Acacia

It was with a feeling of excitement that I got stuck into David’s latest book – Acacia: Book One – The War With The Mein. First in a trilogy it charts the downfall of the mighty Acacian empire through the assassination of its king. Before he dies he sends his four children to the four corners of the known world where they are to mature and return one day to reclaim the throne.

Part of this enthusiasm, I must admit, was a selfish awareness that David had (loosely) based the main characters on my own family. King Leodan was modeled somewhat on my father, Laughton, and the four children on myself and my three siblings. Quite how far this inspiration stretched I’m not sure. Not too far I hope, as my sister, especially, comes out of it all rather dark and twisted.

David said Ursula Le Guin was an inspiration, as were Tolkien – no clearer than in the character of Rialus Neptos, his Wormtongue to the king – and other fantasy writers. He borrowed from myths around our world to create his own. And it’s a unique and very believable world. The first quarter of the book is fairly heavy going as the wheels are set in motion and the reader introduced to many characters, plots and cultures. But perseverance is rewarded with a rich tapestry of drama, intrigue and epic battles.

David obviously picked up the knowledge in pulling together massively disparate strands of narrative across such a vast landscape with Pride of Carthage. Perhaps the greatest skill he learned from that experience – and has honed here – was presenting battles in unique and arresting ways. There is film talk, and if that should ever come to fruition it will be interesting to see if they include the scene where an army (both male and female) of thousands strip all their clothes off to combat a beast attracted to bright colour!

There is a supreme sensuousness to David’s writing that comes in all forms.

It can be about physical characteristics: P.52 – “Her mother had given her the shape of her face, the character of her lips, the pattern of lines across her forehead. They had the same hands: the same rate of taper and length, the same character to the knuckles, the same thin fingernails, the same off-kilter slant to the small finger.” This passage resulting in a sublime refrain: “The girl of ten held between her palms an aged, decaying, fading grip on herself, like some strange conflation of the past with the present or the present with the future.”

It can be about sexual tension: P.418 – “She wore only a diaphanous shift, so short it was really just a shirt. Walking toward him, feeling his eyes on her, knowing the candlelight would highlight the contours of her hips and abdomen and breasts, she hummed with nervous excitement. It was the strangest of feelings. She felt tawdry and jaded, her lips moistened with oil, eyes shadowed like a courtesan’s. But she also tingled with innocence, as if she were a child again, girlish, walking in the glow of an appraising eye that seemed somehow fatherly. Very strange, she thought, but also decidedly to her liking.”

It can be about violence: P.441 – “Her sword bit into his wrist at an angle. The honed blade sliced up along the bones and cut free a sizable amount of flesh and muscle like it was soft cheese. His sword hand died, dropping the weapon.

“Despite the shock and pain of the cut, Larken was quick enough to extend his hand for the hilt. He would have caught hold of it, too, except that Mena circled her sword back and sliced the grasping hand. His four fingers twirled into the air, each of them dragging thin loops of blood with them. Mena would never forget the look on his face just then, nor in the following moment, when she carved a smile into his abdomen.”

David, unlike the work of Tolkien or C.S.Lewis, wanted a multi-ethnic world. And it is that. He takes great joy in uncovering wildly different histories, stories and myth. Borrowing from Nordic tales, New Zealand Maori myth, and an assortment of religions and animistic beliefs, his world is rich. Where he will take the next two books is anyone’s guess. He’s given himself plenty to work with.

Many people are likening his work to king of the genre, George R.R. Martin, but I haven't read any of his books so can offer no comment on that.

Like Carthage, this is a bloody, realistic portrayal of violence and power. There is a fair amount of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to some of the duels, but the battles are largely brutal and blunt. P.59 – “There was simply nothing to it other than the enemy pouncing on them and his soldiers dying, blood spray all around, limbs kicked across the sodden snow, bodies like cloth dolls strewn about in broken-backed postures impossible for the living.”

Unlike so much fantasy writing, there is no clear black and white regarding good and evil. Characters are painted in all colours, and we learn of their motivations and their place in a wider corrupt world. No one character is undeniably good or dastardly evil. There is much political and philosophical pondering bubbling under the surface narrative. It can be read in depth, or enjoyed superficially. Either way, he should reach a wide audience, and one that has been whipped into a fantasy frenzy by the recent Lord of the Rings resurrection, the end of Harry Potter and the imminent release of the His Dark Materials films by New Line.

New Zealand Film Festival - Manufactured Landscapes

Most of the most interesting films at the International Film Festival are documentaries. I have added many to my 'must-see' list now as Helen and I have seen only a handful.

A lot of my interest is in the rapid development of China. Especially after researching my article, The Great River Theft. Helen and I saw Dong which was not my first choice. I had wanted to check out Still Life, Jia Zhang-Ke's examination of ordinary Chinese people displaced by the construction of The Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest - but it was one of the few films to sell out. A good sign I feel. Dong is his companion piece, also filmed around The Three Gorges and Bangkok, which follows a painter.

One other film I missed - due to the dog we are looking after having the runs! - was Manufactured Landscapes. It follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky as he travels the world observing changes in landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing. Most of his most stunning images are of mass production in China, and the changing face of The Three Gorges where entire cities were raised to the ground by those living there by hand (the subject of Dong and Still Life) and then rebuilt, again by the same people, in new locations.

This clip is from an interesting website Ted, and is a talk by the photographer Burtynsky.





