Blade Runner & the pornography of violence

The Hollywood remake of the classic movie Blade Runner, which I saw last night, begins with a scene in which one replicant, the Blade Runner of the title, kills another, and messily removes his eyeball in order to provide ID for his masters. A replicant scalp.

Despite the lavish sets, the ravishing 2049 urban wastelands, the designer hologram babes in black leather ... the whole movie revolves on the armature of killing; graphic, premeditated, bloody killing, and in that sense it is very much a movie a clef for the American 21st century.

Top eye-gouger

Movie ratings website Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie 8 out of 10. I give the movie a Rotten Tomato.

To me, the ritualised violence of Hollywood movies is a symptom of artistic bankruptcy - and a deeper malaise to boot.

During my ten years in Kings Cross, London, which at the time was the nation's premier red-light and drugs hub, I saw a lot of violence, and experienced a little myself. Violence up close isn't like Hollywood's stylised pornography.

There's no beauty in it ... no discernible aesthetic; no victory for the good guys; no rapid re-mending of torn flesh by advanced self-healing replicant technology. The sterilised violence delivered to us by Hollywood's art directors and production designers is intended to boost box office; to provide a jag of adrenaline and testosterone (for the boys) regardless of the effect on the countless young minds who witness it.

It's also designed, in my opinion, to impart a predatory thrill. In Blade Runner we get to see beautiful, half-naked women being slit open like cadavers on a coroner's block.

Men rule, ok?

As if violence against women wasn't a big enough problem in every nation on earth, we continue to have the most powerful men in Hollywood depicting women (and men) like animal cadavers on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.

Do I sound a little annoyed?

We go after the National Rifle Association for their stubborn and obdurate defence of the free availability of lethal weaponry in the US. But we rarely condemn the Hollywood moguls for peddling gratuitous imagery of violence that desensitizes our children - particularly - our young men. I have little doubt that the Las Vegas killer, Stephen Paddock, viewed many blockbusters in which macho warriors of the American Dream settled their grudges with prolonged and indiscriminate automatic weapon fire.

I have no doubt that tens of millions of young men and women around the world (including jihadis) unconsciously absorb the implicit message - violence is thrilling, beautiful, taboo ... and kind of ... cool ... y'know?

For those of us with a real and intimate relationship with violence ... soldiers returned from wars; women who have been beaten up in the home; the police ... we know a secret and harrowing truth. Violence - all premeditated violence - is a form of evil, and to present it as some kind of ravishing artistic tableau is corrupting of the soul.

Recent events in the Weinstein brothers' company have shown us one more facet of Hollywood's toxicity. It came as no surprise to me to hear the tsunami of allegations about the abuse of power at the top of the US film industry. Contempt for the common humanity of people - a kind of brutalized and blunted sensibility - radiates from many of the movies disgorged by the most powerful and uncontested myth-making engine on the planet.

"Can you believe that such beauty exists?!"

You don't know what genuine fear is, until you perform solo with a musical instrument in front of a sizable live audience.

On Saturday night, I played part of a J.S Bach flute sonata to an audience at the Grey Lynn Community Centre in Auckland. This was my third public performance, and trust me when I tell you that it was a pretty terrifying experience. There were about 100 folk there, and it was part of a fund-raiser for the Auckland Buddhist Centre.

J.S. Bach is one of nature's true mysteries. A humble man from a family of musicians whose parents both died when he was ten ... he went on to become the greatest musician the world had ever known. His life was stitched with tragedy - ten of his children died in infancy ... and yet he created a vast body of music that transfixes with its power.

His flute sonatas are finely-wrought puzzles of intricacy. As a musician you play them in a state of awe, hoping to offer some kind of fidelity to the precision and beauty revealed there.

The flute uses both its own body and the skull of the flautist as resonating chambers ... so you find that your entire head is echoing with this sublime music.

I first started playing these sonatas long ago with my pianist father, who asked me why I chose the most difficult pieces in the baroque repertoire. 'Because they're there!' I shouted, modesty repeating the words of George Mallory when asked why he attempted Everest. We would often finish the fiendish first movement of the B Minor sonata - all 118 bars of it - a couple of bars apart, and this was accompanied by quite a bit of laughter.

Sarabande: JS Bach's A Minor flute sonata

To a fairly shy person like myself, the notion of playing this kind of music to an audience of skeptical Aucklanders kept me awake at night for some time before the event. During the actual performance, my fingers kept slipping off the keys with perspiration.

