Dispatches #157: Autistic heroes, marching powder and Cuban ballet dancers

Thursday, 13 July 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.

Words:

I have a story on Backchannel today. Excerpt below.

The Sleeper Autistic Hero Transforming Video Games (2,000 words / 10 minutes)

With Symmetra, Overwatch is quietly taking on the stigma of autism – and for the fans, effort means everything.



For Samuel Hookham and his younger brother, Overwatch was an obsession that took root last spring. They played the fast-paced shooter video game almost every day, passing the PlayStation 4 controller back and forth across the couch in their family's California home.

Samuel was surprised to find himself selecting a female avatar. Overwatch offers two dozen characters of different genders and races, each with a richly drawn personality. But when Samuel played, he was almost always Symmetra, a slight but potent warrior. Her weapon of choice, a photon projector, locks onto enemies and swiftly depletes their energy. In the hands of a skilled player, she could be one of the most devious and deadly characters.

As he played, Samuel began to notice that Symmetra's behavior was sometimes strange. She often misunderstood social cues. When her teammate, Torbjörn, cracked a joke–"Hehe, there's something on your dress!"–Symmetra would respond literally: "No, there isn't." She craved structure and got overwhelmed with too much stimulation. In the middle of tense battles, she would turn her back on the action in order to, say, rebuild defensive sentry turrets. In a voice clip, she told her teammates that she believed "the true enemy of humanity is disorder."

It was all a bit odd. But in Symmetra's strangeness, Samuel saw himself. Near the end of 2016, he had been diagnosed with autism, and the label was helping him understand the ways his behavior was different. Like Symmetra, Samuel tended to take jokes literally and could get confused by social cues that others navigated with ease. Samuel began to wonder if his favorite Overwatch hero was autistic, too.

To read the full story, visit Backchannel.

How I found this story: I've been playing Overwatch on my PC with friends and strangers for more than a year, and loving it. I also pay attention to the Overwatch subreddit, and that's where I saw the confirmation in March that one of the game's heroes is autistic. This struck me as a landmark moment in gaming, given that she's the first fully playable character on the spectrum disorder (to my knowledge), so I wanted to tell the story of how that came to be. I'm really happy with how this one turned out, as I think it's an important story.

On other note: Backchannel recently shifted from medium.com to its new home on wired.com, so this one also marks my first Wired byline since this weird, fun story about Daft Punk's 2013 album launch held in the small Australian town of Wee Waa, New South Wales.

Sounds:

'Holding On' music video by The War On Drugs (6 minutes). The best music videos are often the simplest, and that's certainly the case here. It's a beautifully shot story of a lonely widower on an ordinary day, who ends up meeting several strangers, including The War On Drugs' bandleader Adam Granduciel. Not a whole lot happens, but there's a sweet scene of resolution at the end. Longtime readers will know that I'm absolutely mad for this band, and I'm excited for the release of its next album next month. I also loved the recent live performance of 'Holding On' on Stephen Colbert's show. The bassline really makes this song.

Liz Tynan on Conversations with Richard Fidler (49 minutes). I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know much about the British nuclear test program conducted at Maralinga, South Australia, during the 1960s, so I was grateful to learn about it from the perspective of science writer Dr Liz Tynan, who wrote a book on the subject named Atomic Thunder that was published last year.

Dr Liz Tynan is a science writer, and senior lecturer at the James Cook University Graduate Research School. In the 1950s and 60s, Australia's then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, agreed to provide land and support to the British nuclear test program. At Maralinga in South Australia, the British exploded seven mushroom cloud bombs (the 'major trials'). By doing so, they became the world's third nuclear power, and created some of the most contaminated land on the planet. Elements of the program were shrouded in secrecy. Prior to 1978, most people had never heard of Maralinga. Then whistle-blowers and journalists began to expose the extent of the environmental and human costs of the program.

John Clarke's Poetry on Poetica (28 minutes). I realise I've gone heavy on the John Clarke recommendations here since his untimely death in April, but I can't help myself, because the man put his mind to so many great works during his life. This episode shows a side of him I didn't know much about: his abiding love for poetry. An absolute joy to listen to.

