Dispatches #143: Folding stuff, outlet glaciers and virtuosos

Thursday, 30 March 2017

Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Andrew McMillen, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia. No new words this week.

Sounds:

Gorillaz – 'Saturnz Barz (Spirit House)' music video (6 minutes). I love this interactive video, which allows you to rotate the camera in 360 degrees to explore the creepy world created by animator Jamie Hewlett, while listening to the first new Gorillaz track in six years. This has had more than five million views since it was uploaded last week, and you should add one more to that count, because it's great. So's the song.

Al Baker on Longform (61 minutes). A thoroughly engaging conversation with a softly-spoken crime reporter whose father was a police officer, so he had an early understanding and respect for the difficult work of policing. Al Baker admits that he's a sensitive guy, and that reporting on murders can be emotionally troubling for him, which just makes me like him more. Excellent interview.

Al Baker is a crime reporter at The New York Times, where he writes the series "Murder in the 4-0." "When there's a murder in a public housing high rise, there's a body on the floor. Jessica White in a playground, on a hot summer night. Her children saw it. Her body fell by a bench by a slide. You look up and there's hundreds of windows, representing potentially thousands of eyes, looking down on that like a fishbowl. ...They're seeing it through the window and they can see that there's a scarcity of response. And then they measure that against the police shooting that happened in February when there were three helicopters in the air and spotlights shining down on them all night and hundreds of officers with heavy armor going door to door to door to find out who shot a police officer. They can see the difference between a civilian death and an officer death."

Dan Soder on My Favourite Album with Jeremy Dylan (35 minutes). I hadn't heard of Dan Soder before this appeared in my feed, but when I saw that he nominated ...Like Clockwork by Queens Of The Stone Age as his favourite album, I was totally onboard, because QOTSA are one of my favourites, too. Soder is a huge fan and I love the enthusiasm with which he speaks about the band and its leader, Josh Homme. This is probably only worth listening to if you already love QOTSA, but if you don't, I'd recommend checking out that album to see whether it floats your boat. I think the song 'I Appear Missing' is the best thing they've ever done, and I'm excited to hear their new album, due later this year.

Standup comic, actor, co-host of The Bonfire, Dan Soder has followed an instinct to just 'do cool shit'. His just 'do cool shit' idol is Josh Homme, frontman of Queens of the Stone Age. We talk about how being uncool makes QOTSA the coolest band in the world, why Dan doesn't care how many years it takes between Queens records, how Elton John talked Homme into letting him play piano on the album, the QOTSA song that could heal the divided America, how Josh Homme embraces 'the Koppelman rule' and what Dan's dream QOTSA lineup would be.

Bill Leak on Conversations with Richard Fidler (48 minutes). I knew his polarising work in the final years of his life, but I don't think I had heard Bill Leak speak before I queued up this conversation from 2009. Fidler and Leak are old friends, so there's a great camaderie throughout the chat, and his ability to laugh at everything – especially himself – is on display. Well worth a listen to get a stronger sense of the man than what you might have gleaned from his cartoons for The Australian.

One of Australia's most recognisable and contentious cartoonists, Bill's career earned him 9 Walkley and 19 Stanley awards. He started work as a political cartoonist at The Bulletin, then worked for The Sydney Morning Herald and in more recent years, The Australian. Bill was also recognised as a great portrait artist. His entries in the Archibald Prize won several packing room prizes, and a People's Choice Award. In 2008, Bill fell from a balcony, landed on his head, and subsequently required brain surgery. While in a four-day a coma, Bill experienced a strange near-death experience; and it was many months before he could be convinced it never happened. Richard spoke with Bill in May 2009, during the long, and unpleasant process of Bill's recovery.

Malcolm Gladwell on Conversations With Tyler (92 minutes). This is one of the better interviews with Gladwell that I've heard, mostly because the host, Tyler Cowen, directs the conversation down so many fascinating and unexpected paths. I am new to this podcast, after having recently heard about it via Ryan Holiday, but I'm enjoying it so far and expect I'll recommend more episodes here in due course.

