sam m

Landon Odle

magazine

2013

ZIP

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STORIES THEN & NOW

   Vietnamese storyteller Sheila Pham's mother

Last night, I heard six autobiographical stories at Carriageworks, Redfern. They were performed in the style of William Yang's well-known personal narratives with images. This show is well worth seeing.

The final performances are at 2pm and 7pm today. There will be a post-show talk with the directors Annette Shun Wah, William Yang & the cast members today at 3.20pm (Saturday 25th May)

From the program notes :
"Taking the audience from the conflict zones of China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea and Sri Lanka to the fraught family squabbles of suburban Australia; these candid narratives are drawn from the rich life experiences of academic and author Ien Ang; performer and writer Jenevieve Chang; filmmaker and writer Michael C.S. Park; producer and writer Sheila Pham; social worker and food writer Paul van Reyk and civil marriage celebrant Willa Zheng. The stories are told through words and rare photographs from private collections. Music by Nicholas Ng.

Stories Then & Now brings together six Asian Australians to tell personal stories from their past to unravel the threads that lead to their present day lives. Directed by the photographer and storyteller William Yang and writer Annette Shun Wah with music by composer Nicholas Ng, experience how war robs a father of his children, obliterates a young woman’s village and thwarts a young man’s aspirations. A heartbroken dancer buries her pain in burlesque; a young professional ‘outsources’ her quest for a husband; and a traveller finally embraces her cultural homeland. These stories of determination speak bravely of the challenges of finding your way in contemporary Australia."

Tickets and information here

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Life as a Chinese government official isn’t what it used to be. Lavish, liquor-heavy banquets have been outlawed. It will soon be harder to get those handy military license plates, useful for avoiding hassle from traffic police. And these days, with China’s army of voracious and ever-watchful bloggers, every inappropriate smile, public temper tantrum, or luxury watch collection soon gets seen by the entire country.

Zhang Aihua, head of an industrial zone in Jiangsu Province threw a lavish banquet on April 19 that was broken up. He knelt on a dining table and publicly apologized. Photos and video soon went viral, and he was later dismissed from his post. Sina.com.cn

The plight of the Chinese official isn’t an issue many rally behind. The thousands of men and women who help run the country in posts ranging from head of an industrial park to a minister, are vilified by the public for their wealth, elite connections, and privileged treatment. Officials are more often than not seen as part of China’s problems with government corruption and negligence.

And yet, it’s not easy being red and feeding from the iron rice bowl. Chinese officials, like political dissidents or regular citizens, also suffer under a party that is accountable chiefly to itself and a government that arbitrarily enforces laws.

In the last two weeks, two Chinese officials have mysteriously died after being detained by authorities under the party’s internal discipline system, shuanggui. The family of Jia Jiuxiang, vice president of a court in Henan province, said Jia turned up badly bruised at a local hospital after being detained for 11 days. He died on the morning of April 25.

A week ago, a Chinese official by the name of Yu Qiyi died after arriving in a local hospital in Zhejiang province beaten, with blood coming out of his nose and ears. Chinese state media said Yu had “suffered an accident” while being questioned by party discipline officials. In both cases, reports said the officials were being investigated for corruption, but no more details were given.

Jia and Yu are just two examples of many more officials subject to shuanggui, which translates roughly as “double regulation,“ a way of keeping cadres in check that is essentially a separate, opaque, judicial system just for party and government officials. This table from Dui Hua Human Rights Journal summarizes some other well-known cases:

What little is known about the process comes from select stories reported in Chinese media. An official is detained, usually without notice. In the case of Jia, he was picked up by authorities on his way home from a trip and managed to make one hurried phone call to his ex-wife, the last time they spoke before his death. Other officials’ deaths have been attributed to vague and strange causes like drinking boiled water or playing hide and seek.

“The idea that the party essentially runs its own separate justice system, detached from the formal justice system, is a real concern,” Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, tells Quartz. Detainment can last for days or months—in some cases, officials have disappeared for years. Isolation, torture, and sleep deprivation are common interrogation techniques, experts say.

