Three years on - post EQ. A photo-essay.

Tomorrow we commemorate three years since the big earthquake that changed Christchurch and our lives.

I took a walk around my neighbourhood. These are photos I took on the way. I started with a house on its own, abandoned, next to Avonside Girls High School. Then empty sections, which have been sown in grass and now look like park land. Then some of the houses around the Avon River, in River Road. I edged through the barriers and photographed inside an abandoned house, a rather grand old place that looked OK on the outside but was very damaged inside. Then an old weatherboard house that had been divided into flats, where I went around the back and found my way into one of the kitchens. I am unsure whether the mess I photographed was left by people who just abandoned their flat in a hurry, or by squatters. I am moved by the thought of people fleeing, leaving behind their possessions. There are a few places like that in our neighbourhood. Piles of possessions on abandoned lawns, people still living in caravans and sheds. The next photos are of the grounds of the Church of the Most Holy Trinity Avonside, which I photographed in picturesque ruins some months after the earthquake destroyed it. Now there is lawn, and the cemetery remains, and some of the church rests on the lawn. And finally a sign that indicates something about life on the East side of Christchurch. Our roads are still very damaged and driving remains an adventure. When we find a smooth patch of road we make jokes about it.

SELENTROPY - FOR PELLE

SELENTROPY - FOR PELLE

He always had trouble bleeding.

He said that it was too cold, and the blood kept clotting.
In the Quran it says that God created humans from clots of blood.
Maybe all we are is moving clots.

It took some years opening veins and even arteries,
And in the end a bullet to his head.

I think it no coincidence that he did it in the Spring.
He spent much of the Winter under the trees, and the rest of it
Following the deep pull of the freezing moon.
Then, when the Northern Spring burst its bonds, and everything thawed and woke and rose and steamed and was loosing and losing itself....

Me? I'm OK. It's what I do, listen to the dead.

What would I have done for him?
This awkward, unhuman boy.
Called his mom.
Got him to a hospital.
Taught him to dance.
Told him not to take it all so damn literally, that even nihilism contains nothing, it is all a metaphor.
Warmed him up so he could actually eat.
Rubbed his arms.
Got the circulation going.
Got the blood flowing.

Oh.
I see.
We are back to blood again.

It was only being Dead that kept him alive.


Per Yngwe 'Dead' Ohlin (Pelle)
16.1.69 - 8.4.91

i made you a goat, but i eated it - on the glories of Black Metal

Young people can be so judgmental.

Recently a young man told me that he smokes weed in the same way that I would have a cup of tea in my conservatory. Whoah! I have a conservatory? Who knew?

The other night I was asking another young man about his t shirt. I am a terror for reading t shirts. Someone should slap me for peering myopically at people's chests. He smiled at me in a kindly fashion and said 'Oh, it's a noisy band'.

Well. I have been listening to a bit of black metal lately and I knew that Immortal, the band on his t shirt, hail from Norway and do very stylish corpse paint, and I have wandered around some of their stuff. But it was not the time to put the young man in his place, so I did not.

I can actually live without Immortal. I currently cannot live without their some of their Scandinavian counterparts Mayhem and Bathory, which are currently my all time favorite bands.

Mayhem is deservedly legendary and their music is so sonically powerful that anything else heard afterwards is so vanilla I just want to punch someone's lights out. Their best known track 'The Freezing Moon', inspired by high summer in Norway, is a simple yet densely layered piece that is so heavy it is almost conceptual, a soundscape suited to the ambience of, say, an oubliette. The vocals, by Per 'Dead' Ohlin, who is by the way very extremely dead, hit this Tuvan throat singing thing at times. It's an aural assault of the first magnitude.

Metal is divided into genres. And sub genres. And sub sub sub genres and even subbier genres and even those within the same genre accuse each other of not being tru to the kvlt and in the end all you have is two skinny guys from Bergen throwing pig's heads at each other and calling each other posers.*

