The world's most outdated Bailterspace interview

A brief explanation: I was going to start a zine when I was 21. I wrote some pretentious crap and interviewed Three Mile Pilot, and got my friend Conor to do an interview with Bailter Space (before they repunctuated and called themselves Bailterspace, or maybe that was different branding in US vs. NZ, but so and anyway). Then I never got around to starting the magazine on account of deciding who cares? It's possible this has popped up elsewhere, but I remembered it existed today, so: here it is, 18 years late, on the night of me finally seeing Bailterspace for the first time. Cheers, Conor.

Bailter Space played at the Coffee Club in Moorhead, Minnesota on July 17,1995. They all turned out to be extremely nice, and were nice enough to allow this, my first attempt at an interview. c = Me, j = John, a =Alistair, b = Brent. Transcribing the interview was more difficult than I imagined it would be, and it was very difficult to tell by listening who exactly was answering, but here's what I typed out:

c= First of all, who's in the band and what do they play, and that sort of thing?

j= This is myself, I'm John, and there's Alistair, and there's Brent, and Brent plays the drums and he plays samples, and Alistair plays guitar and a little bass, and I play bass and a little guitar and sing and that's it.

c= Ok, when and how did you get started as a band?

j= We started playing together under a different name in 1980.

c= The Gordons?

j= Yeah. We played for 18 months or so and then sorta kinda went various directions and ended up in 1987 or 88 or around there, we became and worked together as Bailter Space and we've been playing as a three piece.

c= So, were the Gordons, was the sound the same as Bailter Space?

j= No, that was like... they had some similarities, but it was like a different band, really. It was a different concept, and a different period of history and it was like a new thing. When we formed Bailter Space it was like a new thing. We weren't trying to... in any way trying to recapture the past. It was not an interest.

c= What is the concept, would you say, behind Bailter Space?

a= What kind of magazine do you have?

c= It's gonna be a zine, he's just starting it up. He's into philosophy and music and the interrelation and that sort of thing.

a= Because yeah, you know, we can answer in many different ways to the last question, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn't like a --

c= (rudely interrupting:) Well I guess in a musical way, mainly, or aesthetic or whatever.

a= So, can we have that again?

c= What is the concept behind Bailter Space, as you see it?

a= (chuckles) There are many. There are many varying and shifting concepts, like something that's in orbit, you know. It changes, you know, the form of it changes, but the concept being the orbit of the star or what, you know, the sound or whatever, and then the sun is in orbit.. (asks Brent:) ...does the sun orbit?

b= Well, yeah, but we're kind of orbiting the sun.

j= Yeah, we're orbiting the sun.

a= Anyway, we're in orbit, basically. I was trying to make a parallel, but it tipped out a bit, you know.

j= Is the sun orbiting (unintelligible)?

a= But, the orbit being the main concept... the forces of gravity. We have a concept of sound sometimes, where we talk about how we're going to make a textural sort of production. And, the song kind of speaks for itself more, in concept. It's not like we make a law for a concept, so finite is that it's more like the listener conceptualizes with the song.

j= Every song extends, in some way, the concept. Every song we write is like another step forward.

c= What initially made you want to start making music?

a= It would probably vary for each three of us.

j= We all started playing music when we were really young, and we hadn't met each other at that point. I'm not sure what it was for me. It was just like hearing music and just realizing I loved it. It had a lot of power. I don't know. I guess it had a lot of influence on my life as a youngster, and I just gravitated towards it. And as soon as I could get my hands on a guitar, I did, and I taught myself and never thought about it from that point. It was just something I loved doing, so I kept doing it.

c= You're from New Zealand, right? (them: Yeah) And you're living in New York? (them: Yeah) How do the two compare, as far as, in general and musically speaking?

a= Musically? I don't know, it's a lot different, it's like three times the size of New Zealand, so there's three lots of New Zealand there. We're there, and there's a lot of music going on. It's great. Maybe you have to wait for things more in New Zealand, whereas in New York, if there's something you wanted to see and it's not there, then you can probably come up with another idea about something else you might want to go and absorb. So I think that that would be one of the things mainly different.

a= Yeah, time runs on a different kind of... it's a faster pace, really a lot louder. Faster food. (laughs)

b= Faster cars.

j= Not really; we've got pretty fast cars over there too.

c= How's your tour been going? When did it start, how long will it last, and where are you going after Moorhead?

j= That's like good, good, good, yes, good, and yes. (laughs) It started about two and a half weeks ago and the U.S. part lasts six weeks, and after Moorhead we're heading to Seattle, but I think we've got one show before Seattle.

b= Missoula.

a= Missoula, Montana.

j= And two weeks after the tour we go to Europe for a month, so it's the start of a bigger tour.

c= How do you like touring, anyway? Do enjoy playing live?

a= Yeah, playing live's great. The road runs you down from time to time.

j= It's like the point of our existence at the moment. When we moved from New Zealand, all three of us dedicated ourselves to the band, as being the main drift of what we were wanting to do. So, when we finally get out on the road and tour, it's like we're fulfilling part of what we're doing. That's what we do. We're in a band, we are musicians, and we've had a great opportunity to stay together as a band, and most of the time just be musicians. And touring's a great way to keep playing. I mean, we've been on the road for two weeks, and I feel like we've been on the road for a couple of hours. I think I could do it forever, and probably will.

c= For some bands, it's kinda hard to tour.

j= Sometimes you can have a bad day, I think, and you go "arghhh", you've had enough, but the next day...

a= Getting tired is tough.

j= It's nice to have a day off occasionally, and have a good sleep and catch up.

a= The driving...

j= The luxury of being in your home, surrounded by things you like doing. But it's a small compromise for what you...

a= We'll be back home in like three weeks. We'll be able to hang out all we want then. But at the moment it's fine.

c= So what type of venues do you normally play? Is it kinda like this, or bigger, or?

a= It varies. From this to larger warehouse type places. No stadiums or such on this tour.

j= There's been a few larger 500 or 600 capacity rooms, not that we get that many people.

c= How have the audiences reacted to your show?

j= They like us. We get a lot of people that have never heard of us, never seen us, who just happen to be there that night. They really get surprised and go, "wow, this is really cool". But apart from those people, we occasionally have the hardcore fan thing happening around America.

c= How big do you think is your fanship or whatever in America?

j= In America? Well, we don't know. Matador has never really told us how many records we've sold.

a= But every night we play, we're playing new towns to new people, and if we play good or people like it, well you're always adding to that. So we're in a way doing the groundwork. But even before we came to New York in 88, was the first time; even before we arrived here there was a pocket of people in each city that were familiar with our music through Flying Nun Records releases. So now that we're signed with Matador, and we have domestic releases, that's really helped us a lot to get through to a larger audience.

c= How did that signing thing happen? Did they find you, or did you find them?

j= Well, it was a bit of both. We were working with Gerard from Matador before Matador existed. He used to work for Homestead and we were thinking about working with Homestead, but it was really because of our respect for Gerard. He's just a great guy, and he's done a lot of good things for the music industry.

c= What is Matador like, as far as promotions, and how much creative control do you get and that sort of thing?

j= They're great, as far as that goes. They really give us complete creative control, for one because that's the reason they signed us. They like the way we operated. Before we were working with them, we were largely independent and we managed to survive for quite a few years and build our own thing, and they liked our record covers, they liked our songwriting approach, they liked our overall direction. They don't really tamper with that, at all. They just leave us to our own devices, and that's one of the reasons why we like Matador too, because we don't want to be told how to dress or when to go on tour too much.

