Posts by Keir Leslie
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to andin,
What if they turn out to be on opposite sides of the debate? I dunno, does anyone? until it starts.
Well, one can but live in hope.
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Bob Parker has already alluded to this – clearly he’s thinking in the right direction.
Can I just say that one reason I am not looking forward to the politics of this is that it will include some very very hard arguments to make, where, basically, we have a group of people who (a) had already started botching the response to the previous quake, and (b) are now hugely popular? I mean, this is Bob `Dave Henderson' `School of Music' Parker and Gerry `sexy coal' Brownlee we're talking about here; I didn't trust them to rebuild the CBD as it was on September 3, let alone February 24. This is going to be a very unfun series of arguments, and I don't want to start yet, basically.
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This is a conversation I’ve seen other Christchurch residents have on Twitter. I appreciate it absolutely could be distressing for some, but I know others are comforted by thoughts of a beautiful new Christchurch.
Oh, not the one about rebuilding*; I don't mind that one at all. The one about how one's favourite policy prescriptions are now utterly and exactly what's called for, and if you disagree you're an inhuman monster who likes rich pricks /gold plated assets more than Christchurch? That really annoys me.
* Although I think I dislike the word rebuilding; it's going to be building full stop, especially given how crap the CBD was beforehand.
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The main bus depot’s out on the corner of Fitzgerald and Moorhouse. I have no idea how the depot stood up to the quake, but obviously given timing of quake many/most buses will have been out en route. We had two kinds of buses when we were being ferried around when out digging silt: one was ex-CBS crappy rattler, and the other was a newer machine that seemed pretty good. The problem was that they could barely negotiate the streets in the part of town.
There will have been at most ten-twenty buses in the bus exchange itself, it’s not that big a building.
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I think you’d have a tough time getting people down here to agree that the Cathedral shouldn’t be rebuilt. It’s sad. We need a symbol of hope. Yes, we also need some kind of monument, but that’s the building that symbolises our city.
But it's not a building any more, and it can't be a building again, a cathedral again. It's a death trap. It's a place that kills. It's hostile object theory, a perversion of the sanctuary of the church. I think that Coventry is a good principle: some things can't be put back together*. Humpty Dumpty's fallen off, and all the King's men etc. etc.
God. This is a horrible thing. The beauty of death hangs over Christchurch like the smog from the chimneys used to, settling on things and giving them a patina of grace. Latimer Square has its own deaths now; it doesn't need to borrow Latimer's any more.
(& if you want more maudlin, it's provided on request.)
* and that doesn't mean there's no Coventry Cathedral any more. It's just not an imitation of the old Coventry Cathedral
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I would prefer Brasilia to Hausmann's Paris; at the very least, Niemeyer was not designing a city for the easy movement of troops against the population.
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Well, in terms of Cathedral, the one everyone thinks of is Coventry, I suspect.
I think it should be left in ruins. It's a far more powerful image now than it ever was before. Before the Cathedral looked almost toy like often; now it looks utterly sublime.
(The immorality of aesthetics is not a nice thing when you realise that you look out at rows and rows of cars quiver in a quake, and think only of the sheer beauty of the movement amplified by suspensions and wheels and repetition.)
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To be honest, I think this isn't a conversation we should be having now. It's too emotional (too soon in many ways), and too many people are too fucked to contribute, and too much becomes `don't you care about Christchurch'.
(I mean, seriously, as a resident of Christchurch, I think there is no conflict between the Auckland CBD and the Christchurch CBD, and I will get very angry at people who are using this (and me) as a bludgeon to suggest that Auckland's goldplated or wevs. But then, I also don't like the idea of being used as an argument for higher taxes on rich people right now, not the way Norman and I/S have been doing it. So.)
And I don't think that this shouldn't happen soon: in the next weeks and months it'll be very important. But right now? Right now it is too messy.
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I/S continues total tone deafness; speaking as a Christchurcher, I don't think that ``John Key is reportedly lukewarm on the idea, so I guess we'll get to see who he puts first: the people of Christchurch, or his rich mates. Time to choose, John...'' is at all correct, and I really don't want to be used as a political bludgeon right now.
I am not looking forward to this side of things.
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Most of my classmates said they thought it was a complete waste of their time, having to study things unrelated to their degree.
I have to agree here. In a sane world they'd get a Diploma (or whatever) in Management (or whatever) from the Auckland Polytechnic and have done with it. Instead, we insist they pretend they care about stuff they quite evidently don't, and then they get a degree from a university in return, and that worrying smell of trade is kept at a distance.