I came to black metal via the more cheerful genres of extreme metal, folk metal, pagan metal, and viking metal, although all of these labels are hotly contested, and finely critiqued, like this: No way shit head that is so not grindcore I don't hear any core whaddya mean core you total fucktard if you don't  like what I say you can just fuck off from here you faggot no you're a faggot no you are.** Anyway my two all time favorite Scandinavian folk/pagan/whatever bands are TrollFest, who are from Norway but sing in their native Swedish and have made four whole albums about trolls, and Finntroll, who are from Norway but sing in their native Swedish and have made four whole albums about trolls. Korpiklaani, from Finland, are capable of occasional yoiking and have made four whole albums about booze.  Eleuvite sing in reconstructed ancient Gaulish and have about nine members because the job of playing the hurdy gurdy (a cross between a piano and a coffee grinder) is so rigorous it needs to be rostered. They have made four albums about how the Romans burned down their village. Gorgoroth, from Norway, and the truest blackest metal ever, were fronted by the extaordinary Gaahl. Here is a picture of Gaahl.

You will see he has a porcupine clamped to his arm. This is because porcupines are sacred to Satan.** Gorgoroth is very heavy on the Satanism. You have to be pretty committed to dress like this. It makes it really awkward to get onto a bus, for example. Gaahl is an interesting chap. One of his stretches in prison was for torturing a guy by, among other things, bleeding him into a Yahtzee cup. Yahtzee is also sacred to Satan*** Despite his reputation, Gaahl was voted Bergen's Gay Man of 2011. This is true. Gorgoroth, of course, sing in Orcish.

 Black and black-ish metal is best sung in foreign, like opera. In fact black metal has a lot in common with opera. Both are grandiose and theatrical and atavistic and daft, at their best. Both are best when they are incomprehensible. I mean, ups to John Adams for writing Nixon in China and all that, but, well, damn. Opera is best in foreign. This is because lyrics in opera are like this:

My heart
My heart
It hurts
My heart
Oh my heart
It hurts
My heart

And metal is best in foreign because it has some of the worst lyrics since Marc Bolan.# Here, for example is a track I admit I have actually heard, from German (not black) metal band Majesty:

THUNDER RIDER

Keeper of the sacred oath, defender of the damned
Once born as a thunder child, now you're a stronger man
Riding on a horse of steel up in the hailing storm
Descendent of the universe the mighty lord reborn.

Chorus

Thunder rider
You are flying in the wind
Thunder rider
Bring us hope and clear our sins
You are young you are free
You're the son of destiny
Thunder rider
We all believe.....

Dearie, dearie me. I promise you that is not a parody, and I did not write this. You can read lyrics on Darklyrics.com and you may wish to do so if you think you have a long, long time to live.

I am not sure why I have developed a liking for Scandinavian metal at my age. Perhaps I just like being roared at by shirtless young men with long blond dreadlocks. And the fact that this is the least hip music imaginable. And it cheers me strangely - a couple of tracks from Darkthrone's Under a Funeral Moon and I have arisen from my torpor and made dinner and baked a pie.

There are lots of good links I could give you. The Uncyclopedia's parody articles about Black Metal and Mayhem are funny as hell, (or Helvete haha), but you need to know a bit about it to get the in jokes. Black metal is inherently very amusing when it does not involve burning churches or making necklaces out of the skulls of dead band members.* There are several in jokes in this post which you will not get at all because you are all merely posers.

I will however link to this, which is Finntroll's awesomely fun 'Trollhammeren'. It is from a whole album about trolls:

https://www.google.co.nz/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=&oq=youtube+finntroll+t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ACEW_en___NZ410&q=youtube+finntroll+trollhammaren&gs_l=hp..0.0j0i22i30.0.0.5.5592954...........0.dO64fZElxO4#

*This actually has happened, I'm afraid.

**There is an internet meme that counts the number of steps in any online argument, towards one person referring to another as being Hitler or a Nazi, or being like Hitler or Nazis. In the case of the black metallers, there is a similar count towards one person calling the other a faggot. The answer is always two.+

+Black metal is avowedly homophobic. However it does have a place for women. They make quite good occasional tables.

** There is a South Park episode about  this, for enhanced credibility.

 *** Well, somebody must play Yahtzee. Who do you know who plays Yahtzee? No one, right. I guess only Satanists play Yahtzee. What would i know, scriptural exegesis was never my strong point and so i am wickedly making up theology as i go along. Hail Yahtzee! Hail Gaahl! Hail Erithizon Dorsat!!!#

#This is the Latin term for the porcupine. Black metallers like Latin.

##'Girl I'm just a jeepster for your love'. The prosecution rests.