c= How many tours have you done in the past, and how do they compare with this one?

j= Countless. I wouldn't be able to count them. First off, we toured New Zealand too many numerous times to count, and toured Australia three times, and this is our second national tour in America, but we've done a lot of minitours on the east coast over the years, and Europe we've toured I think four times, and we're going back there again very soon.

c= What's your following like at home, in New Zealand?

j= It's one of our biggest audiences, and it's actually grown out of proportion since we've left the country. From reports that we get, it's like we've become... I think New Zealand is whipping up a patriotic storm about Bailter Space while we've been away; they see us as carrying the flag, or something like that, so they're kind of proud of us. Even though, they think we're a lot bigger here than we actually are. It's grown in their imagination.

c= How do your live shows compare with your studio recordings?

j= I think they can be pretty close, because we've always recorded in a similar manner to how we actually perform live. We play all the instruments at the same time, except for vocals, which are standard because vocals have to be done separately. Otherwise, you get lots of instruments going through your vocal mic. And occasionally we do a guitar overdub, but we didn't even do that on the last album; there's no guitar overdubs.

c= Really? Because, it sounds really layered, a big thick sound.

j= We were very pleased with the producer we were working with. He immediately understood what we're trying to do, and he didn't try to change us into some other kind of band, and he just went straight to it and got the sounds we wanted. And we hardly even had to produce it, because it was already sounding good before it was produced. We just got it on the tape sounding good, through careful microphone placement and taking a bit of time before we laid the tracks down. So it's no problem for us to play our songs live. Some people say our live performances are better than our records, some say the other way around.

c= Tell me about the new album. I've heard it isn't as noisy as previous ones, but I haven't personally heard it. What are your feelings on noise in general in music?

j= Well, I think it has a little more space in it, here and there. Less overdubs. But I think there's definitely moments where there's plenty of noise going on. It's not lacking noise. But it's true, I think some of our previous albums were more layered with overdubs. But we wanted to, with the new album, we just had a quick talk before we wrote the songs and recorded them, about the direction we wanted to take, and we decided that we wanted to get to the heart of what Bailter Space is. We didn't want to do any fancy overdubs or anything like that. We wanted to record the songs directly onto the tape, as honestly as we could, and see how it worked out. And we did that, and we're very pleased with it for that reason, because it somehow catches the freshness of the songs, that were brand new songs, and that were recorded in a lot of cases just as the first take. Sometimes we did a lot of takes to get the right take, but most of them were very early takes. So they're recorded before they had become overplayed and before they been toured ten times and got sick of them, so they're still new and exciting to us, and somehow that excitement was retained in the recordings. That's what I feel, anyway.

c= Are you more of a texture type band or a song/melody type band?

j= Both, I think. We definitely have songs that are quite melody strong, but are also heavily into texture. That's one of the main elements we play with. That, and harmonic overtones and all the instruments ringing together as a whole.

c= What's your favorite Bailter Space album and song?

j= It varies on the week. There are times when I just don't want to put on a Bailter Space record. Sometimes it's too close. We're all in the band and you don't always want to play your own music. Sometimes it's hard to be objective and take a step back. At the moment I'm a lot enjoying playing the new album. I like "Retro", I like a lot of songs off that album. But, I like "Thermos" as an album, a lot. Which, actually, it's going to be re-released very shortly, including "Tanker". "Tanker" and "Thermos". And that catalog is going to come out on Matador label.

c= Yeah, I just bought them in London for too much money, I didn't think they were available over here.

j= Yeah, they're not available, but however your money is not wasted, because what you would've bought is the original pressing, whereas it'll be a different product by a different company. I mean, it's the same master tape. But, if you're interested in the collective value of it, maybe the import will be worth more eventually. But that's one of the reasons why we like the idea of having a domestic release in America is because the prices are more fair. We don't want to be expensive, we want people to be able to afford to buy records. The more people that buy our records, the more people that get to hear it. It's a good thing for them, it's a good thing for us.

c= Are you ever going to be distributed through Atlantic?

j= That's always a possibility. It has been loosely discussed at different points, and that could happen, but it's up to both parties. For a start, it's up to them to come forth with the idea, and up to us to decide whether we want that, or whether we want to stay more on the indie type label.

c= What do you consider your influences to be?

j= I don't think our influences have really been largely from other bands, and I've never been able to understand why that should necessarily be the case. For instance, everyone on this planet walks around, and we're all influenced by common things and by different things and everything around us, being the cycles of the moon or television or makeup or your mother, all make up part of what you become, what direction you take in your life, so I don't see why you have to necessarily be directly influenced by another rock band. Why can't it be the sound of a vacuum cleaner or something like that? All three of us listen to very different music from each other, and undoubtedly different things have influenced us at different times, but I honestly couldn't think of one specific band that we could say, "that's our main influence", it just wouldn't be correct.

c= Do you listen to music much, and what are your favorite bands?

j= Well, while we've been driving along in the van, we've been listening to John Coltrane, just while we're driving here today, and Can, and we've been listening to some Schoenberg and a little rock stuff. Early this morning we just picked up a big box of CD's from Amphetamine Reptile. We know (?), so we visited him, and he gave us a box of those. We don't even know what's in the box yet, but we'll probably end up playing some of those. So we're open to listening to anything, any form of music. I know Alistair at the moment is listening to Latino kinda beats, like Tito Puente. We're all listening to an incredible variety of different things.

c= What makes you want to continue making music?

a= How derogatory is this question meant?

c= Oh, it's not derogatory. Like when you walk up in the morning, what makes you say, "oh I want to pick up my guitar again"?

a= I love music, and very much enjoy playing and working in a group. You're learning about music all the time.

j= I think you hit on it there, Alistair. I think it's mostly just the personal satisfaction of it more than anything else. It's not so much like a job, even though we have to be professional and work in a professional manner. It's not a job to us; we love it, we like what we're doing. Otherwise I don't think any of us would bother.

a= It's great fun to be in a band.

c= Do you want your music to affect what your listeners feel, and if so, how?

j= Yeah, we would like to think that people are going to be moved in some way, that everyone is going to be moved in a different way from another. For instance, lyrics could be interpreted any way whatsoever. You can write a song for a specific meaning. One person will take it right, and then someone else will have a totally different idea on it, and sometimes it gets back to us what someone thinks a song means, and some of it can be really interesting. Even just the name of the band, Bailter Space, travelling different parts of the world, people ask us what it means, but just as many people tell us what it means to them, and that's really interesting to find out.

c= What does it mean, anyway?

j= I don't know. It's an open-ended sort of name. The "bailter" part of it you won't find in any dictionary, so it's kind of like a blank for people to fill in whatever way they've been touched by the music, becomes what the name means to them. It's their space, the "bailter space".

c= How do you go about writing songs?

j= That varies with different songs, too. They often start with guitar, sometimes just with a simple riff, sometimes they start with a sample.

a= A melody, a harmony.

j= Sometimes with a whistling sound in your head.

a= There's various different kinds of approaches, and various different kinds of inspirations.

j= It's not as though we've got a pet formula, where we know we're going to write a song like "this". We like to approach each song as they come up. Sometimes they just emerge, and other times we're really working on them in a more...

a= Going for a sound, maybe.

j= Yeah, or a concept, an idea, or a kind of a beat.

c= Do you all work on the songs together?

j= Yeah, as much as we can.

a= We check every song we have as by the band. It's the way that we choose to work, to write together.