I asked myself why I did it, and I came to the surprising conclusion - surprising to me at least - that I got up in front of that audience because I found it so frightening.

But there was something else, more profound in this offering that helped me stand up there on that musical cliff edge ... something to do with the mystery of the music itself; its astonishing vitality and power after 300 years. It was chance to get up in front of a room of 100 people and exclaim in exhilaration ...

"Look! Listen!"

"Can you believe that such beauty exists!!"

Deep diving a sea cave

Today we descended to a depth of 75 feet and eased our way into a sinuous sea cave beneath the limestone cliffs of 'Eua ... entering this place provokes a thrill that courses through the whole body and creates a galvanising sense of fully living each fraction of a second. The quiet at this depth is profound ... just the hoarse rhythm of my own breathing, and the echo of my companion's bubble stream. Above us, the roof of the cave steadily closed in, a sensation of increasing entrapment. High overhead, in a breach of the cave roof, we could see sunlight filtering down towards us.

The seabed was littered with piles of rubble from the cliffs above. Over the aeons, spurred by the frequent earthquakes on 'Eua, sections of the ceiling had tumbled into the cave, a reminder of the unstable nature of the geology in these parts.

'Eua sea cave

In the distance we could hear the singing of hump-back whales in the straits of 'Eua. My dive buddy, Tani, a stocky Tongan, was waving a torch, which lit up the black interior of the cave, and we moved steadily into its depths, hoping to find rare fish, buried treasure, perhaps a skeleton ...

The whole experience was made more surreal by the fact that it was Tani who had discovered the body of my friend Wolfgang tied to the seabed a short way up the same reef (see 'Wolfgang's Last Dive' below).

At this depth the body burns oxygen at a fair pace, and I was aware as we penetrated further into the cave of the diminishing supply in my tank. On a previous dive on this reef I had run out of air due to a faulty indicator and come to the surface too quickly - something I didn't want to repeat: Nitrogen bubbles can form in the blood and result in crippling and agonising injuries.

'Eua is on the edge of the Tongan Trench, a deep rift in the earth's crust that plunges south to Antarctica, and up which the humpback whales migrate each year: a whale super highway. 'Eua itself was thrust up by seismic activity 40 million years ago, and its elevated coral reefs are honey-combed with caves and sink holes, some of unimaginable depths.

The reefs are encrusted with a smorgasbord of corals ... candy pinks, chrome yellows ... delicate lavender blues ... like the execution of a divine sculpture garden. I have been diving these reefs for years now, and they never cease to amaze with their improbable perfection.

Just the hoarse rhythm of my breathing

As much joy, is being taken diving by a bunch of magnetic Tongans, I have grown to know and love. Finau, a stocky forty year old, whose gentle eyes belie his immense knowledge of the sea, marine diesels, diving, carpentry, engineering and ... tropical cuisine. Sam, a former commander in the Tongan navy ... a massive man, built like Jonah Lomu, who like Finau disguises his equally impressive expertise with a quiet-spoken humility.

Afterwards, devouring pizzas created in the home-made pizza oven at Ovava Tree Lodge, even allowing for the effects of post-dive euphoria, I realised this was one of my favourite spots on earth.

Sex ballet for humpbacks

This morning we were in the open ocean, and below us, three massive humpback whales were locked in a mating dance ... their flippers stroking each other's bodies in a tender display of fore-play, cetacean style.

Sex at a depth of twenty metres is a languid affair, without obvious passion, but with a balletic grace that belies the 40 tonne weight of the animals. Their great white ribbed bellies were turned upwards towards us, a group of humans splayed out on the ceiling of their cerulean world in wet-suits and snorkels.

Love in the deep blue

We had left the Tongan island of 'Eua an hour before, and the first whales we came upon were skittish and left the scene as soon as we threw ourselves into the water from our aluminium runabout.

But this menage a trois, two males and a female, seemed unphased by our presence. Occasionally they surfaced, perhaps ten metres away, bodies as big as a bus - obsidian black on the upside, shimmering white beneath.

Their heavy-lidded, seductress eyes seemed half-fixed upon us, and half-fixed on the ballet they were executing in clear blue water. On the occasions they rose to the surface, their great tail flukes smacked the water like a crack from a pistol. Several times a male - intending to impress the female, leaped from the water ('breaching') with an exhibitionism that seemed truly mammalian.