Officials in question usually lose their posts, careers never to be rehabilitated, and see all their property seized. High-profile cases are sometimes made into criminal cases to go through the regular justice system, but the verdict has already been determined. Suicide is common before that point.

Chinese blogger Chu Zhaoxian wrote about a visit to a party official detainment center in 2011. His article and photos of the center were censored but not before other sites had reposted them. Dui Hua Human Rights Journal

Now, more officials may be at risk under an anti-corruption campaign launched by China’s new leader Xi Jinping. The party appointed one of its most well-respected officials, Wang Qishan, as head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), which implements the shuanggui—a sign some have taken to mean a serious crackdown is underway. Authorities say they have investigated over 660,000 officials over the past five years.

Officials at levels higher than Yu and Jia, who can often be protected by other elites, don’t appear to be immune and in some ways they are more vulnerable. Former railway minister, in charge when a high speed train crash killed dozens in 2011, was charged for corruption and abuse of power earlier in April. Bo Xilai, fallen former powerful party secretary of Chongqing, hasn’t been seen in public since last year and has still not been tried in court.

Yet, the fact that the recent deaths of Yu and Jia were reported in national Chinese media may be a sign of a rising tide of opposition. ”It means that criticism is getting greater. They were under no obligation to report these deaths. This was a choice that someone made. The easiest thing to do would have been to cover up the whole thing,” Flora Sapio, an expert in Chinese law at Chinese University Hong Kong, tells Quartz.

Chinese blogger Chu Zhaoxian on his visit to a Shuanggui center notes that the walls are soundproof and soft to the touch. Dui Hua Human Rights Journal

Defenders of shuanggui, which dates back to the early days of the People’s Republic, say it’s akin to an internal audit of a company. Over the past decade, leaders have spoken more openly about the system and made efforts to institutionalize it with guidelines. In 2009, the head of the CCDI said in a press conference that shuanggui operates under stringent regulations that ban corporal punishment and mandate respect for “the dignity” of those investigated.

Still, shuanggui is shrouded in mystery. There are no available data for how many officials are disciplined through it or to what extent regulations are followed, according to Sapio. ”Officially, it can be used only on officials who serve at the county level and above, and only in what [the party] calls ‘important and complicated’ cases of corruption or official crime. The problem is, what is ‘important and complicated’?” she says.

The system is likely to stay as it is. Officials in opposition would have to prove an alternative discipline system is better or that shuanggui is not effective, Sapio says. Moreover, it is a way to discipline officials out of the public eye and keep scandal to a minimum. Drawing media attention to the recent grisly deaths may have simply been a call for the rights of officials to be respected, not to disband shuanggui. Given how many Chinese, ready pounce on chances to expose corrupt officials, see rough treatment of corrupt officials as rightful retribution, it’s hard to see China changing course soon.

Chinese blogger Chu Zhaoxian described this as the “investigations command room” where a monitor shows what is going on in all of the rooms in the shuanggui center. Dui Hua Human Rights Journal

In Bangladesh, grief over a collapsed factory has swiftly turned to anger. Rescue workers are still pulling bodies out of the ruins in the outskirts of Dhaka, the death toll has topped 275, and garment factory workers blockaded highways and attacked factories for refusing to give workers a day off to mourn.

Sadly, the history of the garment industry in Bangladesh suggests that little is likely to change. Garment workers are caught in a trap—work cheaply, at significant risk to your life, or don’t work at all.

In the wake of the tragedy, politicians were quick to promise action. “Whoever might be the culprits, and even if they belong to our party, they won’t go scot-free,” said Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. But who exactly is to blame? Is it the regulatory framework that let a building with no permit be constructed? The factory owner who forced his employees to work even after cracks in the foundation were found? Or the Western clothing manufacturers that enabled Bangladesh to become the world’s second-largest exporter of cheap clothing?

The building collapse was all too similar to a fire in November last year, which killed 112 people in a factory with no safety certificate. In March government ministries and industry representatives agreed to create a national action plan to improve fire safety. But Babul Akter of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation was not optimistic.