-----

At this point, the opening band, Bossk, started playing extremely loudly, and we ended the interview. The crowd was pretty sparse when Bailter Space took the stage. Apparently few in Fargo had heard of Bailter Space, and fewer still wanted to be exposed to new music. I think Bailter Space were a bit disappointed by this and the non-demonstrative nature of the upper-midwesterners who did stick around to see them. They put on a good, albeit short, show despite frequent difficulties with Alistair's Rickenbacker going out of tune and subsequently having to switch guitars after every song.

After the show I briefly talked to John a bit more. For guitar geeks amongst you, John plays his bass through a marshall guitar amp. He does this so that the chords aren't muddled in the way they would be through a bass amp. He uses a Rat distortion pedal on a couple songs. When he plays guitar, he mainly uses a Fender Jaguar. Alistair mainly uses a Rickenbacker with a Rat distortion pedal and a Boss digital delay pedal. He plays through a Marshall amp and a Fender amp at the same time.

Among other things, I really meant to ask more about their use of a sampler, which they didn't use live. After having heard "Wammo" for myself, I can report that it is quite an excellent album, although my favorite remains "Robot World". Thanks again to Bailter Space for letting me interview them.

Overcoming Dogphobia, Volume Two.

Four months ago, I posted about my quest to overcome dogphobia, a quest that I expected to be long and grueling, but ultimately worthwhile.

Instead, it's been roughly the equivalent of that comedy routine staple of the man running into the brick wall, only to find that it's made of paper, and passing right through it.

I'm loath to say my dogphobia's over, because I may well find myself in an unexpected situation where it emerges, but, well, as far as I can tell, it's over. I haven't had anything resembling a fear of a dog in months, despite running into them reasonably frequently in walking around town and the like. More than that: it's transmuted into not just tolerance but appreciation for and empathy with dogs, which I was neither particularly trying for nor expecting as a side effect.

That's the short version of what's happened. For those curious, a bit about the how.

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As I've previously noted, I'm a deep believer in the current discoveries of neuroscience, which indicate that the brain is not a fixed system but constantly changing, and which can be rewired not just by drugs or electrolysis but through focused, repeated conscious thought. (A neuroscience maxim: "Neurons that fire together, wire together.") I believe we do this - or more pointedly, have it done to us - all the time, unconsciously. So why not take charge and do it yourself?

The method that I principally relied on stems from a technique called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). While I didn't discuss this issue with a therapist, it might have helped; nonetheless, I think you can attempt to apply the principles without doing so. Unlike traditional therapy, which is about dredging up your past ad infinitum (and, for those who have asked, I never did dredge up any particular trauma from my past that caused this), CBT is about identifying the thoughts that you have that trigger an emotional reaction, and then consciously supplanting them with a plausible alternative.

So to break it down:

The triggered thought was that a dog of a certain size would jump up, attack, knock me over, and rip my throat out whilst I was falling out of control. (Specific, I know, but when I probed into exactly WHAT I was afraid of happening, it kept coming back to that.)

The plausible alternative was NOT, as many have tried to get me to believe over the years, that all dogs are great, or that "there are no bad dogs, only bad owners". The former is eminently falsifiable with five seconds on Google, while the latter doesn't really change anything but my view on the fact that the dog that could be ripping out my throat might have had a bad owner, and is only helpful to the extent that I know the owner.

So the ACTUAL plausible alternative thought was this: "if a dog would be likely to attack me and rip its throat out, it would be sufficiently unsafe that it would probably be put down, so this dog in front of me is, more likely than not, not going to do that".

Which sounds verbose, and in actual practice it quickly became a subverbal thought that summarizes that - almost thinking "replacement, safe" as a synecdoche for the whole sentence as I physically calmed myself (which in turn initially developed as a corrective to my instinctual flight response - unexpectedly, it may have resulted in me finding dogs not just non-threatening but actually calming along the way). It's hard to explain, but, well, it worked.

A few things helped along the way. One friend suggested reading a book called INSIDE OF A DOG by Alexandra Horowitz about dog behaviour. Although it wasn't meant for me (the preface starts with a sentence along the lines of "So you've loved dogs all your life, and I bet you've wondered about their crazy idiosyncracies!" - um, wrong), it did give me a bit more insight into them, particularly the value of scent, and that their curiosity is borne of that. So now I offer my hand to dogs (in fist form, which I'm told is better), and they smell it.

Another thing was talking about dogs with other friends who, it turned out, had been attacked by dogs, in some cases viciously. Whilst it might seem counterintuitive, it put my phobia into perspective - these people had actually been through much worse, and overcome it successfully, so what I had to deal with was relatively minor.

The day that I recognized a turning point was meeting my friend Peter's dog, a dog I had feared to the point of avoidance. I remembered her being a reasonably large dog, aggressive, and, well, a dog to be feared.

Sofi was not a dog to be feared by any reasonable person. Sofi is a whippet blend who basically acts like a cat. Fifteen minutes after coming over, Sofi was curled up next to me on the couch. The only thing that keeps me from saying that Sofi is impossible to fear is the fact that I HAD feared her.

It's been a couple months since then. I've gone from crossing the road to avoid dogs to deliberately staying on the same side, not so that I can overcome my fear, but because I want to meet them. The other day, there was a reasonably sized, glorious dog owned by some people in front of me, and I tried to catch up, but they were too far, and I watched as they entered the park, let the dog off its leash, and it ran, a figure of beauty.

By coincidence, the dog and its owners wound up at my cafe. Turns out it's a Weimaraner. Of a size that, while not massive, could easily knock me over and rip out my throat if running at full tilt.

I want one. I've been looking at Weimaraner puppies on TradeMe.

I can't actually own a dog right now at this point in my life, for lots of reasons, but the fact that I'm doing this, at some level, makes me feel almost unrecognizable to myself.

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Which is, to me, the most emboldening thing about this whole experiment. That I don't have a tedious crippling fear of dogs is nice. But if that's a part of me that I've carried for most of my conscious life as "me", and it's gone now, what else is contingent? What other personality characteristics and behaviours that I don't like about myself, or that give me problems, can I get rid of, cast by the wayside?

I'm not sure yet, but I look forward to finding out. And if you have anything in your life that you don't like and want to change, hopefully you can find some small gram of inspiration and motivation for positive action from this.

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For further reading:

THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF, by Norman Doidge, is a good introduction to the frontiers of neuroplasticity, and first awoke the notion in me that if stroke victims could rewire their brain to walk again, that smaller-scale change should be much more easily achievable.

TEACH YOURSELF COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY, by Christine Wilding and Aileen Milne, is a book I haven't read in full, but is a great resource for anyone interested either in understanding CBT or putting it into practice in their life.

In my attempt to devour all the neuroscience reading in the library, I am currently reading TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO GET HAPPY, by Teresa Aubele, Stan Wenck, and Susan Reynolds. It's a self-helpy text that provides many of the current ideas of not just neuroplasticity but plasticity of the self in complete layman's terms, as well as providing bite-size summaries of CBT and other methods for changing unhealthy mental patterns.

Finally, I should note that I don't view CBT as a cure-all for all mental health issues, and certainly not the half-assed self-administered version that I did. In some cases, medication may well be appropriate; in others, a professional can provide the distance that you may be unable to provide yourself. But, from my experience, I do think its potential everyday value is underknown and underutilized.

Some Thoughts on We Can Create

I'm not a graphic designer, by trade or even by skill, but when my flatmate won tickets to We Can Create, I thought I'd check it out, both as a window into a world I don't know much about and under the theory that creative people, regardless of their endeavor, can offer insights to other creative people about process and attitude. Plus it wasn't entirely non-filmy: Taika Waititi, director of BOY and EAGLE VS. SHARK, was speaking, and The Light Surgeons were performing a live VJing work called SuperEverything. So: why the hell not?