Helen and I did get to enjoy a more light-hearted documentary based in China. Les Blank has been making great documentaries for years, especially early bayou-style music stories. In All In This Tea he follows David Lee Hoffman as he searches for the best, home-grown, organic tea in China. There is a subtext regarding mass production in China as he drags the factory owners with him to the peasant farmers to show how their tea is of a much higher quality. But first and foremost it's about the cultural exchange and social interactivity surrounding tea. We are now on the lookout for a tea set so we can start trying some 'proper' tea.




The last film we saw was Build A Ship, Sail To Sadness. On paper it looked like the perfect film for Helen and I. "Solitary oddball Vincent mopeds through the Scottish Highlands with a dream of healing the community's loneliness with a mobile disco. A film about the joy of music and a yearning for the ecstasy of art."

Perhaps it was our desire to see the Scottish Highlands in all its glory that tainted our experience. The film is shot in over-saturated High 8 so the colours are lurid and livid. The best description I've heard calls it "a cross between Local Hero and Borat".

Vincent is a Scandinavian fellow in cricket jumper, rain mac and pink crash helmet who travels the bleak Highlands on his scooter. He stops and talks to various locals telling them he wants to cure everyone's loneliness through a mobile disco. It becomes rapidly apparent, as each scooter scene ends with Vincent stuffing his nostrils down the gas-tank and then passing out, that the loneliness is his own. The locals are happy enough.

The lo-fi catchy and often hilarious pop tunes are all the actor's originals, and you won't have seen the Scottish landscape shot in such an arresting fashion before, but we left disappointed - although we laughed plenty, a highlight being when he climbs a hill to convert a man burning heather to the joys of disco, only to be turned away by the man's fixation on all things heather-related.

Being ex-pats I think our idea of Scotland is firmly fixed in a traditional 'hands-off' watercolour ideal. Had we been living in the Highlands or Glasgow ourselves, this film would have been a delight.

The Scottish White Stripes

The longer and further I am away from Scottish shores, the more patriotic I become. For instance, I've always been a fan of The Proclaimers, but recently I've taken foot stomping and hand clapping and jaw jutting to a whole new level when their music is playing - often with a tear in my eye.

Another favourite act has, for a long time, been The White Stripes. I'd loved their albums, but after seeing them live at The Greek Theatre, Berkeley, California, I realised just how bloody good they are.

I had noticed the use of bagpipes on their new album, Icky Thump, in particular Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn but just learned of their overt Scottish roots from my friend's music blog - The Pop Cop.

And according to The White Stripes' website they just celebrated their "aluminum anniversary in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. To further commemorate this occasion, the band have produced an array of specialty merchandise including traditional kilts, balmoral hats, kilt hose and flashes. These items are all hand made from the offical tartan of The White Stripes, available in both hunting and dress fabric."

Good god. Now the only question is: Can I wear The White Stripes tartan to my wife's brother's wedding?

Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century) (2006)

I'd decided to check this film out mainly because it was Thai. Helen and I had spent 9 months there and I knew that we would take something from it regardless of content. We were both quietly blown away by it. This is a meditative piece of cinema in the David Lynch mould of narrative bending. Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells a simple story based on his own life (his parents were doctors in a hospital) of a female doctor. The story begins in a rural hospital with an interview and then carries on delightfully with a funny exchange mostly off-screen as the credits roll. You realize the director is having fun when one of the characters says he is already bored with this film-making process. The other replies that this is only take 5, there is a long way to go. Characters often break into natural fits of laughter as they talk. There is a gentle understanding of people, and they are given room to breathe.

Like Lynch's Lost Highway, halfway through the story begins again. Same characters, only this time the setting has changed, and the perspective we are given also differs. Now we are in a modern urban hospital. As the classic Thai saying goes: "Same same but different."

The characters' discussion of Buddhism, reincarnation and previous lives now takes on heightened meaning. You try to remember what was said before, just as they try to remember who they were before. "I was not human in my previous life."

Symbolism plays a large part in the film. Water, mirrors. We are given lingering shots of The Buddha and modern statues and a droning soundscape grows as the camera fixes on long interior corridor shots.

This is a lush, funny, patient and poignant film that asks many questions. I will be seeking out his other works.

This is the trailer:


This is a sequence near the end of the film:

Biyeolhan geori (A Dity Carnival) (2006)

Next up was A Dirty Carnival, a South Korean gangster flick with heart.

Obviously low-budget, I was feeling a little detached from the drama unfolding on screen. But from nowhere the film surprised me with a sudden visceral burst of extreme violence. Fist on flesh kind of stuff. Perhaps a few spinning round-house kicks, but nothing that looked too out of the ordinary for our hero - well played by In-seong Jo - which reminded me of the natural fighting talents of Phanom Yeeram (Tony Jaa) in Ong-Bak.

A Soundtrack fueled by a pseudo-Greek waltz on the accordian lent the film a world-weary air, although within the film were strategic set-piece musical sequences as each main character had a go in expressing themselves through karaoke.

This was a film within a film, and linked nicely to the previous showing of Herzog's Rescue Dawn in its shared need to blur fiction-reality. Recommended for all Korean film fans.

New Zealand International Film Festival - Rescue Dawn (2006)

The lights came up, credits continued to roll, I sat till the very end. The only person in front of me shook his head and chuckled knowingly at the final title to appear: "Top Gun Productions 2006" Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn had just finished, Christian Bale's character escaping his vietcong prison and surviving the jungle. I knew I should also find it funny, and kinda did, but not as much as the other guy.