Journalist, author, and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell joins Tyler for a conversation on Joyce Gladwell, Caribbean identity, satire as a weapon, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, Harvard's under-theorized endowment, why early childhood intervention is overrated, long-distance running, and Malcolm's happy risk-averse career going from one "fur-lined rat hole to the next."

I Was Your Father, Until I Wasn't on Death, Sex & Money (29 minutes). A surprising and moving episode based on interviews with two men, who were both fathers of the same girl.

Tony* wasn't sure what to say when the woman he'd slept with told him she was pregnant. First, he says, there was a long pause. They weren't a couple, and he didn't want to say the wrong thing. "I told her that it was her choice and if she chose to keep it, then I would be a good dad," he remembers. "I was freaking out." At the time, Tony was in his mid-20s, working as a bartender and photographer in a college town out west. Tony started paying child support for his daughter near the end of the pregnancy, went to prenatal appointments, and took parenting classes along with the baby's mother. On the day his daughter was born, Tony cut the umbilical cord. And Tony was an active father. As soon as his daughter could take a bottle, he says he started sharing custody of her, sometimes watching her three or four days a week. "We were really just good buddies," he says. "It felt good to have purpose, and it felt amazing to love something so much, in a completely new way." 

Reads:

Natural Law by Konrad Marshall in Good Weekend (4,100 words / 21 minutes). This is a wonderful example of classic magazine journalism. It was published on the cover of Good Weekend's 'Virtuoso Issue', which celebrated Australians who are the very best at what they do. The focus here is environmentalist Geoff Law, who helped save Tasmania's Franklin River in 1982-83 – but since Konrad Marshall is on a nine-day trip down the river with Law, there is plenty of time to stop and ponder bigger questions, too. I read this in the printed magazine, as per usual, but I've just discovered that the online multimedia version is superior: it has beautiful full-screen photos, as well as a great four-minute film shot by James Brickwood which helps to bring Marshall's words to life. It's a stunning piece of work, and given how much time the writer spent on the river, I have to wonder how much other good material was left out due to space restrictions.

The river reveals itself slowly. On the moss of the rainforest floor, dew drops gather in rivulets that gurgle and swell. Along the lip of a quartzite cliff, a stream bubbles and churns until the frothing water is as white as mother's milk. In deep still stretches, it pools like crude oil – slick and black, forbidding and slack. But now, with the Franklin River flowing swiftly over polished rocks, the activist Geoff Law pulls his oar through an icy flow the colour of strong tea. His ears prick, too, for the thrum of an approaching rapid. They call this one the Duck Chute and ordinarily it is not challenging. This cold Tuesday in February, however, it's a hissing, spitting chicane of freezing turbulence. We're quickly stuck in it, wedged between branch and boulder, the right side of our yellow raft rising as frigid water pours into the left. Law is the first person tipped out. He was one of the key campaigners behind the Franklin River blockade of 1982 and 1983 – the most successful environmental campaign in Australian history – and I've come here to ask him what lessons we might learn from that historic action. With climate change deniers and coal carriers in high office, I've also come to take heart from a battle won, to view the spoils of war through the eyes of an old warrior.

The Totten Hots Up by Jo Chandler in The Monthly (4,300 words / 22 minutes). An excellent piece of science journalism about a major Antarctic glacier, the Totten, which is becoming dangerously unstable thanks to... well, I think you know why. This thing is freaking huge, and as an 'outlet glacier', the Totten is a valve that regulates the flow of polar ice into the ocean. It holds back a frozen catchment the size of Spain, and if the glacier opened to let it drain away, global sea levels would raise by 3.5 metres.

December 2016. The Twin Otter aircraft drops into the polar void, skis skidding over wind-carved corrugations of hard snow, and pulls up to a shuddering halt. The pilots have landed as close as they dare to the crevasse fields of the East Antarctic coast. Their location is due south of Albany, Western Australia, and there's nothing between here and there but ice, water, and the storied latitudes of the roaring forties, the furious fifties and the screaming sixties. This day, the elements are uncharacteristically obliging. The wind is still, the sunshine punishingly bright as it ricochets off the white. The pilots and a team of expeditioners from the Australian Antarctic Division – a glaciologist, an engineer, a field officer – climb out onto the colossal Totten glacier. They're adrift upon a frozen river, an imperceptibly oozing stream. A glacier is a solid cascade of ice, the definitive immovable object submitting to the irresistible force of gravity. Totten glacier is one of Earth's mightiest, and the single largest in East Antarctica.

