Not here either

This just in: once again, the master escaper Bob Dylan
has eluded capture. Not that Todd Haynes, writer and
director of the new film I’m Not There, necessarily set
out to catch Dylan; but over the course of two hours
and 15 minutes’ screen time we might have hoped for
some news of his whereabouts. Or at least, hey, a fresh
insight or two. No such luck. Basically, this is a hobby
film—Haynes playing with his toy Dylan set, amusing
himself by cutting and pasting bits of the Bobster's
“many lives” (yawn). He’s got a lot of nerve foisting
the result on movie audiences, but then, no one forced
us to go, and Cate Blanchett’s riff on mid-60s Dylan is
(almost) worth the ticket price. Oh, and the songs are
pretty good.

Friendly fire

The news, reported in John Drinnan’s media column in
the Business Herald, that APN News & Media is
launching a giveaway monthly publication aimed at aging
baby-boomers merely confirms what this former APN
employee has suspected for a long time, namely, that
APN has very little interest in putting resources into the
Listener, which it also owns. The Listener’s natural
territory is aging baby-boomers but rather than invest in
building it up, APN chooses to start what in effect will be
a rival publication sure to eat into the Listener’s main
demographic. On all the evidence so far, APN has never
had any clear idea about what it should do with the
Listener, least of all promote it and resource it properly,
so is letting it quietly wither away. Which is a bitter shame,
considering what the magazine has been and still could be.

Carbon emotions

Researching an interview with Vicki Buck, the former
mayor of Christchurch who's into green business
ventures these days, I came across something she said
in 1991. As an innovative form of taxation, it could be
a very useful source of government revenue.

"I think negative people should be taxed," said Buck.
"They require an enormous amount of your energy."

Certainly, as the planet warms, any enlightened
government will sooner or later want to think about
the carbon emissions given off by depression,
negativity, stored-up grievances and plain old
grumpiness. As well as using the car less, and
cutting out plastic bags, we should all be cultivating
sunnier dispositions. It makes economic and
environmental as well as emotional sense.

Vicki herself is a living advertisement for positive
energy. I can see why the people of Christchurch
took her to their hearts. The interview was
punctuated by waves of laughter, often at her own
expense. She could be a big hit if she went into
national politics; only, her ebullience would probably
be crushed over time. In my experience, politics is a
chemical process for draining the life juices out of
human beings and replacing them with pod people.

Life is a near-death experience

The dead come on with us. In God’s home movie
of the cemetery, the visitors and the dead—indeed,
the vegetation—are indistinguishable. Each has a
different way of moving but from a distance you
would never know it. All are in transition.

Hence more than a hundred years I spent
In my feat of change from a coffin-thrall
To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall...

—Thomas Hardy,
“Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard”

Hardy explores the same theme in such remarkable
poems as “Transformations” (“Portion of this yew/
Is a man my grandsire knew”) and “Heredity,”
which is really a late-Victorian take on DNA.

Going nowhere

Because years are numbered consecutively, it is very
hard not to believe in linear progress. Yet nothing in
nature supports such a belief. We grow and change,
certainly, but only to diminish and die. This is as true
of a star as it is of an ant. The theme of the cosmos is
not progress but renewal—the same thing renewed
over and over again in microscopically differing forms.
Nothing is going anywhere. Everything is always here.

Exactly

Among the millions of words written about the Electoral
Finance Act, I’m not sure anyone has summed it up
better than Norm Drexel, of Halswell, who has written a
letter to the editor of the Christchurch Press (March 24)
telling John Boscawen, of the ‘Freedom of Speech Trust,’
that the act threatens not freedom of speech but freedom
of paid speech. Under the act, says Norm, Boscawen can

...write letters or newspaper articles, blog, phone talkback
radio, hold meetings, organize demonstrations, canvass,
poll and travel the country to address crowds without the
Electoral Commission lifting an eyebrow.

What he can’t do is spend money for TV, radio, newspaper
advertising, leaflets, etc, to influence votes without
fulfilling formal requirements that tell the public who is
paying for it. He can’t spend unlimited money even then.

That means that the size of his wallet can’t be used as a
substitute for the strength of his arguments.

There you have it. Quote that, next time someone chews
your ear about this supposedly fascist legislation.

Three cities

Christchurch is a patterned carpet laid on the Earth,
all its corners neatly squared off. Wellington's a
crumpled rug. Auckland? Seagrass matting.