As I collected my coat I realised no one had left the theatre yet. It must be a film festival audience.

It is New Zealand's 36th International Film Festival, and being a writer I was free to attend most of the day.

It was my first time in Wellington's Embassy Theatre and the main cinema is a majestic three-tier affair reminiscent of Glasgow Film Theatre's Cinema One.I'd never actually seen a Herzog film at the cinema. And he has a taste for man vs wilderness in epic tales of struggle. Stuff you should really watch on the big screen.

So I was quietly enthused as the lights went down (although slightly annoyed to see the margins of the frame over the curtains, something I have become heightened to since working as a projectionist). The story is of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German-American fighter pilot who was shot down over Laos in 1965. Captured and viciously tortured by the Viet Cong, Dengler seized an opportunity to escape, taking two American POWs with him.

Herzog seems to have found in Bale his new Klaus Kinski - an actor willing/capable of undergoing extreme duress and characterization to fulfill a role - although Jeremy Davies seemed to be outdoing him in the prison camp with a caved in malnutrition-ravaged skeletal frame that Bale wasn't even close to in The Machinist.

Davies was also a delight with his twisted finger pointing paranoid rants like Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. There was a good vein of humour throughout, with the pilots watching a dated jungle survival video and making jokes before going on their fateful mission. I will be trawling my way through the Herzog films I have missed so far after seeing this.

The Great River Theft

SOUTH CHINA
MORNING POST
AGENDA
James Johnston
Jul 15, 2007

A plan to redirect water from the Himalayas is dire news for the mainland's neighbours, writes James Johnston


Visitors to Arunachal Pradesh - India's most northeastern state - cannot fail to be struck by the beauty of this largely unspoiled rural region which has borders with Bhutan, China's Tibet region and Myanmar. Through this countryside runs the mighty Brahmaputra, a life giver and provider for tribal fishermen and farmers who rely on the river's bounty and water.

Unfortunately, for the residents of Arunachal Pradesh the 21st century is intruding on their rural paradise.

For energy-hungry India, the potential hydropower of the river is too great to ignore. For the water-scarce regions of northern China, the river may help solve the problem of water scarcity plaguing its north and west. The river is called the Yarlung Tsangpo before it crosses from Tibet into India as the Dihang and then the Brahmaputra.

In fast-growing India, with a population of 1.1 billion, energy is badly needed. The interests of the million or so people in Arunachal Pradesh, most of whom live in close proximity to a river, are very much secondary.

However, an even greater threat to the livelihoods of the people of Arunachal Pradesh, not to mention those downstream in Bangladesh where the Brahmaputra becomes the Jamuna, is posed by Beijing's plans to exploit the upper reaches of the great river.

For the mainland, a rapidly expanding super-economy hungry for resources, finding adequate supplies of water is a matter of national urgency.

Whether it is to meet the energy needs of the largest population on Earth at 1.3 billion - the mainland has built more dams than any other country - or meeting the nation's food needs, where irrigation is used for over 70 per cent of food production, vast quantities of water are needed. But headlong development has come at the expense of water quality.

In China's arid north and west some 300 million people are short of water. And much of that available is heavily polluted.

At the highest levels the question is constantly being asked: where will the water come from?

"The central and local governments have all realised that water shortages have become a key constraint to the country's economic and social development," says Zhu Guangyao, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

"There's growing tension among rural interests, urban interests and factories over who gets water in China," says Yukon Huang, a Singapore-based adviser to the World Bank. "Water will become a major problem for China in the next decade."

Beijing is looking to deal with the problem by means of a bumper solution.

One stage of the solution was completed in May last year, when the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze - 12 years in the making - had its final layer of concrete put in place. The dam, which has resulted in the displacement of around 1.4 million people, will be fully operational in 2009.

The completion of this monumental project is only one part of a much wider water strategy - the South-North Water Diversion Project. By 2050 engineers hope to move an estimated 45 billion cubic metres of water annually from south to north through an elaborate series of tunnels, aqueducts and canals.

Already half a million people have been relocated as engineers seek to link the country's major arteries: the Yellow River, Yangtze, Huaihe and Haihe. The scheme requires construction of three diversions in the eastern, central and western parts of the country at a cost roughly twice that of the Three Gorges Dam - somewhere in the region of US$62 billion.

It is not only mainlanders who will be affected by this wholesale realignment of the country's water arteries.

The geography of South Asia is such that every manipulation of a river by the mainland impacts on those downstream.

Tibet is known as the "Roof of the World" for good reason. It is the catchment area for 10 of the world's greatest rivers that flow through deep canyons into Asia like giant gutters after heavy rain, supplying almost half of the world's population.

Tampering with these vital waterways in an age of growing climate change awareness seems ludicrous, yet that is exactly what Beijing is proposing. Picture the Himalayan glaciers as a massive natural water tank. The mainland authorities wish to punch a great hole in that tank and siphon water away from its neighbours through a buried pipe no one seems to have noticed.

Work is well under way on two of the diversions: the central and eastern routes. The western route is an altogether more difficult proposition as it involves diverting water from the mightiest of Tibetan rivers, the Yarlung Tsangpo.

Since the late 1990s the mainland has been interested in exploiting the Yarlung Tsangpo. However, the river is not important to the mainland alone. For India's states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam and Bangladesh, it is a vital water source. Its journey takes it through the Zangpo canyon, which contains the Tsangpo gorge: eight times steeper and three times larger than the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. At a sacred site the Tibetans call Pemako - the last hidden Shangri-La - the river makes a dramatic U-turn from east to west, flowing into India at The Great Bend. In just 200km the river descends 3,000 metres - the greatest hydropower potential in the world.

