[-empyre-] In response to matters raised...

[The Paul Annears <the.paul.annears@gmail.com>]

Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa

'Indigenous' is a word that doesn't get a lot of air play here (within
New Zealand) that I am aware of.  Other words are used.  Like Tangata
Whenua.  Somoans, Tongans and (ethnic) Fijians are 'indigenous' to
their particular spheres according to the Creative New Zealand / Te
Waka Toi website. Maori are tangata whenua. See for example:
http://www.creativenz.govt.nz/funding/twt/.

Certainly there are plenty of people living and working in New Zealand
who can and do claim Maori ancestry.  When I was a kid it was a bit
different.  If you looked 'white' or even sunburned you probably
didn't go out of your way to claim to be Maori.  Things have changed.

I don't have a list of names names and categories but sure as hell
there are all sorts of people here in lil ole Aotearoa doing all sorts
of stuff - some of it tino pai.

As a young fellow I dismissed Cezanne because in the books I had
access to, with the printing technology of the day, his stuff looked
like shit.  When I first went to Paris I wandered by accident into a
little gallery showing 'Minor Oil Sketches of Cezanne'.  It would be
fair to say that I was blown away.  I knew it was good because it had
the same WOW factor as the Maori carvings back home.

May I respectfully suggest that the distance thing is a aua whero iti,
the indigenous thing is maybe a paraoa with mohiti ra. Or vice versa.

(Not incidentally, I am not guaranteeing that my Maori is
grammatically, syntactically or politically correct.  For those who
need some assistance (like me) try
http://www.learningmedia.co.nz/ngata/.)

Then there is the funding thing.  In my humble opinion creation is
independent of funding (who funded God?) and even more independent of
institutionalised teaching.  It is possible to have good teaching in
an institution but helluva more difficult than any other way.

The 'Polytechs' here are full of people doing courses in 'creative'
areas.  If these people had to make a living they would almost without
exception be doing something else and be slimmer, healthier and less
self-obsessed.  We, and maybe this applies to other low-lying areas of
middle-class self-satisfaction around the world, are suffering from a
tsunami of graduates taught by people who themselves are more often
than not drowning in the voracious waters of mediocrity.

Melinda references my previous post but I hope that people find the
time to read the rest of that posting (see below) because, as is my
wont, and as should be clear from The Concise Model of the Universe
(it is becoming clearer to me), my way of working involves (amongst
other aspects) looking at the whole from a variety of view points and
of showing by example that words are both cute (good) and naughty
(bad).

There are many marvellous 'new media' projects, not a few from New
Zealand or by New Zealanders. I remind myself, though, of the work and
thought of Douglas Engelbart (the 'inventor of the mouse') and not a
New Zealander.  When he realised in the 1950's that computers would
become very fast, very small and very powerful, and he understood what
that meant (perhaps the first human to do so), he set himself the goal
of trying to ensure that computers would come to be used to develop a
cooperative and augmented human intelligence.

Currently, as is demonstrated everyday in the newspaper and no doubt
on television (for those with more time to waste than I have), there
is no sign to date of an augmented cooperative human intelligence.

We are witnessing right now, vicariously for most of us, one disaster
and its aftermath that could so simply have been avoided with existing
software, existing hardware and a few extra data loggers with solar
powered transmitters.  The papers are full of it.  'An unprecedented
human disaster'.

In the same instant we are forgetting that other people have been
dying in similar numbers, for example in parts of Africa from hunger
and HIV and various cannibalistic flare-ups, as one example.  Aren't
we 'forgetting' just as conspicuously in the 'developed'  world, and
more relevantly to my argument, about the spread of cancers, weird
super-bugs and mutations is now accelerating exponentially, after
centuries of the poisonous madness of extracting and refining what we
want and throwing away what we don't.  There is, unfortunately, no
sign that the power of  the modern computer is being used to augment a
cooperative human intelligence.  If anything the use of the computer
is allowing an unprecedented amplification of human greed and
stupidity.

When I was a kid I wondered how it could be that a dog wandering
across a road couldn't see a car coming.  I wondered what the human
equivalent to that invisible car was.  Now I know.

Arohanui and have a nice day.

A P A



Dear Melinda and soft space

To be born from and into that soft autophagic space I am and we are
both localised and universal.

Dunedin music is distinct from Wellington music is distinct from Auckland music.

Pepsi tastes different from Coke tastes different from Thums Up.

The light experienced from the train from Madrid to Paris in Spain is
shockingly different from the light in France just over the border
from the same train.

The web has many flavours, is there a New Zealand flavour?

Here is a story from this mornings web which can also be found on The
Concise Model of the Universe (www.xxos.net), but not easily:

Aid Shambles on Andaman Islands Leaves Thousands at Risk from Hunger and Disease

03 January 2005

The relief operation in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been
so poor that starving tsunami survivors kidnapped a senior government
official to demand food supplies.

Speaking at a refugee camp in Port Blair yesterday, Lilly Ooman said
she was one of a group of survivors who captured the most senior
official on Great Nicobar, the assistant commissioner, together with
the local police chief.

Ms Ooman told how she and a party of survivors had to trek for days
through dense jungle after their village in Campbell Bay was
completely destroyed by the tsunami. There was no rescue mission in
that area of the island and no air drop of food supplies.

"After four days of starving we got to HQ to find out what was going
on," she said. "We found the assistant commissioner eating platefuls
of biryani, along with the DSP [Deputy Superintendent of Police] and
the SHO [another senior policeman]. We told them: 'While we are
starving you are eating, you didn't do any rescue. There are dead
bodies lying all over the island and you have not done anything to
bury them, you are here enjoying yourselves'."

Ms Ooman said the survivors were also enraged to hear that official
reports said only four people had died on the island, when they had
seen large numbers of bodies. The angry party, exhausted and starving
after their ordeal in the jungle, took the assistant commissioner,
Soaman Naidu, and the DSP captive.

"The men were angry. They told them: 'You will see the situation for
yourselves'. But after a short time we realised it wasn't the right
thing to do and let them go."

Squating here in front of this primitive device I am transported
sideways in time to Samosir Island.  Such beautiful peaceful war-like
people.  Such wonderful carved incestious longhouses.  Such delicious
food.  Such intelligent shit-eating pigs.

I would argue that there is no New Zealand flavour, and nothing
special about the web prescence generated by the inhabitants of the
Land of the Wrong White Crowd.

I would say that there is inevitably a difference.

More later.

A Paul Annear