Speaker by Various Artists

Jurassic 5 are tagged as being hiphop revivalists, recalling the party era of rap. They ditched that notion midway thru their show at the St James with a song introduced as "this is about the war in Iraq", followed by the group's four MCs raising their middle finger in the air while rapping the lyric "Well, I’m not hesitant in saying truck the President", cept they used another word that sounds like truck, but starts with F. You get the picture.

The J 5 took their sweet time getting here - originally scheduled to play here last October, they opted for more Australian dates instead. Now they made it, and the appreciative crowd is very happy to see them.

According to the NZ Herald's Rebecca Barry, the gig started with warmup sets from Scribe and "a duo who strapped their turntables and keyboards to their bodies and played them as though they were a rock band." Um, no. What really happened was this. DJ Manuel Bundy played a few tunes, local MC Tha Feelstyle delivered a brief set (I didn’t make it in time to catch this, but have heard a few tunes on the radio - watch out for his album, due out in a few months, it will knock heads and blow minds) and then Scribe did a subdued set. His voice was a little lacking in power, looked like he might’ve been a bit crook. He was followed by Manuel Bundy, then Jurassic 5 strolled onstage.

They ripped thru half a dozen songs, then the 4 MCs (Chali 2na, Akil, Zaakir, Marc 7) left the stage and had a breather, while DJs Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist had some fun. Cut Chemist scratched away on the turntables, while Nu-Mark jumped on a drumkit and banged out a beat. Then Nu-Mark banged out a tune on a bunch of kid's music blocks, which was pretty twisted. For their final trick, Cut strapped on a portable turntable while Nu-Mark had a drum machine round his neck, and they grooved away down front (I think this is 'the duo' that Barry was referring to). If she arrived at this point, she would’ve also missed Nu-Mark sitting at a school desk, banging away at sample pads stuck to its surface, triggering a funky rhythm. J5 must be the only touring act in the world that include a beaten up old school desk in their road kit.

The crowd response was dynamite. The energy from the stage was well matched by the enthusiastic audience, and J5 namechecked Scribe, telling us that we should go out and buy his album, if we didn’t have it already – "support your own". Scribe joined the group later for a freestyle. Chali 2na pointed at his throat while Scribe was rapping, suggesting the dude had a sore throat. He’s a trooper tho.

The J5 live experience is one tight machine, well-practised stage moves, but not too many hiphop clichés, and it delivers the goods. If you didn’t smile at least once during this show, you had a face made of stone. When the show finished, they invited the crowd down to the official afterparty at Fu Bar with DJ Nu-Mark playing, then casually strolled offstage, put down their mics, and the MCs walked to the front, shaking hands and signing autographs. Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist packed up their record bags and left the stage, but came back out to meet and greet their fans, Chali 2na signing someone’s shoe! A charmingly low key end to a warm, genuine show. I headed off to the Fu Bar, and partied with Nu-Mark til the break of dawn – well, they did invite us, and it would’ve been rude not to go - and then walked home, showered, and went to work. Had a nap under my desk, woke up, wrote this, and went back to sleep. Wake me at 5. Later.

Peter McLennan blogs regularly at Weapons of Mass Distraction.

The sea - it's been rightly said - is one hell of a place. I can vouch for this, I've been there and seen it. Proverbially strange. It's a good thing. One of the good things about the sea is fish. One of the bad things about the sea is the removal of fish. Not just fish either, but entire eco systems, by a Quota Management System compliant fishing company near you.

To use the scatologically curious parlance of the industry, it's all about bottom trawling.
This is pretty simple to explain. A lot of stuff grows on the ocean floor. The stuff attracts fish. To catch the fish, you therefore drag a bloody big, bloody heavy net across the ocean floor, and catch the stuff as well.

Trouble is, nobody knows exactly what the stuff consists of. People like Steve O'Shea probably have a better idea than most, so I asked him. One thing that we do know is down there is coral. Not like the little white worm your aunt brought back on a wee plinth from Fiji, but big stuff, up to two metres high, which you can see by clicking on the image library button here, bottom row, centre.