Following preliminary studies in 2003, the mainland's proposed plan - as outlined by the chief planner of the Academy of Engineering Physics, Professor Chen Chuanyu - would involve using nuclear explosives to blast a 15km tunnel through the Himalayas to build a dam capable of generating twice the power of the Three Gorges Dam. The hydropower potential would be sufficient to pump the river water 800km into the desert regions of northwest China, eventually linking with the Yellow River. This would fulfil the final third branch of the mainland's South-North Water Diversion Project.

The sheer effrontery of diverting a river of such importance to the mainland's neighbours has perhaps ensured the rest of the world remains sceptical that it will proceed.

"Man should intervene with nature and reorganise her for his purposes," Professor Chen has said. "With this project the drought in northwest China could be terminated and the flood catastrophes in Southeast Asia brought under control."

Some experts are not so confident. "The south-to-north project will alleviate shortages in China's northern plain, but it won't come close to solving them," says Eva Sternfeld, a Beijing-based director at the Environment and Sustainable Development Reference and Research Centre. "Water demand in northern China is just too huge."

Professor Chen plays down the effects of the project on southern neighbours, suggesting cheap electricity could be sold to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His words are unlikely to assuage the fears of those downstream. With the mainland's potential ability to turn the "taps" on or off, flood control takes on a far more sinister dimension. Control over Tibet's largest river is as great a political tool as any military force - like laying siege to an enemy fortress from the safety of your own home.

"China's green light for the [Yarlung Tsangpo] project could be considered by South Asia as a declaration of war," says Claude Apri, an Indian-based writer and journalist.

There is already a tense border dispute between the Tibet region and India. The McMahon Line, marking the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet, has never formally been recognised by the mainland and military incursions are frequent. Last year, Sun Yuxi, the mainland's ambassador to India, declared: "In our position the whole of what you call the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory ... we are claiming all of that."

The Indian response has so far been meek, perhaps daunted by the realisation that the mainland can quickly mobilise a force in the Himalayas by train and road access through a region India has barely explored on foot. "China seems intent on aggressively pursuing projects and employing water as a weapon," says Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Beijing maintains that it would seek approval for any water diversion project. That remains to be seen.

In 2003 India denounced the plan to divert the northern source of the Brahmaputra, but it seems to have changed tack. New Delhi has now extended the velvet glove by backing plans to dam a section.

This payoff has been likened by one Tibetan publication to the Indian fable regarding a rural simpleton who chopped off a tree branch he was sitting on. It is unlikely that any of the rural locales in Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam or further downstream would support something so suicidal.

In any case, India has its own plans for exploiting the Brahmaputra and the communities along the river will pay the price.

They will be forcibly displaced from a river with which they have lived in harmony for as long as anyone can remember. Millions downstream in India and in Bangladesh are reliant on the river to provide vital soil sustenance and irrigation. They, too, will suffer.

And if India is not prepared to stand up to the mainland, then Bangladesh is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Maminul Haque Sarker of Bangladesh's Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services says the water flow of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna will decline by one-third if the project goes ahead.

"Around 15 to 20 small and medium-sized rivers including Dhaleshwari, Shitalakkha and Balu will die," he says, with devastating consequences for the country's agriculture and fishing industries.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg

(c) South China Morning Post

From Dungeons & Dragons to Torrents

“What is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mysteries?” – PC Wiggum, The Simpsons.

I have an unnerving penchant for watching numbers flick, collate and collect. Hours can be spent monitoring and mentoring the gently increasing file transfer protocols generated by downloading Torrents through Azureus.

I’ve always had this strange fascination. It perhaps started with Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) – that game so engrained into the collectively agreed-upon psyche of geeks.

The following images are from The Acaeum - a site for all things D&D. Sorley, if you're reading this, check out the prices you can get for the rule-books! We could've been rich.

It began in 1974 and involved a vivid imagination, lead figures, graph paper, a pencil, rubber and sharpener and the use of dice. But not just six-sided dice. Oh no. My brother and I had a 20-, 12-, 8- and 4-sided die. The 4-sided was my favourite. A sharp pointed triangle.

In later years it became impossible to continue playing Dungeons & Dragons and expect to kiss girls. But I always kept the dice. And I remember at some lonely stage, having moved schools at 14, creating my own football league and teams on paper. The dice were used to work out scores, scorers, crowds, bookings etc.

Even at University I spent the majority of my first two years with the doors closed playing Championship Manager with my friend, Chris, and then James. It’s a football game based on statistics. You watch the game in sped-up time, with formulaic text appearing as commentary. The rest of the time involves signing-, training and repairing-players. Riveting.

All of these statistically-driven pursuits could engross me for days at a time. Even now, as I write this on the desktop, my laptop screen is visible, the torrent numbers listed like some scene from The Matrix.

Acorn Electron & BBC Micro

I had forgotten all about my early computing days until reading an ex-pat blog by a family now living in New Zealand.

They had posted about wasting time playing Elite and Chuckie Egg.


Better still they had Chuckie Egg embedded into the post!

When I lived on the Isle of Rum - inner Hebrides of Scotland - at one point there was just me and one other kid in the school. The entire island had about 20 folks living on it. Naturally I spent an inordinate amount of time on my computer. My teacher was something of a whizz and I learned a fair amount of BASIC language and general computer know-how through him.


