Brisbane

I think of Brisbane as a city with an.overwhelming amount of small beauty. It doesn't have much of the kind of loveliness that people will travel to see, and I've even been sad before that I don't think I've been able to adequately show it to people who visit. But it feels like you can't go far in any direction without hitting it.

I have all these loops I walk. Like sort of to the grocery store but I go via a couple of different park options. And we live on the floodway creek, and you can reliably see lizards and water birds, herons and egrets, stuff that I think of as a special occasion but they're every day here. And then about midway you get to the tall trees, eucalyptus mostly where the cockatoos roost. Reliably a flock of some kind of parrots fly over. Reliably there's a child's birthday party in both the parks. Reliably some little kid is playing catch or cricket bucolicly with their parent. Reliably every south Asian guy in the state is having a pickup cricket or soccer match on the field. Reliably a crew of enthusiastic speed bikers speeds by.

Or like there's the city where there's no worthy architecture but every building has been designed. I can walk up Queen Street mall with all the other pedestrians. And there is definitely a street performer there and probably some kind of lame event. I can go up the side where there's city hall and the quiet little museum and the too exposed square and the church bells. Or I can go across the giant intersection where there's always a flood of humanity heading somewhere and cut through the fancy shops, or I can take the skyway over Anzac square where the external flame is through post office square where there's all the community chairs and usually some students or a little meeting and the homeless guys hang out, meet at the start of the day. And then Queen Street mall takes you straight up the hill to the bridge and you cross the river.  The river defines my city like so many others. There are four or five bridges across my city but I have a couple favourites. This one that arcs across and you can really see the water, and the best view of the skyline. And Kurilpa or sneaky bridge which cuts from Roma street back over to the art museum.

Ok so you crossed the river and now you can go left or right. Left takes you past the giant Ferris wheel and along the river or along the bougainvillia walk you can choose and eventually there's another bridge and you can come back along the river as well. Oh and there's students and trendy shops and markets through here. Or right past the art museum, library, modern art museum to kurilpa bridge which shows up like a secret so we call it sneaky bridge.

And that's not talking about the botanical gardens or the parks every minute that split up the inner urban because it's not just builders ripping up every green here.

There's a pink tree that was in full spectacular bloom a few weeks ago and now it's switched to this yellow one, the jacarandas will come at the end of the month. But it's always the time for something to bloom and something to fruit, they fold in on each other like a braided rope.

Anyway there's more and more and more and that's kind of part of it. It's not the kind of stuff that would be worth saying all of, but it's like everywhere you go, beauty unfolds itself to you around each corner, in each crevice and so you are rewarded.

That's some of what I'm thinking these days, as I wander around the city, playing Pokemon or whatever just walking these circles and loops for hours. It continues to be worthwhile, and it's not something I can show other people well, but it's something I see all the time.

On Madeleine L'Engle

I've been going back to the Wrinkle in Time books, a bit of nostalgiacide there because I remembered them as deeper than they are. But that's not what I came here to tell you about.

The best thing about the books is that in each of them someone is humanized who was dehumanized before. In that sense the first book is the weakest because it is only the people we expect, and a few monsters. But in the second book it is the elementary school principal and in the third it is her mother in law. Unloveable characters who do not understand or like our protagonist, but they become loveable and important. I think that's a valuable and beautiful theme almost never seen in fiction and kind of provides the walking the walk proof of the larger themes of universal God like love.

Al Jazeera

Israel declared against Al Jazeera today, which surprised me. I wasn't surprised by the move from Saudi Arabia. Firstly Al Jazeera is the most effective competitor against Saudi state TV and secondly they were passionately supportive of the Arab Spring, cover Saudi massacres in Yemen where no one else will, and have been reasonably positive in their coverage of Iran in Syria.  And of course Egypt has jailed an Al Jazeera journalist for years so they are no surprise.

But Israel, they are at least nominally on the side of liberal values e.g. a free press and also there's no other Arabic news source which is so balanced on Israel. Not balanced mind, they're very pro Palestinian, but like civil and they seek comment from Israel etc. It's not heathen devil coverage anyway. 

Anyway I wouldn't have thought that a news organization that contains like 30 percent ex BBC journalists would come under this kind of fire. Especially basically without western support and with some western aggression. I knew the west supported Saudi Arabia despite its human rights violations but I didn't expect this kind of acceptance of an overt attack on one of the most effective journalistic institutions in the world.

So I guess with that in mind...

Why I watch Al Jazeera

1.) Journalists on the ground.
It's no secret that pundits talking in your newsroom is a lot cheaper and makes just as many ratings as getting someone out to where the story is to cover it. Al Jazeera is one of the very few organizations that still funds field reporting in a major way someone actually on the ground talking to people.

2) Worldwide coverage
Al Jazeera does have a bit of a Muslim world focus but it's truly international and they cover the whole planet mostly equally.