Coral is a slow grower. To reach 2m, that coral was alive 500 years ago, and the coral bed itself could be as old as 2,000 years. You'll notice in the image link above that the coral has been hauled up from the depths. That's not because someone went down and got it. It's because they sent a net down to catch fish, and up it came. That, folks, is environmental destruction.

Greenpeace have been very big on this issue lately. Their campaign draws attention to the damage wrecked by bottom trawling on particular bits of the sea bed called seamounts: literally, mountains under the sea. These vary greatly in size, with some being thousands of miles long. There are scores of thousands of them in the various oceans, many in the Pacific, and hundreds within New Zealand's economic zone. And at least 80% of those, according to Greenpeace, have been trawled at some stage.

The significance of seamounts is that they are alive with biodiversity. Some researchers reckon that up to 15% of all species dwelling on volcanic seamounts are endemic, meaning they are more or less unique to that locality. "More or less" in this case meaning, as Steve put it, that "we found some incredible things, like corals up to a metre long off the west coast, and they were the same as some that were found in Hawaii, but they don't turn up anywhere in between, or anywhere else." That they know of, at least. And that's the point.

Steve is also keen on the idea that this issue goes way beyond seamounts. Deep sea reefs and also the mid sea are equally poorly understood, and equally vulnerable to the destruction caused by commercial fishers.

Some more facts and figures: at typical bottom trawling depths, a 3mm veneer of sediment causes total annihilation of all species after just four days. Coral, sea-weed, crustaceans, everything. So what? Trawl nets stir up sediment. The sediment rises, drift and falls. At least some - if not heaps of it drifts outside the trawl path. Who knows how much? 3mm isn't much sediment.

Another: in the 1960s, 37% of sperm whale diet in the Tasman Sea consisted of commercially caught fish species, the rest was squid. Today, all they eat is squid. The world's second or third largest mammal is no contest for commercial fishing.

Most environmentalists are very, very unhappy about all of this, including 1,136 scientists from all over the world. Which reminds me, I've asked a few fishing companies what their view is, but they don't get back to me. Anyway, the fact is that commercial fishing is stripping away a natural resource fast, with little meaningful regulation. It's like mowing down a few acres of native forest in order to catch a few mutton birds.

The United Nations isn't exactly stoked about it either, and were apparently impressed when Greenpeace's Carmen Gravatt was beamed into an Oceans Committee meeting from the Rainbow Warrior II with footage of bottom trawling in action right behind her, just last month (New Zealand vessels, too). The goal for Greenpeace and a broad coalition of enviro-NGOs is a UN sanctioned moratorium on bottom trawling.

There's also an interesting and concise pdf report by Lisa Speer they tabled here and another by Matthew Gianni, clearly describing both the problem as well as the UN resolutions that mandate action here.

The argument for a moratorium on bottom trawling is that the practice is impacting on a natural resource, about which very little is known, without the faintest trace or the merest hint at anything like renewability or sustainability. The idea is that the industry pauses while the scientists get down there and check it out. Which, of course, goes down with industry like a cup of cold sick.

"Of course it does" says Dean Mercer, also of Greenpeace. "You only have to look at the driftnet moratorium in 1989. The moratorium was to take time to see if it could be done sustainably, and it was decided as a result that it was too destructive, and a total ban was necessary. That's obviously what the industry fears most." While he concedes there are probably "a few small guys out there still doing it," driftnet fishing is now largely a thing of the past.

The moratorium goes before the General Assembly in November. Which means that governments, including - and especially - ours, are thinking about whether to support it or not right now. On the one hand, an orange roughy industry worth $57m a year. On the other, environmental sustainability.

