I made a thing

The Auckland Royal Easter Show...A reading.

One potential NZ future.

Here's one potential NZ future.
We are presently engaged in not a mitigation strategy but a unique and ambitious strategy of eradication.
Under lockdown to prevent spread we are attempting to identify all carriers, via testing around known clusters and also the symptomatic.
It might work. It might not, asymptomatics might create clusters that multiply too quickly to be contained. But at the moment we are poised between success and failure. Our daily newly identified infected are not growing explosively.

If this fails we’ll switch to mitigation and be like every other model.
If it succeeds it’s going to be really interesting.
We’ll be an isolated country without the virus, the only one.
Public gatherings will not be dangerous, concerts, movies, daily life etc.
It will be like that one thing NZ had, always being slightly behind the rest of the world [in our minds and in our general culture] will be our jewel.
Tourism will be surreal. There may have to be two week initial compulsory quarantine options involving being shepherded between exclusive isolated places, perhaps staffed by some of the couple of hundred recovered who have it is presumed some degree of immunity before inclusion into NZ public life is allowed.
How exclusive would that make us as a destination!
It’s not nearly over and it’s not decided as to whether success or failure of this current strategy will prevail.
It’s so very balanced between success or failure at this point. Holding out with 89 new cases one day, 71 the next, 82 the next.
Will it bend up or down?
So much in the balance.

We're grieving the old normal.

Yep, there will be a new normal and to some degree the world has changed irrevocably and people will need assistance coping with the unknown being, if not an ok thing, at least a manageable thing and at very best an opportunity to reimagine what personally and potentially collectively the important elements of the near future could be.

At the moment, driven by our need for information we're marinating in toxic media, I know I am. We may as well be shitting in paper bags and putting it outside our own front doors and lighting it on fire for all the good it does us.

My limited and unqualified experience as someone who's never really trusted my own mind and examines it constantly and certainly never trusted the ridiculous death cult we call a civilisation with it's built in expiry date given it's fallacy of infinite growth founded on finite resources and someone who examines anthropology and other ologies for clues and someone who's trusted the best in people to the degree that I spent 30 years internationally being comically despondent in public and lived off the coins generated by people who could identify and appreciated the opportunity to laugh at the same time, as that person, that Martin, my only practical advice is that if you can, earth yourself. Plant something you can eat. Also share something. The more you can celebrate eating something you fashioned and the more you can offer anyone something, anything. Find a street person and give them the smallest thing you can spare on your now rare trip to the supermarket for example.I don't know but I suspect creating some relationship with dirt is probably mentally healthy and being kind is always empowering.

Just watch those flaming bags cos they're everywhere.

after 2 year stilt-gap.

Death with Dignity, NZ's plan to party while the world ends. Chapter 2 of 3.

 

Ok so this is the boring but necessary chapter where I point out the self evident unpalatable but critically important truth and outline some basic broad brush options.

Also bear in mind this writing is a constructive attempt at a coping mechanism for me as a powerless individual rather than a delusive ego based Kanye West type bipolar episode.

I am in broad sociological strokes refashioning the basic needs of a society as an exercise and because societies celebration of itself, which will be the last element I include, has been my lifes study.

Our species is self annihilating and taking a majority of evolved lifeforms on the planet down with it.

Sorry the time for argument has passed. The only luxuries that remain are the weakest form of non critical denialism and an affront to the dignity of man quite frankly.

The time for useful idiots has past and saying that we’ll exclude Humpty Trumpty and Pee Wee Goebbels and the Blonde British windsock and put the rise of conservative  painfully self evident corporate facist vassels  aside for a moment.[So disappointed in you Australia]

 

So lets put a few unpalatable truths front and centre because without that collectively we cannot untether ourselves from the barrage of distractive blither that inflates the post rational envelope the world is currently engaged in with media pimping for short cash the saddest and most cynical global pantomime ever produced.

The world as we know it is convulsing and expiring.

American crops this year were delayed via flooding then cut short by further climatic instability.

Australias food production is also down this year.

The scientific consensus is that once reliable rhythms of climate are becoming increasingly unstable.

