Benjamin Hourigan

Donnie Darko. DVD. Written and directed by Richard Kelly, 2001.
9/10

I am bewildered. I do not want to sleep. I do not want to do anything else. I just want to sit and think about it.

I don’t understand this movie, but I love it.

This is some kind of cult movie, as far as I’m aware. Anyone have some sage words about it? I feel like some bits were missing. What’s the director’s cut like?

Today I’ve posted the frontmatter and introduction of my PhD thesis on role-playing videogames, which now has its own page here.

I’m really hoping to get some feedback on this, especially from gamers. Some reasons why you should read the thesis as I serialise it, so you can give me comments:

• It’s the only book-length work in English on (videogame) RPGs, so if you’ve ever wanted to read one, this is your only option.
• It features me being pugnacious.
• Reading it won’t make your mind contort painfully in an effort to decipher incomprehensible nonsense.

So get to it! Further chapters will appear as I finish editing them. Post comments for discussion on the relevant blog entry, or email them to me directly.

Today, dogpossum posted what is, so far, the most antagonistic comment related to my site that I’ve yet received. Her blog doesn’t have permalinks, so you’ll just have to search for 17 March 2005. Currently, though, it’s at or near the top of the blog.

I don’t mind antagonism. In fact, I know that just by putting forward my opinions on some issues, I’m going to bait people. Possibly everyone. My post on Australia Day baits jingoists: but being mostly acquainted with people of the university set, I don’t expect many jingoists to be reading. My post on arts funding has attracted a lot of comments, most disagreeing with me forcefully. I knew it would bait those kind of responses. That’s not why I write things like that, though: I hope I do so because I have good reasons for my views, and I want to express them, to open up debate. So they have. I enjoy this. So, I hope, do you, my readers and correspondents, most of whom (and possibly all) are of the university set. “University set” isn’t meant to be an insult, by the way: I’m a member of the same cultural milieu, and though it irritates me some times, I still feel at home in it.

Dogpossum’s post seems to be a fairly visceral reaction to my politics, and except where she points out that I don’t know much about Australian cinema (touché), it’s not a good example of a contribution to debate. It shows a common tendency of writers who identify with a leftist politics, and who imagine those who disagree with them are all contemptible rightists. Its response to me is almost entirely to attack my person: to call me a “fool” and an “imbecile,” to ridicule my recording, in my resumé, of my intelligence percentile, determined by a psychologist-administered test, and to “mock” my “turn of phrase”. It objects to my politics without specifying grounds for objection, and without even identifying what my politics are.

For the record, I’ve met dogpossum at least once in RL, where our disagreements were not apparent, and where I found her very likeable. I enjoyed meeting her.

Dogpossum, you owe yourself better than to be so uncivil in writing. I don’t expect you to disagree any less forcefully: but if you can’t say anything nice about my person, you maintain your honour better by not saying anything at all.

Dogpossum’s personal attacks are symptomatic of a tendency that I’ve noticed in my interactions with Cultural Studies academics generally, particularly where political matters are involved. There’s a set of people and beliefs that they assume everyone agrees or disagrees with (i.e. we are all ‘left’; capitalism is immoral; everyone who disagrees with you is a right-wing bastard, especially people who criticise identity politics or French pseudo-philosophy; logic is a tool of oppression; and so on). If you challenge one of these, you get hammered with personal attacks. For an example of what I’m talking about, have a look at the threads resulting from my recent intervention on the CSAA email forum. (Note that the thread goes on into subsequent weeks). Here it’s not me who’s the subject of the attacks (in the main), but rather so-called “right wing jocks” who dare (often very unskillfully) to criticise Cultural Studies. The sad thing is that Cultural Studies practitioners attack these people personally when they could have targeted the gaping holes in their opponents’ arguments, which end up going unmentioned.

I believe this kind of behaviour (and it seems to come from multiple sides) is extremely damaging to the intellectual climate wherever it occurs. Intellectuals should be debating each other’s ideas, not calling each other fools and imbeciles. We can leave that to those who don’t know any better.

Dogpossum, I believe you do know better.

In a comment on dogpossum’s post, I’ve invited her to discuss her objections with me. I hope she’ll take up my invitation, hopefully here, because of the lack of permalinks on her site. I would expect our words to make for interesting reading.

From Dict.org

1 definition found for pugnacious

From Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :

Pugnacious Pug*na”cious, a. [L. pugnax,—acis, fr. pugnare to fight. Cf. Pugilism, Fist.] Disposed to fight; inclined to fighting; quarrelsome; fighting.

Notice that I changed the title of this blog. I am now taking on all comers in an epic battle of minds. I demand that you fight with honour.

With legislation to ban compulsory student unionism currently before parliament, student groups are protesting on the streets, on posters stuck around campus, and to the press to keep union membership compulsory. Even Vice Chancellors are expressing concerns.

I find it staggering that people would protest against their own freedom of association. Okay, if you appreciate the services and representation the union offers you, join it and pay the fee. But give yourself an out if you decide it’s not for you, and let other people decide for themselves whether they join and pay or not.

