing Russell and asking for more french-Canadian black islamic lesbian chinese acrobat blogs might strike a theoretical blow for equality, if nobody fitting the demographic is offering him any decent content I don't think it's going to do much that's actually positive. And you reckon he wouldn't publish it if it were on offer?
-
I've been a bit left behind by this thread as I've been - shock horror - working at work instead of writing at work (I know, curse my name) but I'd just like to chip in belatedly and thank Deborah for the post that made this entire blog entry/thread worth its weight in... uh... magnetic storage. If that was a blog posting I would have been motivated to sign up an account to agree with it. And hey, since I've already signed up, why not try to knock it out in terms of word count?
Some points that have been knocking around my head at work today after reading this in the morning:
The Kathy Sierra fiasco was something that was born out of part of what is easily referred to as the geek community. As somebody who, by nature if not background, fits the profile of a geek very well I'd maybe like to attempt to try to connect some threads of discussion together. Keep in mind as I write this that my qualifications consist:
1) GCSE Maths taken when I was 14.
2) A qualification in hitting inanimate objects with pieces of wood.... therefore anything I say is derived from personal experience rather than academic study.
Deborah, you observe that men are - speaking in generalisations - often better at single-minded focus in their activities than women. That's my experience too, and I'd argue that it cuts both ways - as well as being a gift if you want to get something involved done, it's also a curse in that it is (in extreme forms) rather socially retarded and, emotionally speaking, detrimental to staying particularly healthy.
Geeks are really the ultimate example of this. They (And I'm partially speaking of myself here, but also not) can pull of some of the most impressive feats of intellectual focus and specialisation out there, yet this trait is frequently inversely proportional to their ability to actually deal with people. But that's not to say that they're emotionally stunted and don't feel emotions. They just get them from different sources. More on this in a sec.
Deborah talks in her post about considering male and female differences as being of, in effect, different contributions of equal value. That's something I tend to believe in quite fervently. I'm going to speak generally for a second, and of course there are many exceptions in both directions. Women, in my experience, often offer more in respect to building emotionally sound, healthy environments for themselves and those around them as part and parcel of whatever they decide to do with their lives. Men perhaps offer more in the ability to go way, way off the deep end in focusing on something to get it done - frequently way beyond any actual benefit to themselves that achievement might conceivably provide.
And that's the rub. Geeks (for lack of a better word) do very clever things like write books like "The C Programming Language" - which is a fantastic bit of writing, if you're skewed sufficiently geekward to read it. If you're not, it'll probably seem dry as a fossilised dog turd. They don't do this because it gives them geekMana Points++; they do it because it makes them feel a genuine emotional sense of reward. As such, what seems totally uncontroversial and benign to what I'll describe for convenience as a normal human being might seem incredibly emotionally important to a geek.
Somebody earlier made a point that Kathy Sierra wasn't writing about anything controversial - y'know, just technology. If you hang around the "right" (or wrong, depending on perspective) parts of the internet you'd be well aware that there are few topics more controversial to geeks than technology. After all, I doubt there's few non-geeks who'd consider the difference between a tab and a space a good reason for even tongue-in-cheek references to capital punishment. The amount of sheer vitriol that is exchanged over what seems like (rather, is) absolutely trivial minutiae in the geek world is incredible. But it's part and parcel of the same emotional responses that make the whole state of being possible.
None of that is, of course, any excuse for what happened to Kathy Sierra - any more than suggesting that metal fans are passionate about their music is an excuse for what happened to Dimebag Darryl. But I'd suggest both are certainly explainable as events born from a largely male tendency to go way, way off the deep end emotionally when a particular topic grips their attention for a bit too long - and particularly when they're left in isolation, largely in communities of other males who consider similarly trivial matters equally emotionally intense.
There has been linked mention elsewhere of, in effect, a deep well of misogynistic behavior in the online geek world. To an extent this is true, but in all honesty I wouldn't describe it as worse or arguably even as bad as many other predominantly male environments. It's just that in the absence of women - and one problem that more extreme geeks do tend to have in life is an absence of women - myths and/or obsessions about them tend to spring up to replace the reality. Combine that with a distinct lack of social graces and... yes... see results on display in many places online.
In tandem, a tendency towards very obsessive emotional reactions to techie minutiae and a really rather poor understanding of what women are like in real life is undoubtedly a nasty combo to find yourself on the wrong end of. But I'd argue that socially there are better avenues to persue to "taming" of the geek community than trying to view it as an education or solidarity/community response issue alone. The problem is that the internet tends to allow people to group in situations that they feel comfortable with. So while most of us feel comfortable at Public Address, I doubt few of the commenters at Little Green Footballs would find it too accommodating.
The "We need to start calling them out!" argument is, in real life, a damn good one. After all, in reality it's a lot harder to build entirely homogeneous communities - it's the differences between people that keep people accepting of difference, because being intolerant of it results in you being shunned to a degree that you start getting the message. Unless you're rather thick, of course, in which case you go and join a political group for people who fear difference.
But I'm not convinced that merely calling people out, online, is going to do a whole lot of good. They'll just find themselves a new home with people they feel comfortable around, who don't say scary distracting things like "You're not behaving correctly". They're not, of course, but that's largely irrelevant if they're in a group that accepts the same standard of behavior. Look at certain other blog comments sections for an illustration: you can try calling people out if you like, but you'll probably find yourself attacked en-masse by a bunch of people who find safety in numbers.
So what's the solution? I don't have a single one to offer. I do have a couple of thoughts, however:
1) When you go places reliably occupied by obsessives, it's usually not a good idea to use your real name and traceable contact details unless you can see concrete benefit in doing so from the outset. It's easier to start a blog under a pseudonym and then unmask yourself later if you feel comfortable than to do the reverse. This isn't about right and wrong, it's just the same kind of pragmatism that suggests it's a good idea not to walk too close to strangers in dark secluded places when you're out at night.
2) Recognising that communities of male obsessives aren't necessarily malicious is helpful. Generally they're not - few (if any) geeks are sitting out there plotting the enslavement of womenkind, they're typically more interested in valid XHTML+CSS or whether their data structures cause unnecessary memory overhead inside the inner loop. Engagement is probably a better tactic than confrontation. I'm saying that as somebody with rather severe geek tendencies that are held in check by a variety of more human activities by a lot of non-geek people around me. Left to my own devices I can find one topic an endless source of deeply emotionally involving interest - as you can tell by the stupendous length of this post.
But I'm not left to my own devices, because of situations arrived at both accidentally and deliberately. For example, soon my delightful better half will be home, and she'll say something like "Jesus christ, did you write all that?" and look at me in slightly worried dismay. And I'll react to that and knock it off. Because let's face it, there's really very little actual real return beyond obsessive interest in these discussion threads and endless online political conversations either. Maybe that's why they're usually full of boys?