Food production is becoming unstable globally. Terms and concepts like 'Multiple breadbasket failure' are being discussed seriously.

Nobody knows the pace of this change, this increase in instability, but the consensus is it’s accelerating.

And again I’m not interested in argument. There are only two possibilities.

One is that our inertia  as a species leaves us reacting to a systematic collapse of global and probably terminal proportions.

All hope is lost and morphine, magic mushrooms and weapons grade Kush become our most sought after commodities. Whatever adhesive traditionally binds nation states devolves and our civilisation dissolves into a terminal puddle of mayhem.

If we don't act before some social tipping point is reached, wherein the future shortens to a week or fortnight at a time then we will have given up all agency to think beyond immediate survival and at that point with cohesion lost so is any viable future.

The second possibility is we recognise this impending radical change in our environment and do something about it while we still have the structures of our critically ill and expiring system in place in order to effect some deft triage.

This gives rise to a further set of potential outcomes.

• It's too late but we try anyway and achieve a collective death with a comparative collective dignity achieving the equivalence of a decent party at the end of the universe before our demise.
• It's not too late and we salvage some collective political bedrock with which to fashion a workable sustainable social model.

I’ve looked at our predicament and imagined a future in which smaller countries, Potentially nimble political entities, more tugboat than oil tanker, might set an example for others to find hope in an otherwise increasingly hopeless situation and world. Bhutan, Iceland and New Zealand are countries that have at least broached the possibility, that a 'wellbeing' quotient for the population should surpass the GDP as a metric.

Because it certainly appears that there are hugely disruptive times on the horizon and preemptive defensive reconfiguration of every facet of society, the ability to adapt swiftly and with collective vigor in the face of cascading multifaceted challenges including food production and distribution, climate based infrastructural disruptions, potential global refugee migrations, in my mind inevitable large scale economic instability with attendant mass mega-innue.

Further reading

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s12571-017-0693-z

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/11/eaaw9976

https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067

  Onward....

“Imagination is an essential quality of a flexible, adaptable mind.”

I'm using New Zealand as my test tube for this thought experiment. We are small and adaptive and isolated from the usual mass migration scenarios.

[although I see a lot of upper middle class blue water catamarans with families attached heading semi-permanently our way in the not too distant future and more seriously some pacific intake from drowning communities]

ONE

FOOD

We need to secure food production independent of climatic vagaries.

The production and distribution of food is any societies primary function.

Intensive indoor farming needs to become the first priority of any society that wishes to future proof itself. It is a field in it's infancy and has huge economic and employment and commercially intellectual potential.

https://weburbanist.com/2015/01/11/worlds-largest-indoor-farm-is-100-times-more-productive/

Further; NZ has two universities ranked in the top 100 for agriculture and forestry in the QS World University Rankings.

Lincoln specializes in improving New Zealand's land-based knowledge, wealth and productivity, and is ranked among the global top 50 for agriculture & forestry and Massey is also a world renowned agricultural university. Agriculture and innovation in agriculture has a strong foundation already throughout many NZ educational institutions

The more we can grow food indoors and at increasingly optimal productivity the more stable we will be in an otherwise increasingly unstable world.

Not my area of expertise but to my mind a fairly self evident market given the disruptive conditions at hand. Commercial viability would seem to be straightforward. It would also appear to be self evident that if we do not construct systems which feed communities via close proximity then the idea of communities themselves will perish.

Our current state of indoor growlighting efficiency seems to be this mass produced programable panel that covers a 5 ft squared growing area.

Cheaper perhaps to compile inhouse from imported components.

Not my balliwick.

https://www.mars-hydro.com/mars-tsw-3000-led-full-spectrum-hydroponic-led-grow-light

Some of the largest indoor growing facilities are associated with the accelerating legal cannabis market and serve as an example of how quickly growing infrastructure can be constructed given the right incentives.

Obviously nothing beats cannabis as a cash crop given cash being available however cash itself is less important overall than the biological insurance indoor cropping could lend any population prepared to invest in it and I bring this up too just to point out that it's not like anyones being asked to reinvent the wheel in terms of available applied technology.