Admittedly, students can already choose not to join (for the record, I chose to be a member of what remains of Melbourne’s student union, and of UMPA. But they have to pay the fee whether they join or not. I would skip out on membership of the union if I wasn’t paying already.

The main arguments against voluntary student unionism (VSU) seem to be these:

1. it is an example of the Howard government’s union-busting mentality
2. it will rob students of a body that represents them
3. it will result in less services being provided to students

I’m not going to argue with the first one. I think that the Howard government’s antagonism towards unions is appalling. Workers and their employers (or universities and their customers) should be entitled to fight their battles, in whatever groupings they choose, without goverment interference.

Whether or not student unions really represent their students is debatable. There will always be those who dissent from the opinion of their representatives, whether they voted for them or not, and those dissenting people are not represented. Voter turnouts at student elections are, to the best of my knowledge, typically poor. That’s fine: those who want to have a say can have it. Student representation is a good thing, but…

...there’s no way to justify forcing people to join an association in order to secure that representation. For me this is an absolutely clear-cut issue. If student unionists do not wish to let students choose whether or not to join their association and pay the associated fees, then they are against freedom and therefore in the wrong. (Note that as far as I am aware it is voluntary to join the association, but you have to pay the fee even if you don’t join). If student unionists wish to remain a voice in student politics after this reform (and it will go through), they will have to convince students that it is in their interests not only to join the union, student association or guild, but also to voluntarily pay the portion of their amentities and services fee (the whole amount of which is currently around $400 a year at Melbourne, some of which goes to the University itself). I have to say it: I don’t think they’ll have many takers. They might be able to claw some of their membership back if they lower the fee. Price competitiveness is one of the great things that can come from forcing organisations to respond to market pressures.

So, too, I expect both union services, and the private businesses that will appear on campuses to fill the space created by shrinking unions, will have to compete on price and quality of service to secure the patronage of students. Students will be likely end up being better serviced as a result.

I think the Howard government has been appallingly repressive throughout its time in office. Its treatment of refugees is especially atrocious, as is its attempt to mislead people into thinking there were WMD in Iraq (especially when there was a good reason for war: removing Saddam Hussein, a tyrant, from power). But it seems about to strike a blow against the forces of coercion. And that goes to show how sometimes people you think are awful can do good things nonetheless.

You could hardly fail to notice that after a flurry of posts, I haven’t made many recently.

In the World of Warcraft, players often signify that they are “AFK”: Away From Keyboard. I have been Away From Blog. This is likely to continue. Progress on the second draft of my thesis has been slow. Contributing factors have been:

• a massive procrastination effort on posting to this blog
• discovery of just how compelling World of Warcraft is
• having to negotiate the complexity, subtlety, and maze of alternatives that is The Chicago Manual of Style
• having to rewrite my Introduction from scratch

There’s also been quite a lot of activity going on behind the scenes here, in the form of comments and responses to comments on posts, particularly on End government arts funding now!, which started as a throwaway line and turned into a major debate. If you’re not commenting on posts and reading the comments, you’re not getting the most out of this blog: most of the time I can’t help myself from writing massive responses to comments. I am, as a friend of mine recently described another friend, “a comment whore.” If you want some critical attention for your own site, link to me or arrange a trackback or something.

I really need to get some work done, and I’m trying. So in the immediate future, I’ll be concentrating on the thesis, and posting it as the content here. Undoubtedly I won’t be able to stop myself from posting about other things, but I should.

The Incredible Melk’s Spanking Fashion Parade.
9/10

Last night I overcame a bout of lethargy to go out to the Kitten Club and see a show my friend Mel was putting on. It featured some outrageously stylish catwalking from the models (including at least one who really looked like an actual, perfect ten, model), as well as from the contestants in an audience walk-off, the winner of which sadly couldn’t take the drink offered as a prize, because she was underage, but got a huge bowl of fries instead. Mel punctuated proceedings with her hilarious comic songs. I’m such an old-school, Wired-style (Wired-style!? I’m only 23!) geek that I’m not confident I know what genre Mel’s music belongs to, but she has used the phrases “hip-hop” and “gyno-rap” to describe her work. Guess I don’t spend enough time down in the ‘hood.

I’d give the show 10/10, because I thought it was great, and because I know the star, but I have to take one mark off to save this review from being a sycophantic plug. I’m really looking forward to the Incredible Melk’s upcoming Booty Pageant.

Props to you, Mel.

Before Sunset. DVD. Directed by Richard Linklater. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2004.
7/10

This movie is the sequel to Linklater’s earlier Before Sunrise (1995), in which Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, meets young a young French woman, Celine (Julie Delpy), on a train to Vienna, and spends a night with her before they have to part ways.

At the end of that film, Jesse and Celine made plans to meet each other in Vienna again in six months. As we soon discover, Jesse returned for the meeting, but Celine, though she wanted to, could not. So nearly ten years have passed before they meet again, Celine appearing at a bookshop where Jesse is promoting his bestselling novel, a mostly autobiographical account of their night together.