John Clarke was one of Australia's best loved satirists and this week we celebrate his work by replaying a program he made for Poetica. His parodies of famous poets demonstrate not only his skill as a versifier, but also his intimate engagement with the original works. He writes as WH Auding, Sylvia Blath, BB Hummings, Fifteen Bobsworth Longfellow, RACV Milne, and many others. This production includes John reading his work, as well as an interview conducted by producer Justine Sloane-Lees. It is based on Clarke's book The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse published by Text Publishing.

Jake Lodwick on Stoner (50 minutes). This episode was a real blast from the past, because I remember following Jake Lodwick's blog through Google Reader, back when RSS was a thing that people used. This is a great conversation about his career in the context of his cannabis usage. It's probably not worth your time if you've never heard of the guy, but I really enjoyed this interview.

When he was in college, Jake Lodwick was brought on as one of the original developers  of CollegeHumor. Shortly thereafter he co-founded Vimeo and three years later he posted a photo of himself taking a bong hit after he was fired by Vimeo's new owners, IAC. Jake's a pretty different person now, pouring his energy into a company that makes tactile and joyous music creation software. He's not totally comfortable with the internet he helped create, and had a lot to say about flow mindstates, the relationship between art and technology, and taking the long view.

Reads:

17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future by Jon Bois on SBNation.com (16 chapters to date). Look, I'm not even sure how to begin writing about this story, to be honest. I saw a Facebook friend link it on Sunday. "This is some pretty special storytelling," my friend wrote, and I clicked, and I'm so glad I did. That's all I knew going into this story, and I think it's best if you go in with the same knowledge. So please, click the link and start reading. I think you'll be glad you did, because this is like nothing else I've ever seen before. (Note: I started reading this series on my PC, but it seems to work equally well on mobile devices, too.) Enjoy. 

The Unbelievers by Richard Guilliatt in The Weekend Australian Magazine (4,900 words / 24 minutes). In April last year, a ten-week trial began in the New South Wales District Court, where a husband and wife were faced with monstrous criminal charges levelled against them by their daughter. The trial came about after she was diagnosed with the controversial condition Dissociative Identity Disorder, and began remembering horrendous things from her childhood that no one else remembers. Yet the elite sporting coach and his wife say they're innocent. Who is telling the truth? The Weekend Australian Magazine editor Christine Middap describes this as the most confounding and intriguing story she has ever published, and it's hard to disagree. Richard Guilliatt researched this one for months on end, and his careful investigation results in a gripping read. (Sidenote: for the Penmanship listeners among you, this was the story that Richard mentioned at the start of the interview I recorded with him in March, and published in May.)

On a muggy February morning five years ago in regional NSW, nine police officers from Strike Force Willbe converged on a bushland property that had been the home of a married couple and their children for nearly 20 years. The parents, both in their 50s, were well known in their small community, for their adult daughters were gifted at sports and the husband was a respected coach and educator. Yet over the previous four months their youngest daughter had told police her father was in reality a sadistic monster who had been raping and torturing her since early childhood, assisted by her mother. The young woman, dressed in jeans and a pink polo shirt, accompanied police that morning, pointing out locations in the bushy surrounds where they would later begin digging. Today her father is confined to a maximum security cell and faces the prospect of dying in jail. Strike Force Willbe led to a criminal trial in which "Australia's most sadistic father", as the tabloids dubbed him, was last year sentenced to the longest jail term for child sexual abuse on record in NSW and possibly Australia. The man's wife occupies her own maximum security cell elsewhere in the state. For several wrenching weeks in the NSW District Court their daughter, aged in her 20s, recounted a history of abuse so ghastly it made national headlines: from age five to adulthood, she recalled, she was repeatedly raped, beaten, nearly drowned, violated with tools and imprisoned naked in a shed by a father whose relentless cruelty was aided and abetted by his wife. Her oldest sister also testified, describing a household in which terrifying violence and molestation were the norm.