Anyway, Elite and Chuckie Egg were a big part of my life. And thanks to the Dawes family they might be again.


Free Flash Games

Rejection-Rejection-Rejection-Rej...Oh

So I was all ready to write a bitter account of a writer's daily battle with far-away faceless editors who control you like some sick puppet master.

I had written an article, researched it, edited it, proofed it and had someone else check it out - Helen Harper - then came the part of sending it out.

I drew up a list of editors and publications and went about punting it via email. Oh the horror when I realised I'd sent it to various sections of the Guardian without attaching the article! Schoolboy error. Basic stuff. Really, really embarrassing.

How many of those editors immediately deleted any correspondence from me after that?

Then the waiting.

And waiting.

Then the first reply.

Rejection.

The process of watching your inbox reminds me of Luc Besson's The 5th Element when Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) is told by the floating Chinese take-away host that he has mail. Korben wearily says he's not interested. The Chinese man very brightly says he should read it. Korben tells him to read it. The Chinese man opens it and exclaims: You're fired!

Most of the rest of the editors hadn't even replied. So I awoke early this morning, sometime around 4am, and couldn't get back to sleep. I shuffled into my slippers and pulled on the dressing gown and fingerless gloves. I had to do something. I came to the computer ready to post about the depressing position of being a writer.

The mailbox said I had a message from the South China Morning Post.

Click.

YOU'RE FIRED!!!

Actually it said they would be running the piece this weekend.

Huzzah.

Onto the next thing, and the next series of rejections.

My conscious

My conscious is divided up thus: 50% of each day thinking about writing, 40% beating myself up for not writing, and perhaps 5% of it concentrated on actually writing. The other 5% involves food and the like. Okay, so those figures are embellished, it’s probably nowhere near that. But that’s how it feels.

After spending a couple of weeks almost full-time writing at home a whole lot suddenly happened to divert my attention. This always seems to happen.

I went for a writing/research job with a Wellington-based company, Story Inc, which looked really interesting. They put together exhibits, interactives, signage and the like for all sorts of things: Museums, nature reserves, industry headquarters.

It took two days to write my application, then four days of worry before I heard back. Then they asked for two samples of writing. One was to write 115 words about an endangered New Zealand bird, The Stitchbird or Hihi. The other was to design an interactive exhibit that explained the Buddhist notion of karma in one A4 page. Both were to be for an uninformed young audience. Have fun with it, they said. I did for the first 30mins. For the rest I sweated. That was another three days. Then another four days of waiting.

That week I wrote an article We All Live Downstream which I am currently trying to sell.

On top of that I took on part-time work at the Lighthouse Cinema nearby. It fulfills a boyhood dream of working as a projectionist. I’ve already managed to drop an entire film, Ocean’s 13, which took over 2 hours to put back together. It’s great threading the film up and then adjusting the frame, setting the lens, and fretting over whether you’ve done it right.

I got an interview for the job. So that was another day of preparing and another three days of waiting.

I didn’t get the job, but strangely they invited me in the next day.

I spent the next two weeks in their offices working freelance. I worked on a Maori Rock Art exhibit in Timaru, South Island, New Zealand, and an exhibit for a museum in Bangkok, Thailand about the earliest people in Southeast Asia who settled in a region called Suvarnambhumi.

So the fiction is, as usual, on hold – except for in my mind where it continues to fester.

I have plans to write some more articles before leaping back into the novel.

We All Live Downstream

I just had this article accepted at the South China Morning Post. It will be run in their Sunday Agenda section on Sunday, July 15th.

Unfortunately they charge to view archived articles. It may appear on the website but I don't know yet. For now I will leave sections of the article here, and hopefully be able to provide a link once the SCMP has run it.

-------------------------

Ismail Serageldin, former Senior Vice President of World Bank: “The next World War will be over water.”

When rafting on the many tributaries that make up the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh – India's northeastern most state – I learned first hand that rivers are the economic and cultural backbone of South Asia. Journeying through that largely unspoiled rural region which is bordered on three sides by Bhutan, Chinese-controlled Tibet and Myanmar, I met the tribal fishermen and farmers who rely on the river's bounty and water, was witness to the natural beauty of the deep canyon of the Brahmaputra, and found myself enjoying the tribal Siang (Brahmaputra) river festival. The festival has become an annual event, unifying diverse and scattered tribes, linked through the life-giving and life-taking Siang river.

It was shocking to peacefully float down a river in a raft where the only signs of man are bamboo bridges, then to turn a corner and be faced by a gutted forest and mass construction. The Indian government are moving quickly to “develop” Arunachal as its potential hydropower is realised, and its scattered tribes can be damned. Governments appear to play a numbers game when it comes to displacing those who have lived by a river for generations. In fast-growing India, energy is needed for a population just over one billion. There are a million people in Arunachal, most of whom live in close proximity to a river.

The distribution, manipulation and pollution of river waters is creating mounting tension and displacing those downstream (and upstream) all over the world. Water is a matter of life and death.

When talking about water though, you have to consider China. One runs out of superlatives when describing China's energy and water crisis. Water is catastrophically scarce in a country that has built more dams than any other in the world in an attempt to provide energy for the largest population on earth. The little water that is available is heavily polluted. In the arid north and west some 300million people lack clean drinking water. Statisticians tremble at future pressures on the world food supply in the knowledge China uses irrigation for more than 70% of its food production. At the highest levels the question is asked: where will the water come from?

