A wee bit of context: this is New Zealand. We have a general election coming up in September and we are staring down the barrel of another neoliberal term of pathetic social injustice- expanding poverty, homelessness and environmental degradation at the hands of the farming and mining lobby. Borrowing to buy groceries, watching your/your childrens' opportunities for secure employment and housing recede into the distance, our waterways choked with pollutants and our natural resources battered into nothingness; these are our everyday realities now. They might sound familiar to overseas punters and I want you to really, really understand that this is the whole fucking world and the picture you're being sold of this country by interested parties is complete and utter bollocks. Recently, Green Party co-head Metiria Turei (now a lawyer) admitted lying about her situation whilst on a benefit (what we call welfare in NZ) in order to receive enough money to actually live on (she didn't tell welfare about her flatmates). I'm going to stick my hand up and say I don't know a single person who hasn't done this to one extent or another as a way of negotiating their survival while at the mercy of a system designed to be punitive and utterly inadequate. All while listening to plenty of rich people bragging about their trusts and their offshore shit and their tax-dodging workarounds. So fuck everyone clutching their pearls about this. I've lived here long enough to know who's grifting our collective resources on a massive scale out of sheer fucking gluttony and who is just trying to make it into next week in an economic and social system stacked against anyone who's not already wealth-adjacent. Toby Morris is a local artist with a social conscience and the ability to neatly encapsulate one of the ugliest facets of NZ society; its frustratingly glib and utterly internecine battle with itself. Its need to blame the victims of neoliberal insanity for the latter's inevitable outcomes. I hope he doesn't mind that I boosted his shit, because I'd like you to see it. Thank you for listening. Share this and give Toby a hand job or something on Twitter. And vote, fellow NZenders. Ideally Labour or Green. The time for sitting on your fat arse and nekk weekin is gone. supermoon Giorgia Hofer (Italy) / reflection Beate Behnke (Germany) see more of these lovely images here see more re this mm project here I don't love the video or the song, to be perfectly honest; it feels a little bit... self-indulgent. Wallowy. Like this all biological allegory has been played out. But the rendering and individual constructions are lovely and well-executed. Flight of the Rays, 2010. Florian Schulz said: “During an aerial expedition over the coast of Baja California Sur, we glided high above the water looking for whales, when a large dark spot caught our attention. As we got closer, we started to discover its nature: an unprecedented congregation of rays. The group was as thick as it was wide, all heading towards the same direction. I have asked around why this took place but no one has been able to explain it to me.” Photograph: Florian Schulz/Ciwem Environmental Photographer of the Year see more here hibernate 4 weirdly, I had more or less this exact image in my head a couple of weeks ago it is probably what the inside of my brain looks like while nothing much is happening, so: literal see more here I stumbled over this shit on some other totally unrelated website. For those of you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Primitive Technology is a nameless Australian guy running through various practical experiments in the bush with well, primitive technology, to achieve basic levels of anthropoid comfort and functionality. He makes a kiln, simple forge, baskets, prawn trap, pottery and various huts etc. from the modest resources of his northern Queensland bush setting and if that doesn't sound especially riveting it's because you've never experienced his delivery. It is minimal. Silent. Unsmiling. Largely devoid of eye contact or indeed any of the extraneous and highly execrable elements now sadly synonymous with Youtube presentations. There is no calculated self-aggrandisement; no desperately studied tattoos, no chicken dos, no notice-me piercings, no branded items. Primitive Technology man wears crap board shorts and a series of inexpensive haircuts to get shit done. The episodic demonstrations are like plunging one's face into clean meltwater after extrication from the synthetic ooze that is the rest of the internet (by and large, present company excluded). His delivery rides the line between meditative and ruthlessly purposeful and I find myself watching the episodes over and over in bed late at night. R doesn't even mind. I think he's a little bit in love with him too. Having grown up in Arnhem Land, I guessed where he was from the eastward shift in the otherwise similar birdsong, especially the Peaceful Doves warbling away in the background as is their charming/fucking incessant wont. I've lit friction fires. Whittled poky things from those white-wood saplings, constructed coil pots from the slippy clay gouged out of riverbanks, made bush cubbies and hardly ever worn shoes. All this is tremendously significant and formative and Primitive Technology really plucks that atavistic string. If you've never done any of this stuff you have never really contacted your inner feral. It's my contention this constitutes an important deficit that many more people should concern themselves with. In the absence of other, more explicit causation, it might just be why you're having those panic attacks and eating your feelings. I'm not joking. Against all those nobler considerations I will admit to finding Primitive Technology more enjoyable for being shirtless and well-made, because I am a hopeless voyeuristic hobag. The sight of a semi-naked idiosyncratic sort of person glowing roseate in the light of a hand-built forge or mutely treading clay in the middle of nowhere moves me deeply. There is something oddly fetching and completely un-gratuitous about that stoic, rain-shaped thatch of possum-coloured hair, silty fingernails and robust architectural pallor, especially whilst demonstrating that most erotic and beguiling of all personal qualities: competence. Together they are a slutty primal bush-pig banquet. I don't know how Primitive Tech man would feel about my unseemly objectification but that just sprinkles his sexy mystery with more sexy mystery. Primitive Technology: would, hard, repeatedly. Highly recommended.
Kgomotso Neto for S Mag speaking on behalf of all my no-neck homies and ugly skull-havers everywhere: extreme jealousy. that awkward moment you're cackling and weeping like a crackhead over shit like this and the courier guy comes to the door and is sort of afraid of you see more here |
Independent Creativity
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