For my part, I can't understand how a so-called Quota Management System that enables entire fisheries to be bought and sold as nothing more nor less than capital property can possibly ensure sustainability. Fishers all claim that because they own the fishery, naturally they'd want to extend its utility as far as possible, but nothing could be less clear. Such a system does nothing to prevent a player from exploiting a fishery for all it's worth in a single season, if that's what the fisher wants.

I admit I'm not an expert on the QMS, but there's more evidence than I can cite that clearly proves that fisheries here and everywhere are declining, and fast. And as they continue to do so, that $57m will decline as well.

There would seem to be every reason to support the moratorium. The only reason not to would be because some fishermen would require - and deserve, say some folks at Greenpeace - compensation.

So, you can help our government make up its mind here and here (BTW: still waiting for someone to return www.govt.nz to the layout it had three years ago. It's still easier to search it from without it) . Underwater video of bottom trawling in action here.

The fishers say they are fishing sustainably. But they are alone in their opinion.

97% of the New Zealand orange roughy population has been fished. Tuna, that stuff in little round cans, is one of the great predators of the ocean. "Dolphin friendly" or not, the species is on its way out. 70% of New Zealand's fish stocks are over exploited.

The long and short of it is, until some independent studies can verify the impact of bottom trawling, it's just not safe to carry on fishing it.

I informed the dole people the other day that I was heading to Sydney to see someone about work and grabbed on of those $40 virginblue flights. Lets hear it for consumer capitalism! Instead of locking myself up in a gas-guzzler for ten hours, or being trapped on a train full of tourists for twelve, I was being taxied away to Redfern in the comfort of a mates Forrester in under two hours, including departure lounge time.

To be honest, if someone had offered me a job there I think I might have stayed, despite how gushy you’ve heard me be about Melbourne in the past. But, we’re putting that one down to ‘tourist glamour’, that feeling that anyplace new if the greatest city on Earth. It can actually be Beirut or Baghdad, but while that feeling of something fantastic lurking along the street waiting to be discovered lasts, you’ll never want to be anywhere else. It must be my ‘gypsy roots’, because there’s nothing like it. Must talk to my barber about that one. Being five degrees warmer than Melbourne helped too.

Tell you what, getting away for a mere three days was probably the best thing I could have done. Melbourne’s not exactly London, but it’s been pretty bleak around here for the past couple of months, and being on the dole doesn’t exactly help. In combination with sitting on my arse reading every day the lack of people contact can make a bloke crazy. If you’re reading this and thinking of writing a Ph.D., don’t. Have kids. They’ll take up less time and be more rewarding. And after two years without a significant holiday, I should know.

So, being on the dole and studying is like writing yourself a social death wish. Hence the trip to Sydney. At least the last time I was making trips to social welfare for free cash I could spend it on ‘cones’ to help pass the time. No longer but. And let me tell you, if I ever have to try and survive on other peoples money again, I’m going back to it.

I don’t know that the latest speak in New Zealand is, but over here the buzzword for dole bludgers seems to be, ‘mutual obligation’. The give you a few weeks of money gratis, and then the obligation thingo kicks in. Honestly? I don’t think it’s such a bad concept. Something has got to get some of the munters you see arsing around in the dole office out there doing something.

I shouldn’t be too harsh mind, some people are unemployed because they have serious problems and make them the kind of people you don’t want to be cooped up in an office/factory with. Having worked for almost two years as a dishwasher to fund the study, I can attest to the fact that some people are just plain ‘difficult’. Chefs being the obvious example.

The big problem with this free money thing though is dealing with the bureaucrats. What I remember most from being on the old rock and roll in New Zealand was the constant presence of social welfare. Even under the Aussie system the stream of paperwork and demands to attend various offices in person is a little daunting. As part of this mutual obligation thingo you’re required to apply for a certain number of jobs a week and get back to being a productive and useful member of society. Me? No problem with that. But the feeling that these people are constantly on your back would be a hassle if was a weeney bit more paranoid, or just plain stupid.