“At least 33 members of the current parliament own garment businesses,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s more than 10% of seats. There are repeated instances of MPs linked to the garment industry blocking stricter legislation.”

Some affected by Wednesday’s collapse are hopeful that the big clothing brands that use Bangladesh as a supplier will force a change in working conditions. Customers of Joe Fresh, one of the brands sourcing clothes from the destroyed factory, have threatened to boycott the label as anger on social media grows. But New York-based sourcing agent Edward Hertzman told Reuters that Bangladesh’s garment industry can only survive by offering the lowest costs: “If the factories want to raise prices to make up for rising wages and costs, the buyers say, ‘oh why do we want to go to Bangladesh if I could go to China, Vietnam, Latin America etc for a similar price?’“

Indeed, even before the factory collapse this week, major Western buyers were expressing dissatisfaction with Bangladesh, citing recent civil unrest and religious violence. A 40 percent reduction in foreign orders is likely to get worse in the wake of the building collapse—none of which will help Bangladesh avoid future tragedies.

Happy belated Halloween all ya'll,
Since I scanned a Pumpkin already, I wanted to do something else and was introduced by my flower people to the Pumpkin Tree. Actually more like a pepper and closer to an eggplant. Here's the whole bunch.

““Where is the bomb?””

- Security guard as he looks into my small pursue (that can barely hold my cellphone).

a fun guy
brent was a fun guy.
he liked to have fun.
he especially liked to have fun with his buddies pat, jeremy, adam and joshua.
one day he went over to pat's place to have some fun.
but when he got there he found his four friends not having any fun and looking down at the floor with sad faces.
"hey guys," brent said.  "what's wrong?"
jeremy looked up.  "i guess he hasn't heard the news."
"i guess not," said adam.  he handed brent his phone.  it was turned to cnn, and there was a big headline - "supreme court outlaws fun."
"this is terrible," brent said.  they all nodded in agreement.
after that brent was not such a fun guy any more.
in fact he became a sad guy.
a real sad guy.

Like the trillion-dollar platinum coin several months ago, Bitcoin has jumped from a technical curiosity to “mainstream” financial news. It has become an object of economic escapism—but the kind you can’t escape from. Whether it continues to grow as a phenomenon has yet to be seen, but the underlying curiosity tells us that there is growing skepticism about global financial systems’ long-term viability, and a correlated grassroots interest in returning to smaller scale, offline, more locally-focused systems of exchange.

Economic anthropologist Keith Hart, who gave us the phrase “informal sector,” maintains that the previously bold dividing line between “legitimate” formal economies (with their megabanks, registered brokers, middlemen, and recognized currencies) is blurring quickly due to worldwide economic stresses. In a talk last year in Barcelona, Hart pointed out that in ailing countries, such as Spain and Greece, the informal practices that have been in place all along have re-emerged as a new kind of “formal informal” market, recognized by many citizens as a valid option for work, earning and exchange. This formal-informal connection is being accelerated by simple uses of technology says Ken Banks, founder of a global initiative to promote economic self-sufficiency Means of Exchange. A much broader potential user base, with web and mobile access, can coordinate simple economic activities, such as time banking, bartering, and local economic action that brings buyers and sellers, or workers and employers, together simply—more like Craigslist, less like Amazon.

Bitcoin may be the digital canary in the coal mine at the moment, seen as a test case for “new money” by both economists and tech enthusiasts, but its not the only game in town. At the moment, these simpler systems of payment and exchange get far less press and attention from money bloggers, but if we’re lucky, they will succeed without this attention—perhaps precisely because no one is looking.

Physical alternative currencies

While we fret about block chains, and coin mining, new analog currencies are taking root in the world. There have been various alternative currencies kicking around developed countries like Britain and the US for years, but the global recession has spurred increased interest in setting up small local systems of payment using money designed around local needs. These range from the gray hairs of local currency such as the Brixton Pound, set up five years ago in the South London neighborhood that gave it its name, to more recent entrants like Bavaria’s Chiemgauer, a currency that started in a school and has spread to wider use, and the Credito, used by the Damanhur eco-community in Northern Italy. Most of these currencies utilize very little technology, other than for simple accounting, putting them in reach of even the unwired, which is critical to making these currencies accessible.