Outside, It's America by Sarah Larson in The New Yorker (2,600 words / 13 minutes). U2 is touring its 1987 album The Joshua Tree this year, and the tour has sold 2.4 million tickets worldwide so far. I loved this personal reflection on the role of U2's music throughout Sarah Larson's life, and her thoughts and feelings about revisiting their music in the context of a different America to the one that Bono wrote about three decades earlier.

Love for a band, like love for a person, can move in mysterious ways. Rarely, in my experience, do you love a band with your whole heart for a decade and then turn away sharply, never to return, but that's what happened to me with U2. When I was in middle school, circa "War" (1983) and "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), I adored U2, as did every thoughtful sixth and seventh grader at my school, inspired by the sophisticated eighth and ninth graders with puffy young-Bono haircuts and long wool coats with U2 buttons on the lapels. At dances, we danced to "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Seconds" and "I Will Follow," thinking about the Troubles and nuclear war and devotion, feeling riled up, worldly, and serious at once. U2 made the political sound physical; they made pop feel essential, global, elevated. In the news and in social studies, we learned about the I.R.A., apartheid, and the nuclear-arms race; U2, with forthright urgency, seemed to be singing about all of it. And they had ridiculous names like Bono and the Edge.

A Painfully Tense Pause In The Game by Gideon Haigh in The Weekend Australian Inquirer (2,300 words / 11 minutes). I suppose it makes sense that it took Australia's greatest cricket writer to make me properly understand and care about the ongoing cricket pay dispute. I had skimmed the headlines with a shrug up until now, but when Gideon Haigh writes about cricket, even casual fans like myself had best pay attention. Quiet, the master is speaking. Near the end of this great bit of reporting is this wonderful section: "You can hear the old devotees peeling away; you can detect the young fans' confusion. After all, try explaining to a 10-year-old why the cricketers they have been taught to admire are now in purdah, and that a Lamborghini is a bad thing when it actually looks like a pretty cool ride. Has anyone – anyone at all – considered the collateral damage that cricket is sustaining at present?" (I had to Google 'purdah', which means "a state of seclusion or secrecy". There you go.)

Along a wall in the corner of the Melbourne Cricket Ground's National Sports Museum sits the picturesque Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, a series of cabinets containing relics of 46 carefully selected male and female greats – caps, jumpers, stumps, trophies, balls, bats of willow and of aluminium (Dennis Lillee's). There is also a letter, small enough to overlook, dated July 9, 1906, from the dental surgery of the revered Australian captain Monty Noble, harking back to the formative dispute of the antecedent body of Cricket Australia. On behalf of "the players under suspension" by cricket's Board of Control, Noble thanks the Melbourne Cricket Club's secretary for a statement of support: they languish, Noble complains, in "undeserved disfavour" as a result of "the strenuous exertion of interested parties clothed with temporary authority", abetted in "gross misrepresentation" by an "antagonistic press". For 21 years, the hall has modestly manifested cordial relations between CA and the Australian Cricketers Association, whose respective chief executives, James Sutherland and Alistair Nicholson, are members of the selection panel (as is the writer). Yet its first relic serves as a reminder of how CA owes its origins to a desire to quash our leading cricketers and take over the game they had pioneered, and the tensions ever since between those who have played cricket for Australia and those who have run it.

Mum's The Word by Trent Dalton in The Weekend Australian Magazine (3,200 words / 16 minutes). "A story of true love, high art and one powerful secret," reads the strapline, and it really is as simple as that. One day Trent Dalton will write a magazine story that doesn't make me cry, but not today. Wonderfully told.

She had to be seen from the wings, through Camilo Ramos's eyes, that white swan princess he fell in love with long ago, spinning on her toes in perfect circles, lit up by the Lyric Theatre stage lights so her ballerina's frame glowed like the Cuban suns of his childhood. Yanela Piñera was flawless that night of May 13, the night before Mother's Day, playing the dual lead roles of the princess-turned-swan, Odette, and the black swan minx, Odile, in the final night performance of Queensland Ballet's Swan Lake. There was a step sequence in Act Three some choreographers call "the 32 fouettés". It's the treacherous ballet equivalent of an Everest climb, where seductive Odile mesmerises the prince by continually whipping one leg around the other, spinning dazzlingly and endlessly on a fixed spot the radius of a two-bob coin. The Odile sequence gave Dame Margot Fonteyn cold sweats. But Camilo watched his partner that night dance so serenely, with such confidence, that he wondered if she knew the secret he had been keeping from her for seven days. Not because someone had told her the secret, he thought, but because she had felt it; that somewhere deep inside her Cuban heart, where she stores all her longing and sadness and fire, she knew her mother could see her dancing.