Maybe the only way to explain it is to use a phrase like police presence. If you don’t know what it’s like to notice that cops are around, you can’t really know what it’s like being “inside the machine”. But, that constant awareness of being monitored, even if you aren’t, isn’t so much scary as annoying. A better description perhaps is bumping into your ex’s friends. Smile, acknowledge, move on, and know they’ll be telling her that you’re in the pub instead of making money to get back into the game.

What’s really fortunate about my situation is that I don’t have to suffer the dependency problems that other do. At least I know that I will be able to do something when I finish the study. Even if I am the most highly qualified courier in the country. But, I also know that there are stacks of people for whom this dole business is something that the community owes them. For that I have no answer. But at least I figured out from experience that ‘lazy bugger’ and ‘unemployed’ aren’t the same thing.

To digress for a moment though, the friends I stayed with in Sydney and I had a realisation about our old mate John Howard. Now, this is straying into conspiracy theory, but its still rings strangely true. Lets face facts. Being a good religious type John hates horses hoofs. But, we think he tries to restrict them for a very good reason.

Gay people are fairly likely to be educated and have above average incomes (or so I’ve been told). Also, they only infrequently have or support children. This leads us to believe that, as a stereotype, gay people are likely to have high incomes, pay higher rates of taxation, but also have higher amounts of discretionary spending. What this means is that you have a ‘core’ or individuals within your society who will always be economic contributors in a consumption society like ours.

The phrase is I believe, ‘cash cow’. Think about it.

The Prime Minister said on b-rekky that “Creative NZ now know what it’s like to be accountable.” I don’t know if that is strictly correct. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the rest of the country is finding out what it’s like to try to measure a cultural institution with a calculator.

What is the problem? If you don’t yet know the identity of et al, then I’m not about to tell you. Who cares anyway? What are the implications?

Let’s look at it firstly from a nationalist perspective, which seems to be the one causing most of the grief. The PM says the artist should be able to turn up to Venice and explain their art. But why? If it’s the nation that is being represented at Venice, then what’s the artist got to do with it? I like to think of nationalist artists as a sort of conduit, surrendering themselves to the vagaries of their context, letting the cultural lifeblood of the nation to cascade right through them. Rather than criticising everybody in sight, why not praise the artist for having the humility – for once – to let the art speak for itself? And before you say it, remember it takes even more humility than that to let your art be spoken for by others. Try it.

By removing her own profile from that of the work, et al is being profoundly nationalistic, allowing her art to represent the nation directly, without the security net of his own identity to come between the sign and the signified. Besides, the biennale is – by all accounts – primarily a meeting of institutions, in which artists have a fool-like role: entertaining, reflecting, and momentarily basking in the curatorial glow sparked by the rubbing up of national discourses.

Perhaps the nationalists fear that the artist will misrepresent them. Reasonable fear to have. Everybody hates that. If the art misrepresents you, then it’s always good to have someone to blame for its existence. But in this instance, where the artist steps out, the institution rushes in, like gas in a vacuum. Presto: people are already blaming the arts council.

Perhaps there is a critical argument to sending this particular work. Not having seen the work, that’s not my call. But if you’re feeling misrepresented by a work of art, then the absence of the artist creates a whole new critical situation (well, not that new considering how well established the anonymous art tradition is now, with the likes of Budd Holdings, DM Portables, City Group, Lillian Budd, et al, to rattle off a few). With no appropriate object onto which to project rage, the offended now has to locate an alternative site for those feelings, and an alternative response as well. Incredible! A new location for thought, and a new thought process to go with it. In fact, nothing short of a new way of being. And that – I really hate to say it – is what art, and indeed nationhood, is all about (needless to say this will no doubt change).

That’s right. Nationhood is all about doing things different. Different from before. Different from elsewhere. Different from how we will do it again. Example: Lord of the Rings. Example: extreme right wing economics.

Et al understands that life is logo mad. Everything has to be a brand these days.