None promise to become the euro, nor even replace its various national antecedents. They are designed for and serve local structural interests, mapped closely to the economic patterns of its users, rather than a distant abstraction. Most authorities, who don’t see these local currency “startups,” as a threat, have stayed back, which encouraged others to try as well. The latest to come onto the scene is being created by the BilboDiru project, a group in Spain’s Basque country, to serve that region. According to a recent interview with the group (Spanish), the currency is so new it doesn’t have a name, though a poll has put hazi, “seed” in Basque, and bertoko, “local,”in the running.

A better means of exchange

Why is all of this happening now? According to Banks, a growing number of people worldwide have grown tired of being burned by globalization and just want to get back to functioning within sustainable local systems.

“Because of the way our globalised world works (great when it does, rubbish when it doesn’t), hard-working people, and communities, are being destroyed by financial meltdown in distant places,” Banks wrote me in an email. “Globalisation has eroded our incentives, and ability, to play well together as local communities, meaning we’re now less resilient to shocks of all kinds than we used to be.”

Banks, who knows technology from his experience designing FrontlineSMS, a platform that uses mobile short-message service to enable community engagement, believes that while projects like Bitcoin are interesting, they set too high a bar for the average person.

“Most of the action I see is around software development—people getting excited by local currency platforms, or virtual currencies,” Banks wrote. “The problem here is that these are generally being run by techies, and we need to lead with the problem we’re trying to solve, not a cool technology. Most of the software being developed is unusable unless you have a degree in computing, or a server that costs about the same as a small car, and is hard to understand.”

This doesn’t mean technology should be thrown out completely though, but rather used where appropriate to the task. For Banks, and a growing cadre of others looking at the issue, this means using technology as a simple underlying platform to bring various systems together.

“In terms of software and tools development, I’m fascinated by what we might be able to do if we can build a brand around local economic empowerment that resonates with a wide range of people, including younger people,” Banks said. “What we need is a platform—yes, I’d go that far – which can capture the whole range of behaviours and activities which make up a better locally-engaged citizen. Right now we don’t have that, and it’s problematic, and confusing.”

You can follow Scott on Twitter at @changeist. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

History tells us that artists with an experimental lean tend to topple toward the middle over time, losing a once-unique edge in an effort to curb artistic stagnation or simply as a means of courting a wider listenership. At first blush, the career of Marnie Stern would seem to bear out this trajectory. The treble-voiced, finger-tapping, endearingly self-deprecating New York-based guitar hero has moved breathlessly across a trio of albums with nary a pause for traditional considerations such as melody or structure. That she’s gathered both in intermittent fits of inspiration over the years certainly speaks to her natural talent, yet both have, up to now, felt more like natural by-products of her process rather than premeditated goals. Which is more than fine: each of Stern’s records have provided more than their share of thrills and heart-stopping flourishes, and as a technician she may be the most naturally gifted guitar player of her generation. Nevertheless, she seemed to be exhausting her formula a bit on her 2011 self-titled album. The less defined, more freewheeling moments in her past work were easy to forgive for an artist still presumably finding her footing. But more recently these same feats of strength had begun to feel less like displays of unchecked passion and more like a crutch.

Which is what makes Stern’s amazingly titled new album The Chronicles of Marnia such a refreshing listen. Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers, Chronicles is unique in that it doesn’t represent a stylistic 180 or drastic overhaul of Stern’s sound, but instead finds her integrating her unique ingredients into fresh, streamlined concoctions. Working with Oneida drummer Kid Millions after years battling against the currents of torrential fury whipped up by Zach Hill (now of Death Grips infamy), Stern has finally found a running-mate rather than a foil. Granted, much of the excitement generated by the band’s prior set-up was a direct result of the tension spark by Stern’s guitar reacting unpredictably to Hill’s free-assault percussion. Millions may be more of a finesse player (though compared to Hill, nearly every drummer can sound dainty), but he’s far more equipped at harnessing a groove without sacrificing the momentum so essential to Stern’s headlong fury. What they’ve emerged with is Stern’s first collection of songs, ten carefully plotted tracks with an emphasis on craft and internal harmonization.