Creating a meaningful new industry would also dovetail into areas of a social 'wellbeing' quotient, employment, empowerment on several scales.

TWO

HOUSING

At present average housing cost in NZ has crossed the $700 000 rubicon.

Under the present status quo I can't begin to fathom the mental capsule needed to presume 20 years of stability required for a classic mortgage.

We [and the world] need a flexible, scalable foundation of a building/habitat manufacturing base to provide housing that reflects the robustness and energy efficiency necessary to withstand climatic extremes and resource sharing as well as surges in demand from our present population and influxes in our population caused by inevitable global migration.

Not qualified at all in this regard but in any society shelter is mandatory and primary and both shelter and food being foundational I'm focusing on it on principle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R1CBFBxuew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sguIU9gaJn0

I'd presume a focus on cheap viable building materials research. Rendering, compiling, building techniques, an entire new approach to shelter in an adaptive state would be the challenge given the status quo is presently unsustainable and will only grow more so.

The Auckland Uni Architectural school is a brains trust that could be brought to bear.

Also personally I'd guess that financial services, which are a large part of real estates cost at present in the near future will either die gibbering of old age or be smothered in it's bed by it's children.

As you can tell this topic illustrates why I shouldn't talk on matters I'm ignorant about but housing and shelter is an important critical collective need that will need to be addressed.

However again, the development of alternative systems of housing and accommodation has within it a progressive quality wherein the 'hope' at it's foundation lends itself to a larger interwoven social/cultural dynamic that is essentially inoculative to paralyzing despair in the face of radical change.

THREE.

MAKERS-SPACES

As you can probably see I'm just working, in primitive sociological terms through your primitive hierarchy of needs for any functioning community/society/state

Food-tick

Shelter-tick

Society........

Maker Spaces.

Sometimes called FabLabs, TechShops or Hackerspaces are communal spaces with shared tools and shared skills where individuals and groups can improvisation-ally engineer solutions, inexpensive adaptations, improvements, group and individual projects, creating communities with mentors and teachers and skill-sharers empowering various grades of raw curiousity and providing opportunities for collective and individual problem solving and education.

Driven by specific, usually project driven educational factors, the ambition to compile a cheap and powerful personal computer, a need to set up an indoor garden, exploring 3D printing to obtain some open source do-dad or a reason to get out of the house and just explore for it's own sake.

The differences between these community based centers and other learning institutions such as Universities and poly techs would be shorter, more informal and less certification driven participation. Short cycle makes them more adaptive, more informal makes them more elastic and less formal certification makes them more about self actualisation than top down industry driven.

They also promote a robust, improvisational, socially cohesive problem solving component into a local culture.

They would have the potential of being practical incubators in a period when innovation on a local scale becomes increasingly relevant.

They would provide a social facility that was constructive by definition.

They would be open to all and that inclusiveness would be a social asset to combat a host of isolative mentally unhealthy issues that are growing concerns.

Empowerment and self realisation being key foundations of general wellbeing.

A network of these maker-spaces would require planning and not inconsiderable investment in funds and management however their efficiency in providing social stability, potential innovation, community resilience and adhesion ideally might have successes that alleviate stresses on other budgets contained within, unemployment, health and Justice systems.

And also, as with all the above stated, the inference is that investment in alternatives to our present systems that are showing the beginnings of terminal failure are far more achievable the earlier in the curve of increasing systematic pressure they are made.

Because hiding in a well off hole in the ground waiting for the new refeudalization is a foolish alternative.

It's said that societies exist via the cultivation of dependency and the monopolization of violence.

That's quite a terse description.I think there's terse times ahead.

Present Govt's cannot simply ship themselves off to holes in the ground via private metal eggs, all of their eggs are in one basket and so it is up to us to egg them on and suggest that they act like good eggs or as is traditional during social revolutions, we'll probably kill them all and either eat them or not.

When [or if] the state cannot provide security, in food, in shelter, in peace, then communities reform themselves based on quite unforgiving primitive models.