Which all reminds me to ask, is there a financial argument in this? Back when I did theatre, we used the 2 out of 3 ain’t bad approach to marketing: if the audience recognise two items amongst the name of the author, the cast or the title, we had the confidence to run with it. I don’t know if that’s how they still do it, but perhaps the only certainty about New Zealand’s current contribution to the Venice Biennale is that its got media interest. Is it a cultural cringe that makes us imagine that because we find it interesting, there’s no reason to suppose the punters will? Or worse, that because we do, they won’t?

It’s just that it seems to me that this is probably the most talked about Biennale ever. I know, because I’ve stopped hanging out in art galleries, and news of it has still found its way to me. Trust me, when you get your information from TV One, you’re talking public knowledge, rather than news.

Thanks to those who agreed with me about the awesome work the midwives do, and apologies for implying Team NZ are involved in birthing. When I said births, I meant for the boats. Like, where a boat ties up is a birth. I could have said docks, but in fact that’s slightly different.

Feeling the pull of the obligation to do ‘academic’-type things I went to a public lecture the other day to hear some geezers talk about “community building”. Now, normally these things are as boring as batshit, but the Shadow Minister for Communications Lindsay Tanner was speaking and he’s actually kind of interesting. I won’t bore you with the details, but he made a good little clarification some publicaddress people might like.

Essentially, he stated that there had been two really important revolutions in his lifetime. The first was what is now called the ‘political correctness’ revolution of the 1960s, and the second the ‘economic rationalism’ revolution of the 1980s. Economic rationalism should be obvious to everyone in New Zealand. I remember attending another talkfest type night in Auckland a few years back (to hear David Lange speak) and heard a very excited Asian academic speak about New Zealand being the most highly economically rationalised-type economy in the world. Mind you, seven years has dulled the memory of a talk that mostly went over my head anyhow, but the point seems to have been that New Zealand took it onboard big-time.

Although trying to not be too partisan, Tanner indicated that Howard’s Coalition really digs the economic revolution, but is happy to try and simply forget about, or worse, try and turn the clock back on the cultural one. Instead, the Coalition uses money as a means to solve all ills. So, he argued that someone in the media says, “poverty among Aboriginal people”, or “child-abuse in middle-class white families” and like many conservatives Howard will reply, utilising the ‘Royal We’, “We have dedicated/allocated/allotted/contributed $Xmillion to that problem”. The obvious consideration being that money is the cure for all ailments.

But anyone who thinks rich people are happier than they are, might be both right and wrong. Sure having money would make my life easier, much easier, but it’s not going to do me any favours if people still call me a ‘boong’. On the other hand though, if I have money and ‘report’ someone who’s racially vilified me, maybe the coppers will listen.

Still, it didn’t help Aden Ridgeway in Democrat party squabbles last year. On Message Stick the other night he all but said outright that he wasn’t given the leadership because he’s black. Excellent…

Anyhow, the ‘political correctness’ revolution was a good description, if not only because it labels the way in which opponents of 1960s and 1970s social liberalisation see the changes that overtook both Australia (and New Zealand) back then. Tanner said clearly that the problem with liberals ‘these days’ is that they’ve still got their ‘liberation goggles’ on. He pointed out that in the 1950s things were pretty cut and dry in Australia. You went to school till you could leave and then you found a job, and advanced thru the ranks. Apprenticeship, office junior, or university? Which will it be?.

While this was going on women were almost exclusively home-makers, violence was normal, Aboriginals were “sub-human” (his words), and White Australia was the only nation-building policy. Coming from a small town Tanner reckoned that he could see and agreed with the changes overtaking Australian society that fundamentally questioned the way in which people saw these things as ‘normal’.

But, at the same time he suggested that this revolution has become a little too dogmatic in its aims, and people from that generation still want to challenge everything that is ‘status quo’, and try to force more liberalisation into society. And I’m in agreement that you can go too far. Maybe it is time for liberals to take off the ‘liberation goggles’ and let a few minorities stick up for themselves.