3) Coverage of Africa

You might think this is the same as 2 but most outlets have a real blind spot when it comes to Africa and I seek out coverage specifically. That's actually how I got into Al Jazeera to start with. I was trying to understand the DRC or something and they were the only ones doing any kind of regular coverage so you could follow a story from one week ( or month) to the next.

4) Focus on poor people

If Al Jazeera has a bias I think it is less pro Muslim or pro Arab and more pro poor. It is literally the only news outlet I can go to in print audio or TV that regularly covers ordinary people or people's movements, and good news stories as well. I saw a thing about new solar cookers going into villages there, an in depth piece on a woman raped repeatedly who had made a farming commune on marginal land for rape victims, artists in this slum in India who the government was trying to shift. For both stories like that about changes to people's lives and just interviewing civilian individuals living through the big stories there's no beating them.

5) They take in depth reporting to a new level.

I always tell the story of one of my favourite stories Al Jazeera covered about Somali refugees who were fleeing to Yemen (that's right folks to Yemen in case you thought Somalia didn't suck) and the reporter got in with the refugees and interviewed a bunch of them on the docks and then get this smuggled himself on one of the dodgy fishing boats run by not nice pirates. He got like threatened and semibeaten by these people along with the refugees and then thrown off the boat into the waves off the coast of their destination.

You can't get the story at the coal face like that any other way and it's a whole new dimension to really see it rather than like the journalists embedded with friendly troops.

6) Balance of coverage

All my other news sources are western and they have blind spots when it comes to stuff done by the west or its allies. So you hear lots about Isis but never about Yemen or Bahrain. And the Turkish connection to Isis is hushed a little. Socialist leaders in Latin America who don't play ball are strongmen. And you hear a lot more about human rights atrocities in the siege of Aleppo than the siege of Mosul.

Al Jazeera has it's blind spots too, but they're different and so I feel like I get a more complete picture having coverage from more than one different alliance grouping.

7) They're "objective"

Ok so I know no one's really objective and everyone comes from their own perspective and blah blah blah but I think there's still a difference between organizations that may have a view but let the facts speak e.g. BBC, ABC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the Economist, prolly still NYT and Wall street journal, the Guardian places where the story is the story and places where the story is largely created to serve the ideology like Fox news, MSNBC, the leftist rags I get on the street, Saudi and Chinese state TV. Ok so I don't really have a lot of experience with Le Monde or Chinese state TV but you get the point right?

So in conclusion they're not my only news source but they're a source for good and the free press and people having a voice that otherwise wouldn't and they sure as hell have a lot of hate for the terrorist organizations they're being accused of supporting.  More than that, they will interview both those terrorists and their victims and the Muslim civilian population that fears and hates them in a way few other people will and that I think is more damning than just calling them evildoers from across an ocean.

And if you've only ever heard Al Jazeera talked about on US news, you should check them out.  They stream online live round the clock.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Preacher says there is a god shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.

I'm not calling him a coward.  I'm not saying he's stingy. But sometimes when you're too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.

Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way not to live at all is to take life one day at a time.  It's the way I've discovered to not do a damn thing.

Even if it never comes the point is I'll be waiting for it and the waiting is just as bad because you can't do anything else in Jamaica but wait for something to happen to you.  This applies to good stuff too.  It never happens.  All you have is the waiting for it.

He say the point over and over, from one direction then the next with new words and the same words until he figure they get him point.  But as usual white bwoi think black man stupid.  Them get the message from he come through the door.  Stop mess with white people.

I am slowly realising that even though the Singer is the centre of the story that it isn't really his story.  Like there's a version of this story that's not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.

I wonder if you find this as obscene as I do that they are so quiet, as if this is work.  There will be no last words.  I wonder if you are crying now.  I wonder if you hope somehow the Singer will hear you begging for mercy.
But you should know this.
The living, they never listen.

Make me ask you something, you think Trench Town is a favourite spot for anybody living in Trench Town?  You think any of them sitting on a stoop saying, Now this is the life?  Tourist funny, boy.

Bushwick.  I still working my brain on how Jamaicans can come to a ghetto 5 time as big and with tenement three time as high and think they're better off.  What, nobody know the difference between a good thing and a bigger bad thing?  That must be for some other brother to figure out.

Hey me now... these meant something to me but they don't really give the full sense. When it starts, a boy is being buried alive. The Singer is in it but not of it, and there is a building inevitability to a climax that happens like midway, and then consequences spill out slow and certain for years and decades and may be  only at the end of all that do you know why. And there are times you lose what is going on in the language and times it seems perfectly clear. And it understands real poverty in a way nothing else does.

And I forgot to mark my favourite line where he says it's so ugly a picture couldn't cover it because a picture would smooth the lines have some beauty. And then later someone else says that that beautiful line also has too much beauty.

Like the difference between poverty and the povertiresque in Pierre. 

Anyway, I would read this one again and anything else by him too. It gets into something... Like Arundhati Roy says... How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everyone? No, by slowly becoming everything.