The males sing complex, extended songs while mating, signalling their credentials to the female, who listens to the call, and makes her choice accordingly.

Incredibly, this trio rumpty-tumpteed for three-quarters of an hour beneath us, an apparent exercise in playfulness that seemed as human as it was cetacean.

Humpback migrate every year from the Antarctic regions, where they feast on krill, fattening themselves for the fastening months in the warm waters off Tonga. In these regions, they mate and give birth.

Wolfgang's Last Dive

There are not many scuba instructors who tie themselves to the sea bed on an incoming tide, but then Wolfgang Borner was an unusual man.

Today I visited his grave, an unadorned block of concrete, without inscription, in a graveyard full of the elaborate, flower-covered sand-mounds of local Tongans.

When I first met him, he had just begun construction of a row of chalets on a coral ridge above the ocean on the island of 'Eua. He had a sawmill from Sears and Roebuck on his back lawn, and fashioned tens of thousands of planks from off-cuts of the island's logging industry.

He had persuaded the loggers to give him the wood for free. Each of the chalets featured minutely worked wooden shutters, and hand-carved doors and lintels. Between 2009 and 2015 this stylish row of red cedar huts extended further along the escarpment overlooking the harbour. He also built a large dining room, and a vast shed to cover his sawmill. When he finished this project, he immediately began construction of a 21 foot catamaran in which he would 'sail into the sunset'.

I returned every year for four years to 'Eua, as the row of fale crept along the ridge above Ohonua Harbour, sometimes camping on the floor of a half-completed hut, while I learned scuba diving from Wolfgang. He was an impatient, exacting teacher, who reprimanded me for my tendency to float to the surface. Only by girthing me in many pounds of lead, could he get me to stay on the bottom.

He kept bees on the escarpment next to the huts, and presented comb honey to his guests. Almost as good was his papaya and passion-fruit jam; his oven-roasted arabica coffee; his cinnamon and chocolate pancakes, and the elaborate pizzas he made in his home-cast pizza oven. Friday night was pizza night, and locals, including a bevy of Mormon missionaries, would converge from around the island to feast on Wolfgang's fare.

Wolfgang had been a wealthy man in the former East Germany under Soviet rule, where he ran a commercial sawmill, and owned a multi-story house. Visiting an aunt in the West, he had been tempted to escape, but drank a litre of vodka and steeled himself to return to his wife and daughter.

When the Wall came down, Wolfgang fled Berlin for Honduras to run a dive centre, where his problems really begun. He ran out of money, his dive boat was damaged, and he began to have hallucinatory dreams. His wife and daughter, soured by this precarious life and his pungent, prophetic visions, abandoned him and returned to Germany. His place in Honduras was infected with demons he told me, who appeared in the guise of a wild red dog, and it was only through Jesus that he was able to keep them at bay.

As well as being a scuba instructor, Wolf was also an adventurous sailor, a gifted and creative mechanic, and a relentless pursuer of the hump-backed whales that came to 'Eua each winter to breed and give birth. One year, I brought him a suitcase stuffed with fins and snorkels. Another year I gifted him a computer, which he cast in the ocean when he discovered his young Tongan assistant watching pornography.

Around a fireplace made out of rough blocks of coral, Wolfgang would open a bottle of whiskey, and in passionate tones, explain how the promise of eternal life brought him profound joy and exaltation. Thus was ordinary life made bearable. Often, in the midst of these speeches, his guests would get up and leave. It was when the monologues began over breakfast, that I realised things were moving to crisis point.

Final opus - 'Kleines Boot' is complete

On my final visit in winter 2015, he sported a biblical grey beard, and his hand shook when he poured my coffee in the morning. He was putting the finishing touches to 'Kleines Boot', the ornate catamaran that was his final opus.

The Tonga Times reported the Wolfgang had indeed sailed the 41 kilometre stretch of ocean to the main island of Tongatapu. He told reporters that the boat was too small for ocean transport, and he planned a monster craft for the hundreds of kilometres to the island group of Vava'u. Two months later, he was dead.

His employee at the Ovava Tree Lodge, Tani, told me that Wolfgang had disappeared at Xmas 2015, and three days later, fishing for a New Year banquet, he had found the German on the seabed, in flippers, snorkel and mask. He had tied his feet to a large rock.

It was a typically flamboyant gesture from a man who lived by extremes; a Berliner who rarely compromised in the execution of his plans ... and a man who brought to the tiny island of 'Eua, a memorable cargo of skill, passion and eccentricity.