Like Before Sunrise, this movie is a conversation with a time limit. Jesse now has to catch a plane out of Paris just hours after meeting Celine again, and they have only until then to talk about their lives since they last met, and to deal with what that meeting had meant to them both. For the most part, their conversation is crushingly but realistically banal and evasive. They talk about their jobs, their relationships, and skirt around what is the real issue: how they feel about each other now they have finally met again.

It’s only when their time is running out that they each reveal the extent to which the memory of their one night together has destroyed their ability to love anyone else. Jesse hints repeatedly at the lack of love in his marriage, and how he is only bound to it out of a sense of duty to his young son. Delpy unconvincingly portrays Celine’s sudden burst of anger on the car-ride to her apartment, in which she blames Jesse for her string of superficial relationships with other men. They ascend the stairs to her room, ostensibly so that Celine can play Jesse one the songs she has written, in a silence punctuated by glances that speak of the unacknowledged inevitability of their becoming lovers one more time. Finally, when Celine breaks out her guitar and sings a song about how a man she met one night was everything she ever wanted, Delpy’s sweet, warm voice breaks out of the banality entirely with an elegiac testimony to her love for Jesse that is entirely free of bitterness about never having seen him again.

Finally, a few words passed between them, ending the film, show them both acknowledging Jesse is going to miss his plane: that because of what they have revealed, they are going to leave their relationships for each other. It’s a pleasing change from the similar resolution of the chance meeting in Lost in Translation (2003), where Bob (Bill Murray) goes back to his deadening home-life despite having made an enlivening connection with both Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Tôkyô.

Before Sunset is not a visually interesting movie, and, as I said, the conversation that drives the movie is mostly banal. The film isn’t meritorious in itself, but rather as a sequel. Those who haven’t seen Before Sunrise are advised to see it first or stay away. For those with the necessary background, though, Before Sunset is a thoughtful and affecting wrap-up of the story that Linklater left unfinished back in 1995.

For those inclined to use the word conservative without thinking carefully, my last post expresses a classically conservative sentiment. I’ve just said Japan should keep things the way they are, because the status quo is better than the alternative, according to my values. I’d call myself a libertarian overall, but I can still hold politically conservative views like this. It’s worthwhile to note that whether or not you’re politically conservative will usually depend on the context you find yourself in: if you love freedom of all kinds, you’ll be a political radical under a totalitarian regime (like Hitler’s Germany, or the USSR), but a political conservative under a liberal one, like the USA of the 18th and 19th centuries (leaving the issue of slavery aside for the sake of argument—not that it wasn’t a major hole in pre-civil-war America’s claim to be a liberal state). Arguably, Republicans like George Bush and the bible-bashers who love him don’t deserve to be called politically conservative, since they have little respect for their nation’s political traditions.

On the other hand, there’s also social conservatism, which tends to produce actions such as the LDP’s desire to revise the constitution in order to do such things as prohibit cultural products that lead youth away from time-honoured (but irrational) prejudices, like a preference for sexual coyness. This is the kind of conservatism people often think of when they do things like call people rightwing [sic] jocks, and which I, frankly, find abhorrent. People can exhibit both kinds of conservatism at once, but they don’t have to exhibit one because they exhibit the other. For example, while the Japanese LDP is socially conservative on issues like censorship, their move to alter the constitution is a radical one, since it goes beyond existing norms.

There’s nothing good or bad about political conservatism or radicalism as such. However it’s definitely true that political conservatives are not so enamoured by the new as political radicals in general, and so long as they don’t fear the new simply because of its newness, political conservatives will then be able to more clearly evaluate the merits and deficiencies of the status quo, since they aren’t dedicated to changing it for change’s sake. This is a good thing.

Clampdown on freedom eyed in LDP’s Constitution

The Japanese LDP is probably scared of finally losing government for the first time ever, after their main opposition, the DPJ (DPJ) won 178 seats in the general election of October 2003. So it is drafting a new constitution for Japan which will make its social conservatism a fundamental feature of the country’s political system. The Japan Times reports that they are looking to curtail freedom of assembly, as well as “to restrict or ban the publication or sale of books that have a detrimental effect on young people’s upbringing.” They also want to be able to spend government money on Shintô religious ceremonies. This won’t be ordinary legislation: it’ll probably be not just allowed, but suggested by the constitution. The changes required could be pretty far-reaching, since the current constitution guarantees that “freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed … No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated,” (Article 21). Even “academic freedom” is currently guaranteed specifically, by article 23.

Constitutions are meant to be minimal, and to limit the scope of government to the protection of citizens’ rights to property and self-determination. These moves would clearly transgress the purpose for which written constitutions were championed in the 18th and 19th centuries. In its original form, the US constitution is probably the best of those pioneering documents, and the Japanese ought to think themselves lucky that US officials drafted their current one during the occupation after WWII. For the record, I think the present Japanese constitution is a hell of a lot better than the Australian one. Maybe we could offer to take it off their hands (minus the stuff about the Emperor appointing the Prime Minister and so on).

Let’s hope the DPJ wins the next Japanese election and sets things right.

Incidentally, the Japanese LDP shares few values (except a commitment to privatisation) with the Liberal Democratic Party of Australia, which I recently joined.