..................

The geography of South Asia is such that every manipulation of a river by the Chinese has a trickle-down effect. Tibet is known as ‘the roof of the world'. It's the watershed area for ten of the world’s greatest rivers that flow through deep canyons into Asia like giant gutters after heavy rain; feeding almost half of our entire planet’s population. Tampering with these vital waterways in an age of growing climate-change awareness seems ludicrous, yet this is exactly what the Chinese are proposing. Picture the Himalayan glaciers as a massive natural water tank for the world. China wishes to punch a great big hole in that tank and steal water away from its neighbours through a buried pipe no one seems to have noticed.

...........

Work is well underway on two of the diversions: the central and eastern routes. The western route is an altogether more difficult proposition as it involves diverting water from the mightiest of Tibetan Rivers, the Yarlung Tsangpo, some 800km from the mountainous Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Since the late 1990s there has been Chinese interest in harnessing the hydropower of the Yarlung Tsangpo – that becomes the Brahmaputra when flowing into India through Arunuchal Pradesh, then the Jamuna in Bangladesh; a water source vital to both countries. Its journey takes it through the Zangpo canyon, which in 1994 Chinese geologists announced was the biggest in the world. It contains the Tsangpo gorge: eight times steeper and three times larger than the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. Most importantly, at a sacred site the Tibetans call Pemako – the last hidden Shangri-La – the river makes a dramatic u-turn from east to west, moving into India at The Great Bend. In just 200km the river descends 3000m – the greatest hydropower potential anywhere in the world.

............

The sheer outrageousness of diverting such an important river has perhaps ensured the rest of the world remains sceptical. They should start listening. For China it is never a question of 'Should we...?' but always 'How do we...?' Chanyu has proclaimed: “Man should intervene with Nature and reorganize her for his purposes. With this project the drought in Northwest China could be terminated and the flood catastrophes in Southeast Asia brought under control.” He also suggests cheap electricity could be sold to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His words are unlikely to assuage fears for those downstream. With China’s potential ability to turn the taps, as it were, on or off, flood control can take on far more sinister qualities. Control over Tibet's largest river is as great a political tool as any military prowess – like laying siege to an enemy fortress from the safety of your own home. Claude Apri, an Indian based writer and journalist, has said: “China’s green light for the [Yarlung Tsangpo] project could be considered by South Asia as a declaration of war.”

...................

South Asia’s river network is a manmade mess of diversions and reservoirs; the pollution levels unsustainable. But International Rivers Network campaign director Aviva Imhof has not given up hope. If there is a coordinated and concentrated effort to harness alternative power sources and efforts are made to clean up the water then the rivers are salvageable. “It doesn’t take as long as you would think to restore a river,” she has said. “There have been a lot of dam removal projects in the US and the river has returned to life in a very short space of time, sometimes as short as five to ten years.”

China continues to seek large-scale structural solutions to its growing energy and water crisis, but no matter how great their achievements, the crisis only seems to deepen. The tentative schedule for the initiation of the western component of the North to South Diversion Project has always been 2009, the year the Three Gorges Dam is to be fully operational. China has denied the project at various intervals in the past, but after the Grand Canal, the Great Wall, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Three Gorges Dam, it seems futile to deny the possibility of the 'Great Bend Diversion'. We must avoid yet another footnote in our damning history.

No Country For Old Men

I was real excited to learn that the Coen brothers have made a film version of Cormac MacCarthy's No Country For Old Men.

You can watch the trailer here.

Tommy Lee Jones will no doubt have the best self-deprecating one-liners.



The Coen brothers' sly humour will serve the dark novel well I'm sure.

Found - Gav Sutherland

Considering I'd lost touch with Gavin Sutherland for many years it's certainly ironic the name of his most successful (but definitely not his only) musical act is 'Found'. This is a video from their recently launched new album.

You can buy it here



And another of theirs

Synth Like Minds

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Visit the official FOUND site and their myspace page.

FOUND are Ziggy Campbell, Tommy Perman, Kev Sim, Alan Stockdale and Gavin Sutherland. Ziggy, Kev and Tommy met while studying art in the cold granite city of Aberdeen. Since 2001 they have collaborated on various audio and visual art projects. Though they are occasionally drawn back to the gallery environment, the start of 2005 signalled a new beginning as they enlisted the musical abilities of Gavin Sutherland and decided it was high time they formed a pop band.Recently Mr Alan Stockdale has joined in on the fun and is playing live drums and percussion.

Over the past 12 months the band have enjoyed a rapid rise to success. They have played gigs across the UK, recorded exclusive radio sessions for BBC Radio Scotland, Radio Magnetic and The Selector and made a debut TV appearance on BBC Scotland’s ‘The Music Show’. MTV Europe have just snapped up the video for ‘Mullokian’ ( a collaboration with young Edinburgh animator Joe Richardson) and they have just recorded a live session for a major US radio station in the legendary ‘Beatles Studio’ at Abbey Road.

Their much celebrated performances have drawn comparisons to The Beta Band, Tortoise and Tom Waits. From the outset it was considered a necessity that the music being produced by the quartet could translate effectively to a live audience. This desire, coupled with the band’s suspicion of, and general feeling of boredom towards, the “laptop set”, pushed them to create an ever evolving live show which combines new technology with their extensive collection of acoustic instruments.