Fond Memories Of The Folding Stuff by Richard Glover in The Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum (900 words / 4 minutes). I love Richard Glover's weekly column, which always good for (at least) a smirk, but I found this one particularly brilliant, as he reflects on the changing role of hard currency within our increasingly cashless society. Writing 800 to 900 words each week, and keeping it interesting, funny and engaging, is a bloody hard gig, yet Glover makes it look easy here. What a gem!

I found a $5 note the other day, folded in half, damp with dew, nestled in a patch of grass. Oh, what happiness. It probably dropped from my own pocket, but that's hardly the point. Money on the ground is free money. It can be spent on frivolous things. In the world of digital payments, the equivalent would be a bank making a mistake in your favour – something that never happens, and if it did happen, would be hunted down by the bank's computers. The joy would be short lived. According to the latest figures, cash is on the way out. The use of automatic teller machines is at a 15-year low. In places such as Finland, businesses are no longer required to accept the folding stuff. In Australia, people will buy a packet of chewing gum with a wave of plastic. This is all very well, but how do we replace the occasional serendipity that comes with cash? Sometimes it's the $5 found on the ground; more commonly it's the $20 discovered in the pocket of an old pair of jeans. Or the $50, slipped into a cheque book for banking, then forgotten. It's a loyalty bonus scheme, available only to customers of the payment system called cash.

Into The Darkness by Bernadette Brennan in The Weekend Australian Magazine (2,500 words / 12 minutes). An absorbing extract from Brennan's book, which examines Helen Garner's body of work. This piece has totally sold me picking up the paperback, and its ending is incredibly moving.

Helen Garner began to fidget. She glanced at the moderator, Michael Cathcart, then at US writer David Shields. The 2012 conference NonfictioNOW had brought Garner and Shields together on a panel in Melbourne. The catalyst for Garner's agitation was Shields' assertion that "because we experience almost no reality in our actual lives, we crave the real". In reply Garner said that, living next door to her three young grandchildren, she did experience real things. She thought there was nothing more real than the company of children and seeing how they understood the world. "It seems to me," she said, "there is a world and there is a reality." Throughout her work, Garner has explored the reality of the world around her: the fraught complexity of relationships, the social experiments of communal living, the balance between personal freedom and moral responsibility, the rule of law and, always, questions about sex and power. Significantly, she has also ventured into aspects of the real that by their nature defy easy elucidation: spirituality and death. Thirty years ago, Garner told the author Jennifer Ellison that she would never be so famous as to be recognised when she walked into a room. Now aged 74 and the author of 13 books, two screenplays and a multitude of articles, essays and reviews, Garner is one of the best-known and, some would say, best-loved writers in Australia. That admiration is inspired by a sense that she is honest, authentic and familiar to readers.

The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself To Death by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker (1,200 words / 6 minutes). An incisive analysis of the 'gig economy', where the lack of dependable employment is sometimes glorified by companies like Lyft and Fiverr, which seek to glamorise this work rather than considering that it might be read as an example of a flawed economic system. I'm a freelancer by choice, but Tolentino's article resonated with me. More people moving away from full-time employment into the gig economy is not necessarily a good thing.