The seminar was absolutely worth it for the first two speakers alone. Sarah Maxey came out of the gate a bit goofy - my third note is "apparently (this presentation is going to be) nothing but bear jokes" - but once I clicked into her mode of presentation I found her both entertaining and inspiring. Her field of hand-drawn lettering fits into what she calls the "awkward space between art and design", but she doesn't limit herself to that - her project "World Animal" was about finding unexpected appearances of animal simlucra in the manmade world. Perhaps the most exciting was a joint project called "Sentimental Journey", where she and another lettering artist independently handled half of 20 two word phrases, which were then combined to sometimes incoherent and sometimes astonishing results. "Productive tension as result of inconsistent aesthetic", I noted. It also underlined one of her major points: "talent plays less of a role than persistence".

Creating first and analyzing second was a pivotal message of the morning, and one brought fully into perspective by the even more inspiring duo of Thomas and Martin Poschauko, twin Bavarian designers who showcased their thesis project NEA MACHINA. They limited themselves to two elements - a picture and the words NEA MACHINA - and, with that strict brief, created 10,000 artworks over four months, a thousand of which are showcased in their (currently German-language only) book. Their philosophy also extended to free flow between computer and handmade - so, after reaching a certain point manipulating an image in Illustrator, they'd realize it looked like yarn and built a simulation in yarn, then photographed themselves playing it. Or, radically simplifying the number of vectors in a hand drawing scanned into Photoshop until it looks like an expressionist woodcut, then making the woodcut. "Doing is a precondition of thinking", they stated at one point, and whilst much of their work didn't appeal to my personal aesthetic (and perhaps sometimes to theirs), it was clear that the result for them was one of expanding a toolkit, challenging one's selves, and refreshing their creative world view.

Neither "Sentimental Journey" nor NEA MACHINA were particularly economically-driven works, which left one wondering how applicable this was to day-to-day operations. NZ advertising agency Assembly, who described themselves as working at the boundary of art and science, came out after the lunch break with work deeply committed to creative challenges while fully embedded in a capitalist structure. Their advertisement for the NZ Herald involved printing the visual material they wanted to shoot (HUGE rolls that took multiple days to print in color), then putting it through a printing press (which has a tendency to take anything on it that's not as strong as unprinted paper and rip it to shreds), then photographing it (whilst not having anything resembling a registration system). Meanwhile, the V Motion Project (linked above) used XBox Kinects to create an interactive music system - my favorite hack in this was discovering that overlapping Kinects cancel each other out, so they attached a motor to one so that it would be permanently shaking slightly, thus obviating the cancellation. It was great to have such an in-depth look at the processes for these projects, even if they weren't particularly personally applicable.

Having said that, there was something deflating about the level of passion, dedication, and commitment going in to create something that was meant to sell energy drinks. (Note to self during presentation: "I saw the greatest minds of our generation working 70 hour weeks to increase share prices by 1/8th of a point.") Assembly spoke about their moral limits in the work that they'd take on forthrightly (no cigarette advertising, for instance), and intimated that they saw a future where they weren't doing advertising work, even if they were vague about the path: "it's like we're training for some other event; we don't know what it is yet".

This is getting remarkably unshort, so: Jonathan Barnbrook, graphic designer (most famous to many for his work on David Bowie's HEATHEN, with Damien Hirst, and Occupy London). After some prefatory remarks on the relative place of the artist and designer in societal perception, he launched into a career retrospective of his work, in both font design and more conventional graphic design. He was perhaps the most well-spoken presenter of the day, and the mixture of his work (focusing quite extensively on non-economically driven work, such as pictograms critical of the Olympics, which stood in effective dialectic to Assembly) was hugely impressive, as was his closing admonition that "the important thing is to be happy". (Also interesting: him drawing a line between himself and artists in that the work he did for the Olympics e.g. was free, whilst everything artists do is monetized.) I'd have liked a bit more process, but it was a full and worthwhile hour, so basically I'm probably just complaining that it wasn't longer.

A short break, and then followed perhaps the most colossal miscalculation of the day, or perhaps a strategic provocation. I won't link to Rockin' Jelly Bean for those of you innocuously reading at work who would be unexpectedly confronted by boobies shooting energy bolts, but: well, that's how we spent the next half hour and change, with the Japanese designer basically showing page after page of variations on huge-breasted women in various situations. Oh, there's one with a tail. There's one riding a fish. There's one who has an entrance to a circus between her legs. etc. I wasn't personally offended (tho many were - I was in the front row, but heard of walkouts later), but I did find it a rather odd inclusion to the day, especially when somebody whose work was so provocative was unwilling to speak much to its provocative contents other than "I like strong women, and this work celebrates women's bodies". (Anatomically impossible bodies that help reify an impossible ideal for women whilst monomanically positioning them as sex objects, no?) To add to the general discomfort (already high because of his positioning after Barnbrook's socially engaged work), he spoke in Japanese and had a female translator, whose role became exceptionally awkward during the Q&A when issues of sexism and portrayal of women's bodies came up. I'll give WCC this, though, it definitely added some great grist for the mill for conversations for the remainder of the day. There's a wonderful discussion to be had around the free expression of individual sexuality vs. the role of creators in controlling a mediasphere and the responsibility that in turn engenders in re: the depiction of female form, even if it didn't happen on stage.

Am I a horrible person for finding AdBusters equally problematic? Perhaps. I found myself taken aback to recognize an early image in their slideshow (shown above) as being from an old friend Lyza Danger Gardner. Whilst everyone else's work was either about creating something new or creative reappropriation and transformation, much of what AdBusters does is nick imagery in service of creating a narrative. I was more than somewhat appalled when Ellen, a graphic designer there, basically said she went through Tumblr, grabbed images they like, and had gotten in trouble because of using images without permission ... and then, when I thought this narrative would end "and now we're more considerate of using pictures of 17-year old girls that their friends might have posted on Tumblr without permission", instead ended by saying "we think it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission. To which I say: fuck that. There's plenty of images in the world, and no shortage of options. It's one thing to subvert a piece of art or corporate branding that's in the public space, and another to take somebody's image to use for your political narrative. And it's a narrative that they're advancing in disingenous ways: in introducing their new book about economics, their editor stated "it's about emotion, not facts". The slide that they used, whilst difficult to discern in complete detail seemed to underscore the point. The left side of the page had a graph that represented population growth as suddenly spiraling out of control, while the right side had a graph of gross domestic product (IIRC) that was growing at .2 slope or so. Only trick is, it appeared that the graph on the left spanned 2000 years, the graph on the right spanned 200. Don't get me wrong, I generally agree with these guys more often than not, I just wish I could support their mode of behaviour, one I suspect they would find repellent in an organization that they ethically opposed. I don't know if a Q&A would have engaged these more problematic issues; sadly, for time reasons it was axed.

If you've seen the above, you've basically seen Taika Waititi's talk. He dicked around for five minutes in some inexplicable combination of awkward comedy and flat-out awkwardness - to the point where people walked out - then finally got into it and provided the most laughs of the day. The main new material was hysterical examples of the drawings he's been doing for his Kickstarter rewards (famously delayed in delivery, as noted in the papers lately; "Never do a Kickstarter", advised Waititi), and some clips from his new vampire film shot in Wellington and co-written with Jemaine Clement. The presentation space wasn't very forgiving to the darkly-shot material, but it seemed like his signature mix of cleverness and stupidity, much less polished than BOY. He's self-funding the film and will own it at the end; I got the impression that BOY was a bruising process, and that this is a retreat to safer, more nurturing creative environment.