While FOUND are always keen to experiment and push themselves in new directions, their music has a strong grounding in melody and structure. It’s not often the terms accessible and forward-thinking sit happily together but in the world of FOUND they are the definition of what Pop music should be.

Until now

This blog has been somewhat random to date. Mainly compiling other people’s articles, blogs and websites of interest. And of course images found during my continuing search for the loneliest cabins. But there has been very little comment of my own. My aim is for that to change. What I intend to do is chart my progress as a writer. Part of my reluctance to engage myself in actually writing on the blog has come from a fear of putting too much into it and not enough into anything else. But I’ve come to realise that writing, in any form, will help overall.

In a southern American twang: “Well what we gat here? A ree-dah?” – Bill Hicks.

First then, the story till now. As a kid I read a lot. Unlike most kids I lived in some fairly remote places, including the Isle of Rum – population around 20. This definitely fuelled my interest (need) in books, music and computers. My father, Laughton, read many books to me (that I subsequently reread), and the ones that stick in the memory most are The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, a lot of Roald Dahl, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin.

By the time I was seven I had written (and recorded on cassette) my first poems. One of them I remember a little of: “and the noise went beep beep beep all night long / Oh what a noise.” This was inspired by a stint in the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh.

The first time I remember turning my hand to fiction was soon after when I began a sequel to Lord of the Rings. The first scene involved the principal characters searching for Gimli’s axe in the rubble of Helm’s Deep. I bashed this out on one of the typewriters in the Nature Conservancy Council office on the island.

Over the years I kept a diary at various junctures, and wrote many letters to my siblings who all lived abroad at different points. The other memories I have of my writing came through school. At James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh I had a stereotypically larger than life English teacher, Mr Campbell, in the mould of Alasdair Gray. He sang at you in a theatrical voice and was prone to embellishment and great humour. He had the required physical characteristics: corduroy suits, a missing thumb, wiry grey hair that surrounded a bald dome like a bird’s nest, and a glass eye. On one of my old jotters my friend Gavin Sutherland and I had been writing the name of our band, Amorphous Head, in different styles. And below this Mr Campbell has written: So this is what goes on in the secret corner! He was inspiration in itself.

At Breadalbane Academy in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, another elderly English teacher gave me full marks for a piece of creative writing. No one else had had such a privilege for a long time, he said. But what marked it out for me was the content of the piece. It was a gritty, no holds barred (well, I thought it was for a fourteen year old’s English submission at school) piece about young folks going off the rails at a house party. I may be embellishing the story now, but I remember my classmates were shocked that such content was not just accepted, but prized.

Had there been an undergraduate creative writing course available back then I’m sure I would have applied. For as long as I can remember I’ve always imagined writing for a living. As it was I ended up studying Film & TV and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. With the advent of email a lot of my writing became enmeshed with communication back to old friends in Edinburgh. Stories involving them as the principal characters and the like. I also got into journalism and became Sports Editor for the Glasgow University Guardian.

Studying Scottish Literature has had a profound effect on my writing. I learned what texts were important (from Barbour’s Bruce to Stevenson and Scott to House of the Green Shutters and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to MacDiarmid to Alexander Trocchi to Kelman and Gray to Spark and Lochhead to Banks to Welsh to Warner) and how they slotted into a Scottish psyche. All courtesy of an inspiring department led by the enigmatic Douglas Gifford.

With the emergence of the Creative Writing Masters at Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities I decided to apply. There was something appealing in the fact applications were approved based on a folio of writing, rather than previous studies and qualifications. So for the first time in a while I sat down to produce a few thousand words of fiction.

Once accepted I spread out the studies as thinly as possible. It didn’t seem worthwhile to complete the course in one academic year, unless one had produced that barnstorming novel. Instead I did the course part-time which seemed to make my studies much the same as those students who were full-time. I had the same amount of access to the staff. Could be present at just as many lectures and workshops. But I knew I would have another year of the same.

The first year for me was run by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, two of the most famous Scottish writers, and I had studied them during my undergraduate years. I spent the majority of this year attempting to write a screenplay as my mind was fixed on being involved in film. I was also terribly caught up in the mechanics of producing two anthologies with funding from the course, and in coordinating and running a weekly reading night at the Scotia Bar. In hindsight I believe my priorities were all wrong, and I don’t think I took advantage of the staff and course nearly enough. Which is why I am glad I decided to take a year out (spreading the course out as much as possible).

When I returned the course was altogether different. Kelman and Gray had retired, and Willy Mayley had returned from a sabbatical. His positive energy altered the makeup of the department considerably. On a personal note, the time away had also fixed my mind on prioritising the writing over anything extracurricular. So it was that I devoted my time to writing for this academic year 2004-2005. I had a deadline of six months – between October and March – as I would be returning to California for a job. I finished my first novel, a landmark. Again though, with hindsight, I can now see that my need to complete the novel in that timeframe affected the quality of the prose I produced. There was little rewriting, redrafting or redressing. Instead I pushed on to finish the story. My study of Scottish Literature and time at Glasgow University (going on six years by this point) also affected my work and the appreciation of my peers’ work. I found the cosy scene claustrophobic and was turned off by writing that I found to be Scottish short-sighted navel-gazing. It was all too close to home

Ever since then I have been travelling and living abroad and waiting for life to get out the way so I can continue to write. Two years later I’m now realising life won’t do that for you. But I find it hard to slot in small stints of writing amongst other work pursuits. So far it has been all or nothing. I need a few months of dedicated time to write. In the past year I created that time to produce more prose in Thailand, and now in New Zealand I have the time to dedicate myself to it again. The outsider perspective of living abroad will, I hope, give me the necessary inspiration to dig a little deeper this time. There is no cosy scene to get lost in.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve come to appreciate that any form of writing is a good thing. So I supplement the frustrating production of fiction with blogs, travel writing and various non-fiction stories for websites, newspapers and magazines in the hope that I can earn enough to write for a living.