Rick Rubin's Def Jam Confidential by David Samuels in Tablet (4,500 words / 23 minutes). David Samuels is one of my favourite American magazine writers. I'll read anything the guy publishes, because based on past experience, it's bound to be good – do email me to ask for more recommendations, if you're so inclined. In this case it's essentially a long conversation with legendary music producer Rick Rubin that took place two decades after he and Samuels first met. The ostensible point of this article is to discuss how the music guru decided on the logo for his Def Jam record label, but it's also about much more than that, and thoroughly enjoyable all the way through.

Rick Rubin has Malibu's greatest beard. It's expressive, luxuriant, yet well-trimmed. Three times over the course of an hour-long conversation at an espresso bar just off the Pacific Coast Highway, beard adulators stop dead in their tracks and stare, speechless, lost in the harmonious interplay of form and formlessness that cascades down from the lower part of Rick's face–the upper part being dominated by his piercing blue-green eyes–to the midway-point of the music producer's chest. His beard is a little shorter than the beards on the guys in ZZ Top, but a little longer than the Lubavitcher Rebbe's beard, both of which I have had the pleasure to see close-up and in person. Growing a beard like that is a notable achievement, their gazes suggest, even in a community of show-biz types with both the time and the means to grow their beards long. After not having seen Rick in person for 20 years, I am seized by the urge to gently touch or stroke his beard, in the hopes that maybe some of Rick's holiness will rub off. I am also struck by the undiminished clarity of his eyes, which is in part the result of his life-long abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine and South America's Strangest Jail by Rusty Young (2003, Pan Macmillan). It has been some time since I've been as absorbed in a book-length character study as this. I was totally taken in by the strength of Rusty Young's storytelling here, but he is not the star of this book. Instead, it is a biography of an English drug trafficker, Thomas McFadden, who was imprisoned in Bolivia's San Pedro prison on drug charges. It's far from a normal prison: Australian author Young met McFadden when he visited San Pedro as a tourist and sampled the cocaine made in-house. "He sniffed a line, slid the CD case over to me and then started talking," Young writes in the first chapter, which is the only one told from his perspective. "Soon, I did not want him to stop."

From that point on, Marching Powder is a fast-paced and entertaining tale of McFadden's years behind bars. The drug trafficker is an expert storyteller, and Young's narrative is so immersive that I found myself sketching mental pictures of San Pedro before too long. Inside the prison, there's an corrupt economy that McFadden can barely comprehend at first. Inmates are expected to buy their cells from real estate agents; shops and restaurant operate behind bars, and women and children live with their imprisoned family members. These inner workings are laid out in colourful detail, and once you're invested in the weird world of San Pedro, you have no choice but to keep reading to know what happens next.

"If prisons are no more than schools for further criminality, then San Pedro prison was the International University of Cocaine, where you could study under some of South America's leading professors: laboratory chemists, expert accountants and worldly businessmen," McFadden notes halfway through. The entrepreneur decides to capitalise on the knowledge and experience of his fellow inmates by offering guided tours to wide-eyed visitors, like Young, and these visits become a big part of how he manages to stay positive throughout most of his time inside, though he is bit by periods of depression for his seemingly hopeless plight. 

Importantly, McFadden is self-aware of his storytelling skills, too. In the midst of a massive, all-night party held in his 'cell', he shrugged at the sight of some cocaine that was accidentally spilled onto the carpet by a remorseful New Zealand tourist. The Kiwi's punishment? To cut up ten more lines of coke, as quick as he can, to make up for lost time. "I knew that everyone in that room would be telling the story everywhere they went for the rest of their lives," quipped McFadden, and that remark could also apply to the extraordinary story captured in this book.

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Andrew

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