The Light Surgeons closed the day with their piece SuperEverything. I'm largely unfamiliar with VJ culture, but apparently they're big names in it, and having seen snippets of their work and being fond of split-screen composition I was quite curious to see how it played out. In theory, the two-screen depth-based setup - a scrim in front of the stage, the performers in the middle, and a second opaque screen in back - seemed appealing as a unique way to experience projected imagery that couldn't be simulated at home. In practice, I was a bit disappointed in both form and content. In terms of the former, there were moments of beauty, but overall the design of the piece felt overly cluttered; as if to make up for this clutter, the actual content was excessively didactic. I'd been bemoaning the inevitability of narrative in films like BARAKA and KOOYANISQATSI earlier in the day, where beautiful natural images are contrasted with highly deterministic factory images to create a pointed political message. If you like that, this will be up your alley, I guess. I'm still glad I experienced it, but I doubt I'd see them again, unless other projects have a radically different spin.

Overall, despite being generally less positive on speakers/performers as the day continued, I did enjoy the hell out of it, and even the criticisms of the presentations that I've brought up are, I think, equally important to challenging and developing one's ways of thought and practice. (Those criticisms should not be taken as criticisms of the event itself: my only criticism on that level - apart from not running on time and thus losing Adbusters Q&A - is that the sound seemed to be a recurring problem throughout the day.) Would I pay whatever the hell tickets cost next year? Maybe ... while I'm wary about falling into the trap of going to seminars to get inspiration instead of actually, you know, DOING THINGS, it's certainly given me a lot of inspiration.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make something.

Auckland Cinephile #1 (week of August 23rd)

Auckland Cinephile is a guide to the various arthouse and retrospective releases of the week that in our highly subjective opinion are worth mentioning. Listing doesn't guarantee a theatre will follow through with their plans, or I might have fucked up, so double check before going. For a full listing of screen times across Auckland, Flicks or the theatre website is probably your best bet. If you think we've forgotten something, please mention it in the comments. Suggestions for improved formatting also welcomed.

CURRENT RELEASES:

* NZ documentary HOW FAR IS HEAVEN was one of my highlights of the NZFF, and I'm glad to see this beautiful observational documentary about a small community is returning to local theatres.

How Far is Heaven Trailer from Deer Heart Films on Vimeo.

* Kenneth Lonergan's MARGARET, starring Anna Paquin and feted by many critics as one of the greatest US films of 2011, unexpectedly returns to Rialto for its third trip to theatres this year (after World Cinema Showcase and a May run at some other theatres). Screening in 35mm!

* Pang Ho-Cheung's VULGARIA, a cheap quick and filthy film about the perils of filmmaking, is the first film from NZFF's Incredibly Strange section to return for a theatrical run (at Event Queen St and St. Luke's). Other Asian films releasing this week: the Chinese STARRY STARRY NIGHT and LAN KWAI FONG 2.

* Academy Cinemas are hosting a mystery screening of an "ultra-out there black comedy involving splatter and irreverance (sic) at every turn blows the politically correct society apart, literally. Rated R18 contains violence and offensive language, this film will have its Australasian premiere at the Academy, Sunday the 26th of August at 7.30pm."

* And, rather unexpectedly, a lot of major critics have reasonably nice things to say about HOPE SPRINGS, despite it seeming like blue-rinse fodder and having a poster I can't bring myself to look at without cringing.

Continuing in release are a passel of NZFF '12 films, including:
* I WISH directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda (STILL WALKING, AFTER LIFE)
* BERNIE by Richard Linklater (SLACKER, BEFORE SUNRISE)
* SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS, the LCD Soundsystem concert film/documentary.

REPERTORY SCREENINGS:

* Terrence Malick's second film, DAYS OF HEAVEN, returns to Academy Cinemas in HD for four screenings. They're also showing a Who double feature of THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT and QUADROPHENIA on Sunday at 3:15.

* This Monday's film at Auckland Film Society: VACATION, a 2007 German film directed by Thomas Arslan (35mm).

* Dave and Dan present LABYRINTH on Sunday at Britomart Country Club (Blu-Ray).

* Monterey Cinemas plays digitally MAX MANUS Friday at 6:30 and THE BIG SLEEP Sunday at 2:00.

* Berkeley Cinemas in Mission Bay plays THE WIZARD OF OZ Sunday at 6 pm.

Unfinished notes on the sadness of HOLY MOTORS

Arriving on a wave of hosannahs from Cannes (although no laurels - it left the Croissette prizeless), HOLY MOTORS was my most anticipated film of NZFF 2012. The word was that it was bugnuts, joyously insane. And I love joyously insane. I love Leos Carax, the director, who is responsible for my favorite live-action scene in cinema, Denis Lavant's run to David Bowie's "Modern Love" in MAUVAIS SANG. He's responsible for THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE as well, a glorious film that was ruinious financially and to his career: HOLY MOTORS is only his second feature in the 21 years since then. His previous feature, POLA X, I've only seen once: it lives faintly in my memory as an artistic challenge but spiritual slog, certainly nothing as uplifting as HOLY MOTORS seemed to be from a distance. I knew little going in, other than Denis Lavant featured prominently throughout playing different roles, and many of them were absurd, and all in all, it seemed like riotous fun. The remarks that I heard post-the first screening at NZFF (a Friday afternoon one I couldn't make) attempted to mitigate my expectation - "it doesn't add up to much, but it's lots of fun", was the common refrain.

Fast-forward to the end of the screening, and my immediate question was not "what the fuck did I just see" (a question most of the audience seemed to have), but this: why am I so sad?

And why the hell is nobody else reacting like this?

Maybe it's where my brain was. NZFF 2012 was a festival, as I've noted elsewhere, characterized by the transition from film to digital, DCP stepping in for film, works like SIDE BY SIDE (which I skipped watching but couldn't avoid hearing about) analyzing the trend, TABU sending a love letter to cinema's past, and TWO YEARS AT SEA waving goodbye to the physical medium of film altogether. HOLY MOTORS, not content with these challenges, took things a step further, and imagined a near-future world where the apparatus of cinema is vanishing completely. That it's often hilarious as fuck and relentlessly inventive is true, but it's often funny in the way Samuel Beckett is funny, maybe: in service of a bleaker truth.

I've only seen HOLY MOTORS once, and I'm bound to get some details wrong, but herewith, a spoiler-filled discussion of what I saw in this film. (Well, until I bailed. You'll see.)

SETUP: We meet an older man, alone, in his room. (This man, as it transpires, is the director Leos Carax.) Hidden away in his room is a secret door to a cinema. This is the only cinema we see in the film. Am I right in remembering the audience sleeping? Perhaps not. Regardless, it's disconnected from the world. Is this where the films that we see are going - to a hidden audience - or is this (more likely) the tomb of the cinema audience of the past? A black dog roams the audience - a guard dog, like you'd find at a deserted warehouse, perhaps? Or is there other symbolic freight here?

(Incidentally, Drew McWeeny's review, which is pretty insightful and great albeit seemingly unwilling to address the obsolesence of cinema as more than just a possible reading, reminds me that the film starts with early Meuybridge photography. It's the birth of film, and perhaps it's not unreasonable to read this opening as the dateline on a tombstone, showing the birth and death, before we get to the epitaph.)