Fuckbuddy

My new iPhone 5C has made portable internet access so much easier, and yet it has its risks. I discovered this recently when innocently browsing late at night in bed.

Somehow I ended up on a site that told me that hundreds of women whom I knew, in my town, wanted to be my fuckbuddy.

Fuckbuddy is not a term that is in my active vocabulary. I am not sure what it is. I supposed it is one of those things the young people do nowadays, such as having friends with benefits or fedoras or what have you.

Naturally I was alarmed. I tried to get out of the site. All I got was the next screen, which contained a gif of a young woman performing what the police call an indecent act, on what was clearly a man. Parenthetically, I think that gifs are perfect for porn. Porn is so repetitive after all.

Further alarmed, I tried to get out again, but all I could do was shuttle between the two offending screens. I turned the whole thing off and on, and there it was again.  The hundreds of women. The indecent act. Damn.

The page told me that all I needed to do was answer three simple questions and I could go onto the site proper. I figured I could work this to my advantage. I would answer the questions wrong, and get kicked off the site. The first question was - Are you over 25? I answered no. The second question was - Have you ever had an STD? I answered yes. The third question was - Are you prepared to use a condom? I answered no. The page thought about all of this for a minute and then announced gleefully: Congratulations! You are eligible to join this site! 9,463 women are waiting to be your fuckbuddy!!!

At this point scepticism set it. I am not good at numbers, but I don't think I even know 9,463 women let alone ones in my town who are on porn sites. I suspect they are exaggerating. I wonder if they mean the number 9,463 as a sort of mythical device - the way large numbers are used in the Bible to indicate - well, large numbers. Like it says people lived for 900 years when actually they just meant 'a really really long time'. Or the army had 10,000 soldiers when really they just mean 'a lot of mean dudes'. Or, perhaps the number 9,463 is numerologically significant? Perhaps it indicates great sexual prowess in the ancient scriptures? Like the number of concubines of the legendary emperor Creosote?9,463 breaks down to 22 which breaks down to 4 - perhaps it refers to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of whom was a noted sex fiend, or Ovid's four Ages of Civilisation, or even the four pleasures of Omar Khayyam, which are less exciting than they seem. Or the four types of caviar.

None of these ideas flashed through my mind as I desperately tried to get out of the site. In the end I just sort of buried it. I found a way of getting to other sites I had meant to be on, before the fuckbuddy one, and I buried the offending site behind them all. Whew. Respectability restored, I turned the light off.

Oh, and a message to the 9,463 women out there - it's all right. I know that you don't really want to be my fuckbuddy and I don't want to be yours either.

Obituary

My little dog Tigger Ratbane, died on Wednesday.

He would have been 15 in February. He had several complicated medical problems, but what got him in the end was an unexpected and very fast growing tumour.

I said at the end of his life he was held together with love, and I meant it almost literally. The week before he died he was entertaining an elderly woman with dementia. He still liked to trot around the block and sniff and pee, and he was still mostly cheerful, but he was tired.

Today I miss him hugely. All the places we walked, and I would not have known about otherwise. Our daily routine, to which he was always faithful, right down to the little piece of cheese he got before he went to bed in his box. There are now many little spaces in my day, and some big ones.

Love is to our spiritual world as gravity is to the physical. It holds the planets in their courses. It binds us to the real earth, and lets us move in our destinies. I cannot say more about love. Language fails me here.

I can say something about how it is to love and be loved by someone from another species. This is remarkable, and yet it happens in households all over the world, and has done since the first brave children bonded with the first clever wolf puppies. What foresight. I still have no idea how we communicate across species - and yet I can still say that Tigger and I loved each other.

I have always been wary of anthropomorphism. I never liked being called 'Mummy' regarding the animals in my household, because I did not give birth to them. They are not children. They are not to be treated like human children, because that demeans them.

We demand contradictory things of animals. We want them to be like us, so we can relate to them and empathise with them. We say 'The chimpanzee is sitting like that because she is sad', or 'The sparrow is eating his tea'. Thus we ascribe human qualities to them. We also want them to be different from us, in several ways. Better than us, so we can aspire to qualities we think of as noble. We say, 'Animals would never be so cruel'. Lesser than us, so we can eat them or exploit them. We then other them - we say 'It's OK they don't feel things like we do'. All of these attitudes somehow exist concurrently, often within the same person. All of them might for all we know be incredibly wrong. Our relationship with animals is complex and more fraught than we think, and I suspect it is a new frontier in the area of civil rights and social inclusiveness.

