You feel lucky when you know where you are

So, yes; context has already revealed that harvestbro is in town, looking almost, but not quite, as beardy as Liam Finn. The effect in our familial case is like looking into a time machine that takes one back thirty years, to a universe in which harvestdad had kept his hair and worn it a shade or two lighter. As the child who has missed out on the eery resemblance gene, I enjoy pointing this out.

Work and life in Melbourne is flourishing for my bro, whose decision to do more audio engineering as well as his usual round of producing, arranging and composing is proving fruitful. His gift as an engineer, and thereby his commercial edge, is that he can approach the track under construction as both musician and technician. It’s a complex but beautiful fusion, and one that’s it’s enlightening to hear him discuss. This is creativity–poesis, even–in its most literal sense: makin’ stuff. His is a musical world dedicated to the aesthetic, both inside and out: the creation of highly wrought sonic worlds that embody, in a different sense from which it was originally meant, the Crowded House couplet “Ready or not / Here comes the drop“.

Another benefit of spending time with someone in a parallel field is the way in which they can shine new light (or, let’s be honest, call bullshit) on assumptions that might otherwise go unchallenged. The minutiae of such conversations are not for reproduction here; H-bro’s iconoclastic approach to harvestbird thought can best be encapsulated in his remark that “it doesn’t matter how much Gram Parsons you listen to; if all you play is hymn tunes then it’s going to sound like hymn tunes when you improvise”. Indeed.

We went, earlier in the week, to see Transformers, to which I see the Guardian gave one disgusted star in review. This film is an intertext, and should be treated as such. It gains at least part of its meaning precisely in its intersection with the cultural memories of those whom Bradshaw the Guardian reviewer calls “film’s dumbest and most reactionary demographic of 15-to-25-year-olds, to whose masturbatory needs [the director] Bay caters with passionate urgency”. Contempt indeed; contempt for nostalgic consumption, the love of toys solidified, in adulthood, into the geek’s love for their objects of enthusiasm, which critics of the film seem implicitly to suggest is at best emotionally retarded and which, at worst, makes one a tool of global capitalism. To me, it’s a different interface: those many hours of Transformers on television evoked in a word or line of dialogue here and there in the way that texts of all kinds draw on other texts. Megatron whispers “Prime”, once, and a knowing viewer might think both of other narratives of two like cyber-enemies (Terminator 2, for example), and the camper televisual heritage, in which Megatron fights Optimus Prime again, and again, and again, with all the rhetoric befitting two giant robot leaders.

As with many mainstream American blockbusters, the film emphasised the physical skill, mental fortitude and moral goodness of American soldiers: considerable screentime was given in the exposition to a Spanish-speaking soldier who, despite his companions’ complaints at not being able to understand him, insisted nonetheless on his all-Americanness. Later he was rescued in battle by his two heroic compatriots; one black, one white. If the latter’s expressed wish to do no more upon returning home that hold for the first time his baby daughter seemed cheesy, then it needs to be taken in the context of wider liberal-cultural doubts about the possibility of heroism and goodness in American military efforts in the world at the moment. So much of the human drama in the film seemed a kind of yearning not for the consumer past of the Hasbro toys, but an imagined time in which soldiers were super-capable heroes and military campaigns were clear-cut in terms of their necessity, their risks and their desired outcomes.

In contrast to, for example, Air Force One, in which the Vietnam veteran president single-handedly saved his family and the nation at a time when Clinton the real-life president who did not serve appeared almost paralysed by sexual scandal, the president did make an appearance in this film: as the feet in a pair of red socks lounging on a bed aboard Air Force One, asking for one of the air force staff to bring him some Ding Dongs. In Transformers, the president is no longer capable of being a hero, and the responsibility must fall to soldiers, tech-savvy international students and young consumers themselves.

The film’s extended climax takes place in and around the Hoover Dam, and I was intrigued by the contrast of this icon of industrialised modernism with the threat of the future, in which humanity and all its technological achievements are either going to be subsumed as resource fodder or allowed to peacefully coexist with whichever robot faction is victorious. The idea of technology consuming and destroying us is not new at all, and Transformers presents it as encoded with a choice for the occupying robot forces: justice (the Decepticons) or mercy (the Autobots). Megatron makes it clear that humans don’t have the moral worth to let live; the inconvenience of preserving them in the midst of extrapolating their natural and virtual resources isn’t worth it. Prime, however, argues for mercy: the potential of the humans for good makes them worth sparing. We see Megatron engaging with this idea briefly, when he offers to spare the young male lead and keep him “as my pet”, but it’s really only a joke, a jest, at what he perceives to be the humans’ massive vulnerability. Again, these are old themes, and ones which western narratives hash and rehash again, in context after context. Is there such a thing as human worth beyond our own self-interest in preserving our lives and civilisations? Do the giant space-robots have a compelling reason to spare us?

Blockbuster movies are of their cultural moment, and it’s precisely the limitations in their storytelling–big budgets give rise to broad brushstrokes–that make them such culturally interesting documents, since they so often, to my mind, present ancient tropes in specific social and political contexts. Transformers evokes both the threat and the hope of technology, past and present, as well as more particular anxieties about western humanity’s power to govern itself and the world, all embedded in the curious medium of a film predicated on fanboy nostalgia. If my argument’s too rude in the face of our arthouse sensibilities, well, no matter; the film festival starts here next week.

Elsewhere, the ever-interesting Accordion Guy leads an item on Facebook Application Development with the image at left, and in a preceding entry refers to a concept finer still: Facebook Developer Camp. When I read this initially, I read it as Facebook Camp and immediately imagined us all gathering somewhere dark and woodland, building a fire and sitting round to share ghost stories and status updates. In those moments when I wonder if I am about to pass into that shadowland where I’m wholly constructed by technology, I take refuge in the dogs, who, though known on the internet, themselves know nobody there. It’s the inverse, I hope, of this.