I see foundations being implemented now to combat the most challenging fallout of inevitable systemic disruption being the wisest investments to be made. By wealthy individuals who enjoy loyal servants, from Govts who want to continue being viable and to all of us others those who look with increasing despair and powerlessness into the future and lack structure.

Even if it's just for the sake of laughing at the gibbering hedge managers sentenced to each others company an indefinite period finally emerging waving their guns from some hole in Otago.

So we have bustling intensive farming setups working with the maker space wing while the modulated prefab structure industry tries to keep roofs over everything.

All under the auspices of a new civil defense future proofing dept.

Suicidal youth and the generally disaffected are offered invitations to save the world initially in discussion forums, real time meetups and makerspaces.

Metrics, goals, achievable outcomes defined and initiated.

Meanwhile, the only people left that retain the ability to encompass the potential doom of our species and still contemplate celebration need to be given shelter and support to create outbursts of whimsy that defy despair.

Because all work and no play makes humanity a dull boy.

Which brings me to act three, the upcoming third installment in this little thought exercise that I'll finish and post and then also additionally amalgamate into one long read because the separations are simply ways of me providing myself writing targets and conceptionally it probably doesn't suit being broken up although to motivate myself it had to be segmented or this waffle might never have come to pass.

Allow me to introduce myself, technically I'm a clown.

I inhabit the 'dark' real estate of clowns definition. I have specialized for over 30 years as an international clown soloist in making despair comic.

I did quite well, I worked for myself around the world as well as being a corporate mercenary clown in many countries for Coca Cola and Suntory and Mitsubishi and Chrysler and many others, in technical clown terms I am at a level where once invited, I passed a two day cirque du soleil audition in New York. Finishing as the only clown in the final eight selected out of an initial fifty eight prospects.

I've also done a variety of big budget private parties. A host of International Arts festivals and have networked extensively with others in my field from a multitude of countries.

All whilst being demonstratively unhappy.

I returned to NZ from my base of ten years in Hawaii just over a year ago weighing very little and without having eaten solids for 10 months due to cancer of the esophagus, I was not expected to live more than a couple of months by the US medical advice I'd been given.

But via the reduction of 2/3rds of my stomach and some of my esophagus and thirty six lymph nodes in an eight and a half hour operation by NZ health services followed by a year of self imposed solitude as I fed myself via machine then without I am now a 55 year old able bodied unemployed clown.

It's hard to be a cynically unhappy clown when the rest of the world shares that state as a growing hopeless baseline. Thanks for catching up people!

I have a small reputation for getting dark things done. One example is I danced in China to a mixed audience of retired military and their families, using context and non english comprehension to my advantage to a song by Nine inch nails called 'closer' . I succeeded in getting cheerful elderly Chinese to smile and clap along to a chorus of, 'I want to fuck you like an animal-I want to feel you from the inside out.'

It's petty but I'm proud.

A less petty but proud dark function of mine was for two years I was a 'death Sherpa' to a friend of mine who died of cancer. He was also what could be called a dark clown and very successful. He was a challenge both as a vocation and a friend but I could make him laugh. I got the last chuckle from him 48 hours before he died.

I've spent the last year having had my life unexpectedly saved, alone and looking for ways to meaningfully reinsert myself back into the world.

I may have gone mad, it wouldn't surprise me.

I would like to leverage NZ and also my network of international contacts with performers and festival managements to nurture a studied whimsical response to our potential demise as a species.

It's sufficiently dark enough to challenge and experience has taught me that one of only things that makes tragedy palatable is comedy of a sufficient quality.

So in my third installment I'll be outlining how NZ can further position itself as a defiant, quirky antithesis to general despair and powerlessness by promoting whimsy not as a distraction but as an inclusive reward for the multitude of sacrifices that will come with adapting and accepting an uncertain future.

A 'Tearoom at the end of our species.' type deal.

 

NZ's future, (or how I got funding for my festival). chapter one.

Chapter one

Before I begin have a gander at these two variations of post apocalyptic research

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doomsday-preppers/

https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

It’s said parasitic sociopaths can’t be reasoned with. I beg to differ.