Last September, a very twenty-first-century type of story appeared on the company blog of the ride-sharing app Lyft. "Long-time Lyft driver and mentor, Mary, was nine months pregnant when she picked up a passenger the night of July 21st," the post began. "About a week away from her due date, Mary decided to drive for a few hours after a day of mentoring." You can guess what happened next. Mary, who was driving in Chicago, picked up a few riders, and then started having contractions. "Since she was still a week away from her due date," Lyft wrote, "she assumed they were simply a false alarm and continued driving." As the contractions continued, Mary decided to drive to the hospital. "Since she didn't believe she was going into labor yet," Lyft went on, "she stayed in driver mode, and sure enough–ping!– she received a ride request en route to the hospital." "Luckily," as Lyft put it, the passenger requested a short trip. After completing it, Mary went to the hospital, where she was informed that she was in labor. She gave birth to a daughter, whose picture appears in the post. (She's wearing a "Little Miss Lyft" onesie.) The post concludes with a call for similar stories: "Do you have an exciting Lyft story you'd love to share? Tweet us your story at @lyft_CHI!"

Death In Detention by Ben Doherty on The Guardian (4,400 words / 22 minutes). A wrenching portrait of an Iranian woman who saw her partner, Omid Masoumali, self-immolate on Nauru last year, before later dying of his injuries. She has been held in isolation in Australia since that day, and here, for the first time, she speaks with a journalist about the split-second decision that ended his life and changed hers irrevocably. It makes for grim reading, but this is essential, commendable work by journalist Ben Doherty.

On Nauru, life lay in the small things. In the face of their remote island detention, Omid and Pari had each other, and, each evening, they had the sunset. "People often cried while watching the sun go down," Pari says of her time on the island. "Every sunset was a symbol of another day lost." "But every evening Omid would sit with me and talk to me about all the things we had to look forward to ... he would just smile and say, 'We are young, we are together, anything is possible.'" So, each evening, Pari had her dual comforts: her partner and the promise brought by the sunset of another day. Now, she has neither. One year ago next month, the life of Pari's partner, Omid Masoumali, came to a brutal, premature end, when, to protest being forcibly held on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, he publicly doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire. Denied painkillers and adequate medical treatment, his slow, agonised death brought the stark privation of Australia's offshore detention regime to renewed international attention. Every day since, Pari has been held in isolated detention in Australia: alone, traumatised, segregated and trapped in a Kafkaesque legal and political nightmare. She has not seen a sunset since, and faces an indefinite incarceration, despite being formally recognised as a refugee who fled persecution and who is legally owed protection.

Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War On Drugs by Johann Hari (2015, Bloomsbury). This is a good book, though not a great one. Perhaps my reading was coloured by having heard Johann Hari speak about it in various forums for several years before I actually read it. Its strength is in Hari's comprehensive account of the last hundred years of global drug policy, and how the criminalisation of drug use has made the majority of the world's population worse off. 

There is no denying that Hari has done his research, and uncovered plenty of great and original material while studying this subject. I would not hesitate to recommend Chasing The Scream as a starting point for anyone interested in learning more about the subject. I wasn't too taken by Hari's regular injection of himself into the narrative, however, although I understand why he did it. I also found some of his phrasing a little grating at times. He is much better at summarising history than narrating, but there are plenty of wise nuggets and anecdotes to be uncovered along the way. 

Early into the book, I enjoyed this summary: "It's hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some pleasures). It is much more appealing to be told a different message – that it can be ended. That all these problems can be over, if only we listen, and follow."

And during a section where he explained the effects of alcohol prohibition, this is a great analogy: "All that violence  [...] produced by prohibition ended. That's why today, it is impossible to imagine gun-toting kids selling Heineken shooting kids on the next block for selling Corona Extra. The head of Budweiser does not send hit men to kill the head of Coors." He is also astute to point out that we tend to use religious words to describe our first reactions to experiencing new drugs ('ecstasy', for instance), because religion and drugs "are often competing for the same brain space - our sense of awe and joy."

As the narrative arc draws to its end, Hari makes a strong case for legalisation, which is much smarter than our current approach: "unknown gangsters selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, in the dark." I had never thought of the drug market in those terms, but he is exactly right. The book ends with Hari in Colorado, where selling weed has been legalised, his eyes glazing over as the ins and outs of cannabis excise taxes are explained to him by "a delightful Colorado soccer mom in a gray conference". By this point, he notes, drugs have been turned "into a topic as banal as selling fish, or tires, or lightbulbs." 

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Andrew

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