Mary Gibbons Art

My wife's brother's fiance, Mary, recently launched a website to showcase her art.

In her own words: "My landscapes explore themes around stillness and desolation. They are often empty landscapes featuring a man-made structure that will cause the viewer to wonder about habitation, abandonment or desolation."

Loneliest Cabin anyone?

My kind of art.

Iranian blogs

A good blog is supposed to inform, with panache.

When I learned that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had started his own blog I was shocked. Remember, this is a country that has heavily censored internet traffic, even jailing bloggers who voice political dissent. Ahmadinejad recently hosted a forum to discuss: The Holocaust – did it actually happen? He also shutdown access to Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia and the New York Times in an attempt to “purge the country of western cultural influences”, according to the Guardian.

[Image from Berryburger]

And one of my favourite recent Guardian stories, Shoppers see red and President feels the heat over tomatoes, began with: “History is not littered with cases of heads of state being brought down by the price of tomatoes but, with his critics growing by the day, Ahmadinejad could be in danger of earning such a distinction.”

With all this in mind I was eager to check out his blog.

But it’s a bore. I knew it when I found myself reading the comments with more interest than the posts themselves. Due to the nature of my work – subediting and writing – the broken, disjointed, badly spelled and grammatically error-strewn text had my mind quickly wandering.

The comments from readers are rather more interesting, saying a whole lot more than the President lets slip. Not least, “What a joke this blog never updates!” chirruped Adil Kamal. “Very nice, but could you update this more? Its been the same thing for nearly two months,” sighed Eric Sortomme. I couldn’t agree more. Tokenism anyone?

Okay, so you’re unlikely to ever read George W Bush’s hilarious but caustic From within the Whitehouse blogspot.com, but President Ahmadinejad has broken the first rule of blogging: KEEP BLOGGING!

And with that comment I hide my hide deep in the sand. I apologise. I have been absent for too long.

So what about the Iranian people? Well, while countless blogs seem to concentrate on the female form and little else, Amir Normandi takes a rather more intelligent view of the body and censorship in an Iranian photo-blog which believes, “it is unconscionable to accept … extreme gender inequality”.

A good blog is also a gateway, providing useful and related links to other websites, blogs and news stories. For up to date information on Iran (and a host of links to liberal blogs) look no further than Dr. Zin’s. It analyses the various bodies providing (mis)information regarding the country’s political stance and interpretation of human rights. Not a lot of laughs, you might expect.

But Dr. Zin is a smart, witty writer. For instance, he reported that our poor blogger, President Ahmadinejad, has (apparently) backed an alarming law that would enforce strict dress codes to separate Islamic followers from other minorities. Dr Zin writes: “’Iranians have always worn trousers,’ says Mostafa Pourhardani, minister of Islamic orientation. What men will wear on top is not clear yet. Some … propose only a waistcoat.”

[Image from JeffreyDeanFoster]

More worrying to me was that “some Majlis members tried to include articles determining the shape and size of men's beards and moustaches and impose an Islamic standard for male facial hair”.

These are worrying times indeed. Thank you, Dr. Zin, for informing with panache.

Royal Writing

Moving to the remote shores of New Zealand has sharpened my senses in terms of what the Internet can offer. It all became clear in my Dubai hotel room while flicking through the Guardian Weekly (stockpiled from the past month) and reading article after article that threw up words and phrases like 'blog', 'media multi-tasking', 'transmigration' and discussed 'YouTube' and Military Videos.net These were articles riddled with web reviews, URLs, email addresses and podcast discussions. I began to channel all this competing information through my brain while listening to the Times Online's 'The Game' football podcast on my iPod.

In a strange synchronous manner my wife and I recently got hold of an old Royal Typewriter and I wrote this blog entry in a new notebook. Technology has somehow forced me to write once again by hand, to ink-stain my fingers with newspaper print and to erase the mistakes from a stream-of-consciousness rant with the use of tippex - something I haven't done since school it seems.

When on my laptop and connected to the Internet the possibilities seem to freeze any creativity. I barely write emails like I used to and all my time is sucked into the vortex of information consumption, Short Circuit-style - "More input". I read a host of blogs, trawl the torrent sites for music and film and watch endless videos on YouTube.

To create I've had to step back from the keyboard. The blog has certainly allowed me to link ideas and open up doors but I've found it has been mostly other people's work and thoughts: quotations, links and reportage. Cut and paste. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

This is where the typewriter and notebook come in. Thoughts congregate and spill out unmediated and unchecked. There is no possibility of just instant cutting and pasting. 'Did that paragraph work? No.' Start again from the beginning.

With a computer that initial block of text is like a lump of badly-formed clay. It resembles what you intended to only a small degree but hints at possibility through manipulation. So that's what you do. Prodding, cutting, pushing, pricking and pulling, all in the hope of making something better. But it becomes dirty, dry and formless. Better to start fresh with that initial form still sitting as it was, a reminder of your first failed attempt.

For me the simple act of physically writing has restored to my ever-increasing dependence on technology a more natural and healthy balance.