Lets say I’m some neo-liberal billionaire who has more liquidity than any group of people can spend in several lifetimes and I want for nothing and am surrounded by highly intelligent fawning lickspittles and my life’s just peachy and surreal. I’m part of a select digital aristocracy or perhaps I’ve inherited a flatulent amount of wealth and sometimes I just have to pinch myself.

My only problem is that I have it on good authority, the best minds money can buy have told me that there’s a probability approaching certainty that the entire system that’s gained me my wealth and additionally every social system at present intralinked to the present financial global status quo is destined via basic formal logic…to collapse catastrophically sometime within 3 to 15 years.

A great deal has been made about prefabricated boltholes in NZ and other places. Private jets and small select cabals and rushing off and locking the door behind them for a bit. You can almost picture the cocaine rimmed nostrils and the euphoria of a 5 star doomer fantasy realised with a flurry of purchases and agreements and the secured knowledge that were some short lived new plague to break out given a certain amount of absolutely flawless timing and a perfectly executed logistical plan you and some of your equally well heeled friends could live in a swanky hole in the ground for quite some time.

All this can be manifest by simply spending money and luckily as a billionaire you have that on hand. In fact it could be said that spending money is the second best thing you excel at. The first of course being acquiring it in the first place. 

I find it stupendously naive on a multitude of levels. Firstly the trigger impulse that initiates the bunker burrowing. Secondly the requirement of flawless logistics to initiate it and thirdly and most importantly given after exhaustive drills and rehearsals and false alarms and dry runs the plan is initiated and a group of people whose major lifeskills revolve around exploiting a system that has failed to the degree that jumping into a hole in the ground is their best considered option and with the door closed behind them and all further agency forsaken. [Surely someones mentioned that if you communicate with the outside world you are broadcasting your position to anyone with the right handheld device]

But what happens next? Is the ultimate plan to recolonize NZ with everyone else dead or the guns you keep in a room? Do you have any idea how idiotic and shallowly self revealing your post apocalyptic wet dream is? Obviously not.

I suspect these articles are simply penned by bad novelists desperate to drive viewers to their blogs and have little to do with reality and more to do with their withered imaginations.

I cannot digest that some of the most wealthy are this sub-intelligent.

That said it got me to thinking. If I were some financial titan and wished to ensure myself against some financial and ecological and social collapse how would I go about instigating protection for myself?

Well New Zealand is an ideal platform to base the experiment. It has under 5 million population, it's comfortably isolated, it has mountain ranges set so that whatever the prevailing winds they are water making machines.It has hydro and geothermal power sources and is aiming for 90% renewables by 2025. It has potential socially to be galvanised towards the changes required for the undoubtedly massive challenges ahead.

It also has the highest youth suicide rates in the world. A bi-product perhaps of a relatively well educated and critically thinking youth recognising that self actualization within a forlorn socio-economic vehicle heading towards a seemingly predestined cliff makes life less than rosy and optimism a tad redundant.

Also and I just mention this in passing because it amuses me. New Zealanders have evolved a relationship with violence, the kind of tribal violence that usually eventually destroys cultures and civilisations we've turned into a celebration of all we hold sacred and it's our national sport and we hold what appears to be an unassailable position of the worlds champion having won over 3/4s of games played internationally since 1903. We have a well deserved reputation as cheerful kind folk but don't go thinking we're easily usurped via flattery or trinkets. If rugby were international politics we would be the worlds superpower and given various factors this is in fact a potential possibility.

Now I'm worth a couple of billion and on paper can probably double that if I short the industries I know will crash first or any other of a number of silly maneuvers but my prime objective, other than spending millions on a plan to hide in a hole in the ground would be to gather a sociologist or two and a handful of creative thinkers along with some govt connections and some logistical gurus for the management side of things and put it to them. How can I use my wealth to preserve and enhance as much of the existing NZ culture so that I can live safely and fruitfully within it?