What The Bard could tell The Donald

Trump is famously a non-reader. Last year the Washington Post quoted him as saying he has no time to read: “I never have. I’m always busy ..."

If he were a reader, he might be familiar with what the 16th century son of a glover from Stratford-upon-Avon had to say about the single-minded pursuit of power.

The combative Macbeth, a Scottish lord, is seduced by a ghoulish trio of confidents into believing that he is destined for great things ... that he will ascend to be King of Scotland. Spurred on by the prophecy, and colluding with ambitious members of his family, Macbeth plots the murder of the reigning King Duncan.

In order to conceal the criminal nature of his ascent to power, Macbeth weaves a tangle of subterfuge and lies, and is forced to ruthlessly dispose of all those who may reveal his actions. The physical and psychological cost is high, and Macbeth is increasingly wracked by paranoia, startling hallucinations and tormented midnight tweets.

In Act 1, as he plots the demise of another opponent, he anguishes over 'bloody instructions, which being taught, return to plague the inventor',  and confesses to 'vaulting ambition, which o'leaps itself'.

The most compelling passages of Macbeth are his increasingly violent swings between megalomania and guilt ... as his psyche steadily unravels, and members of his family, equally tormented, meet their demise.

Opposition forces slowly assemble, until, isolated in his castle, surrounded only by those most blindly loyal, he is dispatched by the avenging MacMueller.

A compelling literary portrait of the price of ruthless pursuit of power, Macbeth is a salutary tale for anyone who wishes to lead a nation, and who would stoop at nothing to do so.

It's a safe bet that Trump has never read it.

Gargoyles of the tangata whenua

Several days in the Far North town of Kaitaia running a writing workshop for a bunch of local teenagers. The town has rampant unemployment, and was in the national news while I was there for an outbreak of gang warfare that has killed five gang members in the last year (Black Power, Mongrel Mob, Headhunters, Nomads). Problems range from gang executions to kids selling cannabis in school on behalf of their parents. 'Smash Dog', a spokesman for the local Mongrel Mob announced they were planning a formal 'fight night' next month, a social event, to bring the gangs together to stop the killing. Go figure.

I had been invited to Kaitaia by Nancy Wiperi, a community activist charged with empowering local kids through storytelling. Location of our workshop was a freezing wharenui (below) with the most elaborate and tortured figures carved masterfully into the wooden interior. Gargoyles of the tangata whenua.

The kids ranged in age from 13 to 17 and were drawn from Kaitaia College (kiwis, plus kids from Germany, the Isle of Man, South Africa, Spain) and a small local village school. Some of the Maori kids from the village school had never met a foreigner before, and among these was the great-grandson of esteemed Maori poet Hone Tuwhare.

Kids this age have a predilection for science fiction, perhaps as an escape from the nature of their environment, but rapidly segued into events of the real world when I invited them to imagine a poetic transformation of their own tender histories. We looked at how to inflect these stories with the template of the Hero's Journey - a story-telling pattern that goes back to the dawn of man, and which occurs in bold form in Maori myths.

I was inviting them to create stories that transcended the restricted nature of their lives, and they took to it with alacrity. The enthusiasm and native energy of teenagers is always a thrill to work with ... their imaginations still pristine and undamaged by the burdens of adult life and the sterile ways of the corporate workplace.

Perhaps on my next trip to the north, I'll invite the gang members to a creative writing workshop. While not as cathartic maybe as a 'fight night', it might provide a little respite for the local hospital services.

At a writing workshop I held some time ago at Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison, I was struck by two things - the profound sadness of these men ... and also the sense of puzzlement in the inmates, many of them Maori gang members; as if they were faintly baffled by their predicament. At one level the catastrophe of their lives was a failure of creativity - an inability to imagine a future for themselves that didn't include violence.

Interior of the wharenui - gargoyles of the tangata whenua

Warren's hydrogen bomb ...

Today, on a park beach overlooking a sun-kissed Mairangi Bay in Auckland, I listened to my friend Warren Karno describe a hydrogen bomb blast over Malden Island in the central Pacific in 1957. Warren is one of a handful of people still alive today who have seen a thermonuclear explosion. A member of the Royal Air Force, he was told by his commanding officer to turn his back for 15 seconds to avoid being blinded by the flash, and then watched in awe as the air-burst, code-named 'Grapple', hovered 18 miles away at 5,000 feet like a freshly-minted second sun. Warren was ordered to return to Malden Island where he was exposed to radiation. Warren's book 'Grapple and the Guinea Pig' relates his experiences, and he told me of the genetic damage he suffered that he believes is now being passed on in birth defects and still births to his children and grand-children. A clip of one of the 'Grapple' tests ...