It is this contradictory sameness and difference that backgrounds my wonder at how Tigger and I communicated. Maybe I am incredibly wrong, but I do feel he loved and was loved, and that love was his purpose. He came from love and he goes to love.

Now he is buried in our yard, wrapped in a linen shroud and facing Mecca. He had a kind of Muslim funeral; I chanted a prayer in Arabic for him. This was my idea of a theological joke. All animals are Muslims, as I have said in an earlier post. Islam means submission and animals, who do not have free will in Islam, thus submit naturally to the will of God. But in Islamic lore only one dog, the dog who guarded the Seven Sleepers goes to heaven. My joke is that Tigger gets to be the second dog.

Tigger Ratbane aka the Tiny Taco Terrier.
20.2.99 - 16.12.2013

Good Dog.

Two cows enter. One cow leaves.

The sign said, car park, two hours. A bit longer than the walk up the valley, but probably a better view. I decided to take it.

Up on the tablelands, tussock, tall Californian thistles, cow pats the size of satellite dishes, should have alerted me to what came next. But they were up the hill a little and I didn't see them until I was close enough to be in their space.

Cows. Great big fucking big huge cows. They were so big they loomed. They were big and black and looming. Did I explain that they were, like, really big?

One of the more daffy projects of Nazi Germany was the attempt to back breed aurochsen. Aurochsen were giant cows with great sweeping horns. They went extinct in the seventeenth century. The Heck brothers, encouraged by Goering, attempted to back breed the largest and most primitive cattle to get something like an aurochs. Goering had the idea of turning eastern Europe into his own private hunting ground. There are still faux aurochsen around, called Heck cattle. And a more recent attempt, called TaurOs, is using our new knowledge of genetics. Don't quite know why they want to back breed aurochsen, really. Goering saw the aurochs as a symbol of Teutonic might. Perhaps we could back breed something a bit less culturally laden - perhaps dire wolves or - wow - giant sloths! That would be cool.

Anyway these big huge looming cows seemed as big as Heck cattle.

I am a city girl. Well, OK, I come from a little town you've probably never heard of, but I live in a city of sorts and my idea of the countryside is it's the stuff that happens between cities. I like nature. I like walks in native forests. My idea of nature is bellbirds and faeries. I can handle the faeries. As I've said before, my Weird Shit-o-meter goes up to 11. Not so sure about the big huge looming cows though. Proceed with caution, I figured. After all, they are herbivores. They eat grass, for pity's sake. I just hope someone has remind them of that recently.

Then I noticed they were steeren. I am not sure of the plural for steer, but I figure steeren is a good word, makes them sound bigger and fiercer than steers, like aurochsen which is the plural for aurochs. So they were young guy cattle and they were a bit full of themselves that day.

Some of them were sort of bouncing on all legs and flicking their tails. Then one of them wound it up a bit. He started rocking forward and aft, tossing his head. Then he cantered off down the hill and just casually shoulder barged another steer.

That steer lowered his head and said, like, 'Listen, shithead. Do that again and we throw down'.

The first steer said 'Yeah well bring it, motherfucker!'

The rest of the steeren immediately gathered around. Gosh, it was like primary school all over again, when everyone rushes over and shouts 'Fight! fight! fight!'. The air was full of steerosterone. Whoah! Here I was in the bovine version of Thunderdome. Two cows enter! One cow leaves! The steeren raised their heads and mooed. They flanked each other and pawed the earth. They lay their heads along each others backs and rose up on each other in a blurred mix of fighting, mating and playing. Touch! Pause! Engage!

Then they noticed me.

I didn't care if they were herbivores. Neither the tall Californian thistles nor the cow pats the size of satellite dishes stopped me until I was over the stile and away. As I headed back down the valley I could hear the terrifying din of the steeren, echoing from the Thunderdome, calling to their fellows each to each about the little puny human that got away.

Eastgate is probably Christchurch's most low-rent shopping mall, and it is my local. I make jokes about shopping in Linwood, where people wear hoodies and pyjama bottoms to the mall. But at Eastgate it is safe to be obese, or very old, or Samoan. You don't have to move very fast. It is OK to hang around for a while, and it is small enough for the shop keepers to know each other and have some collegiality. There are few big stores and big names, apart from McDonalds, and no flash brands. You don't see Gucci, or Merrill, or Bose.