The sociologists will flatter you with your perception of the age old importance of the dunbar number and the acceptance of the futility of manifest destiny as applied to individuals such as yourself. They would fluff you like you had a day long porn shoot ahead of you. But they would also say some wise things that educated you into your potential place in a new situation you would be instrumental in helping create. [and you'd still be rich, richer than most, the most important thing ultimately being most people wouldn't hate you and want you dead and you wouldn't have to live in a hole in the ground, a victim of your own reptilian impulses]

The creative thinkers, [and I'll switch and be one of them now] would suggest four main projects, each aimed at a differing but integrated part of any culture/society.

The investment in low cost, high energy efficient housing.

The investment in solar [or other renewable] powered intensive indoor agriculture

The investment in a network of 'makerspaces' of differing sizes throughout the country.

The investment into a festival that celebrates 'Quirk' which is an intrinsic part of NZ's cultural character.

Now I'll switch back to my solitary billionaire guise and admit I'm a little overwhelmed by the cost of all this and my neoliberal cortex is perhaps inflamed at the injustice of it all.

“Well we all have problems mate. We're just trying to solve our own and yours to the best of our ability.”

On a macro-level NZ could leverage it's obvious assets both natural and as a relatively small and potentially nimble country to put things in place now that grew an infrastructural independence and proactively positive example to others. The cost being met in part using that leverage to offer otherwise doomed billionares and multimillionares a seat at our table.

I’ve researched housing and intensive indoor farming and maker-spaces and my own ‘quirk’ project and will elaborate at length on each of them but I’m just looking for a bite sized introduction to begin with so have left that elaboration out to include in in the next installment.

If you find this thought experiment interesting then please by all means share it round and if not then perhaps recommend a wellington based mental health expert.


part two...
https://winsomesrevenge.blogspot.com/2019/12/death-with-dignity-nzs-plan-to-party.html

Fraser Hooper, Silver medal winning Clown.

 

 

Stephen Colbert, during a week long promotion of New Zealand recently posed the question. ‘How much of your national economy is based on whimsy?”

Interesting question. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, are our present whimsical big daddies but it must be noted that they, although huge amplifiers of our quirky, understated, laconic and intelligently self aware humour are just that, amplifiers.The signal itself is and has always been an intrinsic part of New Zealands self expression. 

We are cackling church mice giggling in the nook of someone elses cathedral and we like it that way.

There are others, less well known but making an impression internationally nevertheless.

Sam Wills, ‘The Boy With Tape On His Face’ has performed at the Royal Gala in London and has had a multi year residency show in Vegas. 

https://youtu.be/CLs6eULXDqc

 

Guy Williams has an international online following with his 'New Zealand Today’ comic reporting of small-town NZ eccentricities.

https://youtu.be/VFWsF1aJKvE

This month also a New Zealand Clown won the Silver prize at the Saint-Paul-lès-Dax International Circus Performers festival in France.

It’s like the Emmys of circus awards, the oscars being either the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo or the International Circus Festival of Budapest.

However in the world of studied and applied whimsy there are not too many opportunities where Clown is briefly taken seriously and accolades awarded and for a New Zealander to excel is cause for celebration.

What I like to call ‘High end Clown’ is a rarified yet pan culturally accessible medium that discards buffoonery and superficial wit and instead focuses on the creation of shared moments in which usually a solo artist creates a temporary world that entrances, beguiles and stimulates a profoundly palliative quality in which our ability to laugh at ourselves supersedes  all else.

That’s quite a trick, to do it without language, solo and by means of a subterranean authority built on a low status clown foundation even more so. 

Fraser Hooper lives in Wellington.

His Clown is a kind of downtrodden optimist who needs his audiences help to create a world in which he can find peace.

He ends up creating more than that instead producing a riotous celebration of collaboration within a temporary surreal whimsical bubble that is his show.

He’s measured and subtle and constructively sly and his recognition internationally is no surprise to me and I hope he inspires more New Zealanders in the celebration of our own form of whimsy and for some perhaps, in our increasing dour world, a true rebellious vocation in the creation of more of it.

First part of his country life show

https://youtu.be/UU0HqvI71wY

Condensed full show

https://youtu.be/eHeM8ijR7so