MEET THE ACTOR: Somehow (the precise shot order eludes me) we get to a lovely house with sports cars that the actor, Denis Lavant, emerges from. We are led to believe that this is his home, and therefore he is well compensated for his work. (But is it? Bear in mind when we flash forward for the night he winds up in another home entirely, and as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the boundary of the films is not as clear as the inside/outside of the limousine that appears to be the organizing principle.)

With only a limo driver as staff, seemingly, he prepares for his first job, and like many things in HOLY MOTORS, parallels should be made with that which is absent. He does not have a hair and makeup department. He does not have a director. He does not have a camera crew, and as he arrives on site in an old woman's costume, no crew whatsoever are apparent. For some reason, I think all the great films about filmmaking (DAY FOR NIGHT and 8 1/2 spring immediately to mind), and how they take as their principal text the nature of the filmmaking family: the group of people that must come together to make a film happen. With the exception of the singular indulgence of the driver, and one other forthcoming character, we never see any non-actors involved in making these films. (Again, as I recall. Correct me if I'm wrong on this or any point.)

PERFORMANCE #1: It's difficult to work out on a first viewing the entire schema for what Carax is trying to do with his choices of scenes, but I think that the sheer variety of textures and stories that he chooses are meant to reflect the cliches and limitations of cinema. Nonetheless, things must be ordered for a reason, and it seems like a thesis statement for the film that the actor's very first performance is of an elderly woman, alone, ignored on the street. Metaphor for film as it once was?

PERFORMANCE #2: there's clearly a dialectic intended between the first performance, reliant on makeup, and this, its total opposite: a performance in a green-screen. Actors enter one by one, exit without interacting with each other. This scene is of course an amazing demonstration of Lavant's physicality, but it's equally noteworthy photographically: in that the images captured of the performance of Lavant bounding about in motion capture are far more striking than the CGI results, not just in this film but virtually any film I can think of. This reaches its apex when a second performer, a contortionist, joins, and Lavant and her are joined in stunning physical twists and turns, whilst simultaneously transformed into laughable serpent gods having sex.

Again, humans (apart from a disembodied voice, which may or may not be human) are absent from the means of production.

PERFORMANCE #3: And the Godzilla music hits the screen, whilst we have allusions to LA BELLE ET LA BETE and KING KONG as the monster attacks. Here, I decided that Carax was exploring every genre and turning it inside out (a decision that later scenes, perhaps, made me equivocate). As this went on, I found this more and more a bleak, trenchant commentary on the limits of genre: by seeing something so outside our expectations within that genre, we were reminded just how entrenched the rules of each genre were, how ossified our expectations of cinema had become.

But that darkness would settle in later. There's no question this section is a glorious goof, and I think it's here that many viewers decide just to take this film as a comedy. (It's quite significant in this context, though, that the subsequent scene, of a cab driver picking up his daughter from a party, is almost mirth-free: a needed corrective.) But it's also the first place where the reality of what we're seeing starts to break down: when a fashion photographer's assistant's fingers are bitten off, there's no sense that it's fake. It's actually quite scary, as we still don't even know the ground rules at this point: is this an actor intruding into other's lives? We eventually learn of invisible cameras, but here is our first (and not last) sign of invisible special effects artists.

It's also quite a mean-spirited moment - the assistant isn't THAT terrible of a person, as I recall - and one where I perhaps in retrospect feel the anger overwhelming the silliness. And if I'm not wrong, it's somewhere in this section where if I recall correctly we first see the Pont-Neuf, the site of Carax's career Waterloo (I mean this in terms of his ability to get films made). Is there a connection here? Is there something to be made of the fact that, whilst the film being made has no real crew (and Carax, more than likely, has a crew a shadow of the size of his old crews), the insipid fashion photographer has a gigantic supplemental entourage?

… and this is the point where I would love to continue, but I'm reasonably confident that I can't do a great job without a second viewing (possibly even with one, but anyway), and this terrific piece captured more eloquently than I many similar points, and so, I intended to abandon it, or perhaps revisit on a second viewing. But upon (bizarrely enough) popular request, I do want to publish and finish this, in order to address the ending.

To contextualize broadly: the visible apparatus of filmmaking only consists of two visible elements in the end of the film: the white limousines and the people who travel in them. (The cameras have all been left in an abandoned building, the one Kylie fell from. [Which McWeeny points out is possibly a reference to Carax's wife, Katerina Golubeva, who committed suicide last year.] If I remember correctly, it's after this scene that the digital nightmare invades our actor's dreams.) After leaving the actor Alex in his last role for the night (with a chimpanzee, or perhaps monkey, family, I can't recall - endearingly goofy, but also deeply cynical in its address of the cinematic gesture of evoking an emotion of narrative completion, and perhaps a hint that the future of filmmaking doesn't even require other human participants?), the limousines return to their home at Holy Motors. The driver, Celine (played by Edith Scob), leaves the car, wearing the mask that she wore in EYES WITHOUT A FACE 50 years ago (simply an allusion to cinema history, like many others in the film? or an allusion to a further absence?), and disappearing away.

And then, quite unexpectedly, the limos talk to each other.

One person I spoke to afterwards said something to the extent of "I was with that film til the last scene, but Carax was just trolling us then, wasn't he?" Even people who love it see it, as near as I can tell, as a goofy fun digestif to a buffet of cinematic joy.

But beyond the superficial absurdity, in a film where there are no other humans left to talk about the filmmaking appartus with, these machines are noting that they, too, are about to become extinct, just like the cameramen and makeup artists before them. And in a world where cinema has been reduced to such a bare existence, if these limousines are removed, these holy motors, what is left to drive cinema forward?

Nothing.

Result: fin du cinema.

And maybe this is all too bleak and/or overdetermined of a reading. I get films wrong often, when what I expect collides with what I get (DRIVE and SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK being two films I completely misread on first viewings). And I don't mean to imply that I didn't laugh a lot and viscerally enjoy many scenes in HOLY MOTORS, because I did. But I can't reconcile the seemingly popular interpretation of this as a simply joyful, ecstatic, goofy, playful, fun film with the contents on screen, and I certainly don't see it (as some NZFF viewers did) as a funny goof with no organizing principle.

But with such a rich movie, I'm sure that it doesn't give up all its secrets with one viewing, and I can't wait to return.

NZIFF 2012: awards wrap-up.

The New Zealand International Film Festival, for the most part, doesn't give awards (with the exception, this year, of a curated section of New Zealand's best shorts, about which more shortly). So I thought I might give some. Because why not?

BEST OPENING TITLE CARD: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. (Although I'm counting the sound design as part of that.)

MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE, TECHNOLOGY DIVISION: DCP. With the Civic Theatre upgraded to DCP, digital titles no longer have the "must-avoid" stigma that they did for me just a few short years ago, and the back to back screenings of MOONRISE KINGDOM on film and THE CABIN IN THE WOODS on DCP left many suspecting the latter may not just be equal but a superior format. (MOONRISE, being shot on 16mm, and seeming to have registration problems during projection, may not be a fair comparison, but anyway). Two of my three favorite "films" (an increasingly quaint word now that "film" is no longer part of their medium) were TABU and THE LONELIEST PLANET, both screened in this format. (TABU, in particular, looked luminescent.) So the good news is that, by and large, digital projection is under control during the festival. On the other hand, it's underlined the factor that the subpar digital projection which features at many local venues outside of the festival is really and truly no longer acceptable. (The author makes plans to see I WISH, which he missed at the festival, realizes it's playing at the Rialto Cinema Newmarket's e-cinema, and cancels such plans as he waits for the rest of Auckland to catch up with the film festival.)

MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE, FILM DIVISION: TWO YEARS AT SEA. It shouldn't have been a total surprise, given its recommendation by film critic Michael Sicinski, but I wasn't expecting to be this profoundly affected, or that it would be in my top three films of the festival. On paper, it's a wisp of an idea, barely deserving of feature status - an almost speech-free portrait of a man living alone in the woods in hermitude. (I went in thinking it was a drama, and it sort of is, but it's based on a real guy who lives like this, closer to documentary in some ways but still dramatized.) What makes this film so special is that it was shot on short ends of black and white 16mm film stock that's no longer being made. Just as we get the sense of loss from our protagonist when he looks at pictures from his past, so too we feel the sense of loss as shots are abruptly truncated or damaged because of limitations of the source stock. The grain is monstrously, overwhelmingly alive - arguably, film grain is as much the subject here as our human character - and seeing a pristine DCP of FROM UP ON POPPY HILL the next day, I couldn't help but long for the life of film grain, now forever gone in a static, crisp DCP universe. The final shot of TWO YEARS AT SEA (which one of NZ's best film writers, the ever-perceptive Steve Garden, adroitly pointed out evoked THE TURIN HORSE) is a gorgeous long goodbye to that grain; it will be missed.

(As a quick aside: DCP can do a wonderful job of capturing film grain; for instance, I saw THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY at Fantastic Fest last year, and it looked gorgeous and astonishingly film-like. But other times, grain doesn't exist; still other times, it inexpertly pops in and out (such as in STUDENT). The application of grain in a post-film universe is something that will be interesting [to nerds like myself, anyway] to chart over the next few years. In the meantime, the alchemical life that film intrinsically brought to even the most static frame is gone by default. Perversely, my second most satisfying film experience, image-wise, was THE WALL - shot on Red Epic, it gets insane levels of detail normal 35mm stock wouldn't capture, and amazing definition in low-light conditions. But projected on 35mm print (for whatever reason), it managed to combine the sharpness of the digital with the softness of film for something altogether transcendent, beautiful, and undoubtedly transient. Three years from now, it's hard to imagine any film following that workflow.)

BEST CHARACTER: the lifeguard, IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. Festival perennial Hong Sang-Soo presented his most accessible film in ages, not just because of Isabelle Huppert's appearance but because of its uncharacteristically clear structural conceit. Overall, it didn't strike me as one of his strongest works. However, no character in any other film made me smile like the not-particularly bright, easily love struck lifeguard (played by Yu Jun-Sang). In a film where everybody has their secret purposes hidden, his guilelessness was not just winning but transcendent.

BEST DOG: Lynx, THE WALL. Both the regular readers of this blog know that I have a complicated (at best) relationship with dogs. If I had known going into THE WALL that despite its clever conceptual sci-fi premise (a woman is separated from the rest of society by an invisible wall), at heart it was really about the friendship between a woman and a dog, I might have skipped it. Thankfully, I didn't know that. But after spending an hour and a half with Lynx, I wanted him as my own. I mean seriously: if you had to be cut off from the rest of the world, why not choose this furry dude as your companion?

BEST ACTOR: Denis Lavant, HOLY MOTORS. He only deserves all the awards ever.

MOST INDELIBLE MOMENT, ONSCREEN: When I say it's from HOLY MOTORS, I think those who saw it might think of any number of moments - from the opening, to the Eva Mendes scene, to the green-screen, to the accordion, to the ending … the list goes on and on. But it's a peculiar moment that I've seen nobody else comment on that's stuck with me. Driving late at night, we cut outside the limo, and as the trees pass by, the image starts degrading. Just as I looked back unconsciously to see if the projector was somehow freaking out (like I could even tell from my seat?), our protagonist wakes up, and the nightmare is clear. It's a short sharp sad moment that's a skeleton key for the whole film, which is, beyond the silliness at its surface, a deeply mournful statement about all the losses we face at the end of this era of cinema. Godard's WEEKEND may be the film that ends with a title card "FIN DU CINEMA", but this film deserved it more.

MOST INDELIBLE MOMENT, OFFSCREEN: Festival director Bill Gosden calling the Civic "fucking awesome" during his closing night speech. It's an amazing place to see movies, and it's sad that 50 weeks of the year we're denied the pleasure, but it makes the festival all the more special.

MOST ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENT: I bailed on the short film programs a couple years back because they were virtually all coming of age stories, a genre that as a rule I don't value very much. When a friend's film* made the finals of New Zealand's best shorts, however, I had to attend, and was pleased to discover that five of the six shorts were not coming of age stories in any meaningful sense. Does this mean that we've finally got stories to tell in this country in short films that aren't about twelve year olds gazing dolefully into the distance as adults do bad things?

LEAST ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENT: The coming of age short won both jury and audience awards. (Insert covering one's ass statement here about how it's a well made film, no offense intended to the filmmaker, it's not his fault I never want to see a coming of age film again, etc.)

MOST DIVISIVE FILM: KILLER JOE. I loved it, personally. Yes, the third act (violent/sexual act everyone's discussing without regards to spoilers but me) is a hell of a slap in the face, but I've come to terms with it as a necessary violation of the audience relationship that we've had up to that point with the character who commits it in order to reset our moral compass. But man, people HATED this film with a passion that I haven't seen since … well, since SLEEPING BEAUTY last year.

MOST AFFECTING FILM: COMPLIANCE. The last film I saw at the festival. I won't tell you anything about it if you don't already know the story; suffice it to say that it's based on a true story which seems too outlandish to be believable, and too infuriatingly sad and horrible to want to believe. The astonishing performances (particularly Ann Dowd, the credulous manager) go miles towards making this film work; while I'm not convinced by every aesthetic decision, its sum impact was so great that merely watching the trailer a few hours after seeing the film left me shaking with anger, tears streaming, after only 30 seconds.

MOST CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT (BUT ONLY BECAUSE I'M AN IDIOT): HIMIZU. Should I have known that the casually transgressive Sion Sono (COLD FISH, LOVE EXPOSURE) might not have been the man to count on for integrating real life disaster footage from Fukushima with subtlety and tact? Yes. I should have known that. A mess of a film that became distasteful. (Runners up: BEYOND THE HILLS, IN THE FOG.)

BEST Q&A: David Bruckner, V/H/S. After defending KILLER JOE, I found myself struggling with this omnibus horror film, which comes out of the gate with some casual attacking of women on the street (stripping their tops to expose their breasts whilst being filmed for a porn site) segueing almost directly into the first segment about a guy getting glasses with spy-camera installed so that their voyeur porn dreams can come to life. Since it's a horror anthology, it's not a spoiler to say it doesn't end well, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. However, hearing David Bruckner (who directed this first segment) speak made it a lot clearer what he was getting at and retrospectively increased my appreciation of the sexual politics of his work. That aside, he's a fucking smart and thoughtful guy, I'm grateful to Ant Timpson for bringing him down, and I hope he gets to make a feature soon. And I hope his next trip to New Zealand doesn't feature a question which begins with a certain someone reading Ray Bradbury's definition of horror yet again.

(I should note: in sum, I don't find V/H/S particularly offensive - and certainly not enough to get worked up over - but I think I'm the only person in NZ who had any qualms with the sexual politics of V/H/S whatsoever. Conversely, my Australian Twitter friends have largely loved KILLER JOE but found V/H/S epicly offensive. What that says about cultural relativism, I have no idea.)

WORST AUDIENCE MEMBER: The dude who got up every few minutes during THE WALL to wander around the cinema. Runners up include the woman who refused to turn off her phone despite my request during IN ANOTHER COUNTRY and the pair who ate an entire Renkon meal, then left halfway through STUDENT. In general, popular wisdom to the contrary, I don't think audiences were much better this year; I just did a better job not letting them get to me.