This week, we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the Soviet early warning system malfunction of September 1983, when sunlight reflection off high clouds was logged as an incoming US nuclear missile attack. On that occasion the cool head of Colonel Stanislav Petrov, under a paranoid Soviet leadership, correctly identified the 'attack' as a false alarm.

Kim Jun-un

This situation right now in North Korea is quite similar.

The paranoid leadership in Pyongyang view every US move as a threat, and the diversion of a US aircraft carrier group this week to the Korean peninsula has caused the North Koreans to threaten a pre-emptive nuclear strike. No leader in his right mind would conceive of such a thing, but the 33 year old North Korean leader Kim Jun-un, is as belligerent and unstable as his US counter-part Donald Trump. Should there be an error in the North Korean early warning radars, or an over-zealous military report an incoming attack, Kim Jun-un could launch a nuclear strike on one of the dozen US army bases along his southern border, or just as likely ... on the South Korean capital of Seoul, which is 50 km south of this border.

Seoul is the second largest metropolitan area in the world, with 26 million people.

WW II was sparked by a deranged demagogue's invasion of a neighbouring country, and resulted in 60 million deaths. In an unprecedented move this week, China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, fearful of this very scenario, warned that war on the Korean peninsula could break 'out at any moment'.

North Korean missile technology is probably not yet capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to Seoul, but a nuclear weapon would be delivered by one of its nuclear-capable Illyushin Il 28 bombers, which travelling at 900 km per hour would reach Seoul in minutes. Such a catastrophe would leave millions dead and injure millions more.

The North Korean leadership lives in a paranoid parallel universe, not dissimilar to the aging and frightened Soviet leadership at the height of the Cold War. The recklessness of the Korean leader was demonstrated in February when he organised the bizarre killing of his own half-brother with a nerve agent at a Malaysian airport.

This is the true and terrifying danger that Trump's macho posturing brings with it ... that his bumbling belligerence will cause the panicking North Koreans to shoot first.

Night in a sea cave with a ghost ...

Last week I hiked out to the wild west coast and spent the night in my one-man tent, perched above the Tasman Sea in an ancient sea cave. Throughout the night, a sou'wester howled around the site, and big swells from the ocean rolled in and dashed themselves on the rocks below.

I drove out to Piha Beach at dusk, hiked an hour and a half up the Hillary Trail and made camp at Paikea Bay just north of Sir Edmund Hillary's former home high up on the cliffs. Paikea was a turehu, or supernatural being of Maori folk-lore, who rode the hump-backed whale and in local myth would ferry people up and down this rugged coast. Paikea Bay is a wind-blasted and remote spot, devoid of settlement, although ancient Maori (and Paikea himself no doubt) used the cave for shelter, and below the entrance lie heaped up shell-fish middens, and the remnants of camp fires.

After pegging out my tent as securely as I could, I lit my propane burner, cooked myself a Kathmandu instant meal titled hilariously Venison and Vegetables. Choking it down, I wondering why campers ever fall for the enticing photos on these bags. A cup of hot chocolate on the other hand, tasted several times more delicious than it would at home.

Paikea Bay

I had taken a book, 'Solitude and Loneliness' by the BBC radio writer Alistair Jessiman, who argues for spending time alone in wild places, and read this by the light of a failing LED head-lamp. Jessiman tells us that urban life tames the mind; reduces it to habitual and constricted ways of thinking and only by regular contact with the wilderness can we reconnect with the intrinsic and natural wildness of our minds, the untamed nature of our souls.

I didn't sleep much, as the wind threatened to tear my tent loose from the mouth of the cave and send it out over the Tasman like a demented kite ... but at times, in the dead of night, with the ghost of Paikea cackling in the high reaches of the cave, I felt a primal joy that came from the utter loneliness of the place, and the raw power of the elements around me.

In the morning it was raining, so I carefully packed up my possessions, and hiked back across several headlands to Piha Beach, a feeling of rare exhilaration dogging my path. I knew the effects of this experience would only last a few days, but I had supped at the table of the infinite, and that I would not forget.