What I think about these really dogmatic liberals is they tend to superimpose their values on the groups they ‘freed’ during the PC revolution. What this means is that thirty years on, all too often liberals will stereotype minorities, and then find themselves shocked when they don’t conform to their expectation.

A good example is women choosing to be happy home-makers, or Maori who don’t give a stuff about being ‘warm and fuzzy community people’ and just want to go out and get filthy rich.

When I started out on my journey into academe I was your bog-standard angry young man. But I think that age and cynicism is wearing me down, as is my desire to be an academic (which is another story altogether). And this is because one of things that working in this field has taught me is that people are idiots.

As part of the current project I’ve been interviewing people on this and the New Zealand side of the ditch and it’s revealed to me some very interesting information and ways of looking at things. The number of concerned and well-meaning people of any political persuasion who think that indigenous people are helpless and in need to their guidance really, really shocked me.

A guy over here called Noel Pearson calls it the “white messiah” complex, where your great aunty Flo is happy to give money to charity as long as its spent in the way that she’d spend it, because that’s the way out of poverty (for example). In a strange way, your ‘concerned ladies society’ or ‘the middle-class civic-minded blokes club’ are just as patronising as the people who think that minorities are never going to cut it and should just assimilate.

What my study centres on is the idea that belonging to a nationality is more than conforming to majority norms and values. In a nutshell it’s like this. If you think you’re a kiwi, you have to be able to say things like “choice mate”, or “sweet as”, and not get any smirks or looks of disbelief.

I don’t want to flog a dead horse, but racism is almost always the main reason you could be denied authenticity. If you went to a private school, speak perfect English in New Zealand accent, live in Remuera and work for KPMG, but have Chinese parents, there’s still a good chance that some people are going to not think you’re a ‘real kiwi’.

And, even inside some utopian ‘white’ community there’s the same problem. Being kiwi is bigger than just worshiping the All Blacks, or eating vegemite, or following the Americas Cup, or knowing who Paul Holmes and Lana Cock-croft are (no one over here does).

I’ve read a book or two where people have tried to distil the essence of what it is to ‘be a kiwi’ or ‘be an aussie’ and they never really seem to put their finger on what I personally think these words mean. It’s like reading a horoscope, where sometimes you’ll go, oooooo…. That’s me alright, and other times you’ll wonder who in the hell the psychic is talking about.

So what this lead me to think was, if you can’t really say what a kiwi or aussie is, who are the politicians chatting up when they speak to ‘the nation’?

Answering this would do two things. One it’ll bore you to tears. Two it’ll mean that someone out there might publish my answers before I can, so I’m shutting up.

What white messiahs think, whether they realise it or not, is that their way of doing things is best for the subject of their charity, and a lot of concerned liberals think in this exact way. As a result, the difference between domineering conservatives and ‘freedom goggled’ liberals is kind of artificial, because at heart both think that the best way is to manufacture consensus at a mythical ‘national’ level, or to provide parity in socio-economic statistics. The way to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal is if they say “my way or the highway”, or “my way, but you drive”. What this all boils down to though is minorities it’s still about being labelled ‘outsiders’.

This criticism is no reason to forget or undermine the PC revolution though. For example, an effort to stuff alternative viewpoints back into the box by blurting that infrastructure projects are ‘PC’ is stupid. If it’s not PC when farmers oppose lowering tariffs, or growers oppose lifting quarantine restrictions, or manufacturers want low dollar/wages, then why is it PC when other types of special-interest groups like iwi or environmentalists are also listened to?

At the heart of the PC revolution was the realisation that words themselves have really important significance, and that ‘equality’ and ‘participation’ aren’t the same thing. Like I say, you can be formally equal as citizens, or earn an equal amount of money, but getting called a ‘chink’ can mean you aren’t included as a real citizen.

I’ve got to listen to more people talk.