BEST DIRECTORIAL REINVENTION: Ursula Meier (SISTER). Meier's last film, HOME, was a masterpiece of deadpan existential surrealism, about a family who lives next to an abandoned freeway whose life becomes a game of Frogger once the freeway re-opens. (Cheers to critic Mike D'Angelo for the Frogger analogy.) SISTER trades in the surrealism entirely for a story more akin to the Dardennes (albeit a version that uses a tripod and doesn't follow the back of people's heads for ten minutes) about a boy who steals ski gear to make a living and his sister who he lives with. For the first half I was, truthfully, so homesick for the voice that we'd lost that I was having trouble adjusting. But Meier's direction is so assured (thanks in part to all-time great cinematographer Agnes Godard's work) that ultimately I was won over, and the precision in the ending deserves comparisons to THE SON: it's one of the most perfect endings I saw at this festival.

MOST JEALOUSY-INDUCING FILM: SOUND OF MY VOICE. This wasn't the best film I saw at the NZFF: it's either at the bottom of my top ten or just under. But as somebody who's just directed a first feature on a low budget, to see a first feature made with a similar economy of means and no-budget fantastical concept but such compelling narrative and stunning precision editorially was by turns inspiring and depressing. This should be required viewing for every first time low-budget filmmaker that aspires to reach a mass audience.

SEXIEST MOMENT: rope dance, CRAZY HORSE. I could go on at length about my issues with this film formally and in the context of Wiseman's work - and spent a great deal of the running time doing just that in my head - but then this scene happened. (With eleven or so burlesque scenes shown, and human sexuality being what it is, everyone will have different preferences; it's worth noting, however, that the most uniformly admired scene is not a proper performance at all, but an open casting/cattle-call tryout. THAT scene, regardless of one's personal tastes, is truly great filmmaking.)

BEST SONG: "This Must Be The Place", as performed by David Byrne in THIS MUST BE THE PLACE. Despite some qualms about the end, I loved this strange, unlikely film by Paolo Sorrentino. Others did not. But this performance is a wonderful, special, mysterious thing, in a film that seems largely to exist in order to contain strange and unlikely moments.

There's other great films that I didn't talk about (or talk about enough, like TABU and THE LONELIEST PLANET) here, but I have to save something for the next installment of Best Worst Podcast … coming when I can get through speaking a paragraph of thoughts without coughing up a lung.

*The film in question is Thomas Gleeson's HOME, and it's fucking excellent, and also pleasing to see a non-narrative film so well recognized (it won the Friends of the Civic prize). I'm a bit disappointed in myself that I can't discuss NZ films more extensively, but I only saw apart from this program the excellent HOW FAR IS HEAVEN, a beautiful observational documentary that will be returning soon. Of the many local films that I missed, I heard particularly wonderful things about THE RED HOUSE, and am quite disappointed to have missed it. Of course, I also missed Haneke's AMOUR, Kore-Eda's I WISH, Linklater's BERNIE, etc ad nauseum. The festival is, as always, a firehose of riches, and you drink in what you can.

Overcoming Dogphobia, Volume One.

Of the various deviations from mental normalcy that I have - whatever that is - one of the more tedious and socially debilitating is an acute fear of dogs. I don't know where this fear started, though I expect that stories about pit bulls killing people hitting the papers around the time CUJO was on repeat play on cable had a big part to play.

I should clarify: I don't fear all dogs. If it's small enough that I could keep its mouth closed with one hand, I'm fine. It's when they're big enough that they might suddenly, unexpectedly lunge at your throat and tear it out (which is typically what I imagine happening) that problems arise. I have met big dogs that I come to trust (like a friend's old arthitic German shepherd - catlike in disposition, could barely walk) but they are few and far between. Most are the enemy.

So I cross the street when I see a big dog, even if they're on a leash. I take alternate entrances into supermarkets if there's a dog tied up in front of one of them. I avoid visiting friends who have large dogs. I freak out when people bring their dogs to work.

Of late, I've had a spate of experiences where I've had to confront this fear, above and beyond the average. I had a brief relationship with a woman who was crazy about dogs, and would sing their praises, and show me pictures of "cute" (gigantic, huge, fucking scary) dogs. I had a co-worker habitually bring his dog (a dog I, and nobody else, found quite threatening) to work. I went to a recording session, and a dog was there. I came home about two months ago to a visiting large dog in our living room (note: when I say "large", I generally refer to any dog who can gnaw my testicles off whilst remaining on all fours), and immediately had to flee the house (not the room, but the house) for the remainder of the night. That hasn't been a problem for the last six weeks, because I've been living in Dunedin, but I passed up an accommodation in town for a farther, less convenient one because the close-in had a dog. Somehow, nobody managed to mention that the farther afield one had not one but two dogs on the property - bulldogs, at that. Thankfully, I could avoid them most of the time, and did. But it was stressful, and a pain in the ass, and embarrassing.

For these and other reasons, I've decided that this is a fear I need to conquer. There's social inconveniences, of course, but also, the effects of stress. Without boring you too deeply with health shit that depending on your world view sounds more or less scary than it is, I've had some indications of elevated liver enzymes of late, which are correlated not just with alcohol use and other dietary stressors (refined carbohydraftes, like white flour and sugar, are big ones) but with stress itself. The stress response I have when there's a big dog near me - which is almost every day, one way or another - is putting unnecessary stress on my body, and while I won't pretend that all of my health problems are dog-related, every little bit helps.

Can I change? I hope so. I have to believe so. I've spent a lot of time reading neuroscience lately, and while I wouldn't class myself anything more than a blowhard overconfident amateur in the field, it is clear that the brain can and does rewire itself into adulthood. Becoming aware of core, underlying beliefs, then replacing them with realistic but saner beliefs, is a process that can hopefully get rid of my dogphobia. And this is a phobia that might be quite ripe for this sort of attack, because unlike a lot of fears that people have, this isn't rooted in self-image, but exclusively in the perception of how an animal might behave. (I certainly don't think that dogs are going to attack me because I'm a bad person. [Should I?])

Of course, the main thing that supports a new belief is experience. So I'm going through what a friend calls "dog training". Which is the process of finding low stress ways of having interactions with dogs that end with my throat intact, undermining old beliefs and reifying new ones. Apart from hanging out with friends with dogs, I find that photographing dogs that are safely tied up outside stores or what have you is a good distancing tool. If I'm thinking of the frame and hoping the dog stays still at the right angle long enough for a good picture, I'm not thinking that I need to run.

More than one of my friends has suggested that, perhaps, this is all a bit unnecessary. "You don't like dogs; that's who you are", goes the argument. And in many ways, it would be easier to just leave it at that then spend the next few years (so goes my understanding of how long it's likely to take) going through this. In the short term, it would probably be less stressful: I spent 5 minutes Saturday with a 38 kg puppy and could feel the adrenalin shaking through me more than an hour later.

But, ultimately: I need to know that I can change. Because, at the risk of expanding well outside the scope of the "dogs are/aren't scary/dangerous" question, no small part of me places what hope I do have for the world in the belief that we can overcome our limiting beliefs, not through prayer, not through "being true to yourself", not through the motherfucking Secret, but by hard, focused work.

And so: this is where I put my money where my mouth is.

I'll update in six months or so, unless anything particularly interesting happens in the interim. In the meantime, if you have any tips for overcoming dogphobia, feel free to share.