Even here the world of wealth is on display. You can buy a diamond ring, or a pot of $100 face cream. You can spend a couple of hundred dollars on clothes without trying.

I figure most of this is beyond many of the people who shop there.

This week a report was issued about monitoring child poverty in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Its authors are the Children's Commissioner, the JR McKenzie Trust, and Otago University. They crunched the numbers themselves, because they were concerned about the government's apparent lack of interest in social research. Their findings have been widely reported even in mainstream media.

265,000 children, or 25% of the child population, live in poverty. 180,000 go without basic necessities. 10% live at the hardest end. 3 in 5 children living in poverty will live this way for many years. The epidemiologists who did the research talked about the effect of this on the health system. The Children's Commissioner talked about how this affects the economy and the social climate. Here in New Zealand, we have a large body of academics and public servants who are increasingly at odds with government policy, and who are now willing to appear partisan, to make large statements about obvious growing gap between rich and poor.

I am still surprised at the reactions of many ordinary people to this report, as well as ongoing investigations by the Campbell Live TV programme. There seem to be two main strands of thought. One says that, well, we work hard and we are poor too. Fair enough. The other says that the poor are at fault. They should have fewer children. They should not eat junk food. They are probably addicts. . They exploit the benefit systems and perpetuate a cycle of dependence and ignorance. They spend their money on TVs and Playstations instead of food.

I am of the generation that had state help. I was raised partly in social housing. I was unemployed a lot during my youth, and managed on welfare benefits without hardship. I was given a temporary paid job at the university, and thought maybe I was brainy enough to study. I did two degrees paid for by the state, and worked part time enough to manage in comfort. Once I got a grown up job, the state funded a cheap loan into my first house. We raised our child on mostly one income. We are not one-above-average-income-per-person rich but damn well rich enough . And lucky enough to be borne aloft by the last bright bubble of the welfare state for which New Zealand was once famous. I am not stupid with money but I am not smart either. I don't have to be. I have the luxury of being able to think about other things.

Poverty in New Zealand is about food and shelter and warmth and health. It is also about relative inclusiveness and being able to participate in society and have some choices. When you are very poor, you can't think about much else. Financial stress overwhelms you. You can't do the math because it doesn't add up. There is no budget advice to give. Any small mistake follows you for ever. You can't afford to register your car, so you get fines which turn into debts that criminalise you. Your cell phone broke and you can't afford a new one, so they can't contact you and you don't know about the appointment and they cut your benefit. For the lack of the nail, the shoe was lost, and so on.

Being poor, especially if you are on welfare, is a great opportunity to practise the great virtues. You are expected to manage the Byzantine labyrinth that is the welfare system with perseverance and determination. You are expected to wait for hours with dignity and patience. You are expected to be scrupulously honest and trustworthy if you want to retain your benefit payments. And always, always, you must exercise the virtues of self discipline and restraint. To survive at welfare level, whether or not you are in paid work, you must never buy ice cream, or take a holiday, or go to a movie, or buy that dress. Never make an impulsive purchase. Never get ripped off. Never say, oh sod it, let's just do it. And you must be aware that the minutiae of your lives are being monitored, so you must always act with care and temperance, in case you are discovered thinking or acting on something else other than the whimsical demands of the welfare system.

I wish I could always be so virtuous. I confess I have been known to lose my temper and cry. I have lacked tolerance in dealing with organisations, especially when I have been tired or stressed. I have made unwise purchases. I have bought stupid shit on impulse and regretted it. Things even stupider than a kangaroo onesie!  And I confess, there have been times I have eaten too much.

Not that anybody minds or even notices. The welfare system does not mind if I smoke weed or sleep with whole football teams. I am rich enough to avoid the benefit system and free to indulge as is my libertarian right. As long as I consume I have done my civic duty.
.
If I criticised people for being poor I would be holding them to moral standards greater than to which I have achieved. This is the other side of the argument about the morals and values of the poor. Our Prime Minister described this society as 'aspirational'. I think he means the poor should aspire to the values of the rich. But the rich don't need to be morally virtuous. If we want to acquire virtue, perhaps we should look to our expectations of those 'least' in our world.