Lest one think Stern is following the path established by that of her many forebears, Chronicles is frontloaded with a handful of her most dizzying yet immediately satisfying tracks to date. In fact, the opening volley of songs might each be what one might refer to as—depending on how liberal your definition—jams. Opener “Year of the Glad” announces itself auspiciously, with Stern wordlessly yelping atop Millions’ galloping beat. “Everything’s starting now,” Stern chirps between successful attempts at turning monkey noises into a hook, and in less than four minutes she’s ran through a verse, a chorus, and a bridge without breaking much of sweat. Her guitar bends like taffy throughout “You Don’t Turn Down,” scurrying from colossal, power-chorded peaks through naked, strummed valleys, her lyrics about emotional congestion mirroring her and Millions’ dynamic gait. “Noonan” similarly trots with confidence as Stern sings, “Don’t you want to be somebody,” as if she’s now fully found her voice and is offering encouragement to those inspired by her fearless evolution. “Nothing is Easy” and “Immortals” are a closer approximation of what we’ve come to expect from Stern, mantra-like and slightly mannered, but with a continued air of the inspirational (“You don’t need a sledgehammer to walk in my shoes” goes the former; “I’ll come and find ya,” the latter).

The second half of the record sees the duo losing a bit of the momentum built up by the opening gambit. The title track promises a continuation of the chiseled, energetic outbursts of the proceeding side but instead has to play as a shot of adrenaline to last for the next fifteen minutes or so. “Still Moving” doesn’t quite live up to its title, loosening the grip on the more structured principles employed earlier, while “East Side Glory” finds Stern delivering her most conventional riff alongside a sing-song melody that (perhaps intentionally) lacks the conviction of her more demonstrative work. And then “Proof of Life” rumbles to life on the back of storm-gathering percussion and (…wait for it) concentrated piano chords. Thankfully Stern and Millions mostly come through on the drama, building to an emotional and musical climax by simply flashing rather than overextending their chops. Stern’s repeated request of “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon” on closer “Hell Yes,” then, works as both reestablishment and reminder of her most efficient gear: “All I’ve got is time,” Stern defiantly proclaims as her guitar careens alongside Millions’ advancing army of a beat. And hopefully with a little more, Stern and her new partner will learn to spread this restless spirit evenly across the length of a collaboration.

The word ‘naughty’ is etymologically related to the number naught. Winning, and its relationship to one, along with duplicity and its relationship to two, seem to be the only other similar contemporary instances where a number becomes descriptive of a particular kind of activity. But being naughty is not the opposite of winning, in the sense that winning is being number one.

Welcome wonder / Welcome to the letters and so on

A welcome consequence of the digitalization of our lives and media is the creation of streams of data that weren’t previously accessible. One of those is the book passages most highlighted by users of Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader software.

It’s magical to see the short selections of writing that most moved readers across Amazon’s vast digital catalog of fiction and non-fiction works to wield their digital highlighters. Millions of passages are highlighted each month, the company says.

Amazon’s lists are predictably filled with mass market favorites. The most highlighted passage of all time is from Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games series: ”Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” Religious and self-help titles are also frequently highlighted. And scattered throughout the most popular highlights are selections from business titles and books of interest to managers. Below is a compilation of some from Amazon’s Heavily Highlighted Recently list. (Of course, as we’ve pointed out, any business book advice should be taken with a large quantity of salt.)

A number of the top highlights come from The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg. The most popular among them:

To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

First published in 1990, Stephen R. Covey’s bestselling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People also has several passages in the most popular. Among them:

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

The most heavily highlighted passage recently in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is the text of a voiceover for a TV commercial co-written by Jobs in 1997:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Another popular selection from Steve Jobs:

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

A section critical of brainstorming from Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain makes the list:

Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

Two sections of The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, are popular:

How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?

And this:

Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.

There’s this section on the importance of deadlines from Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, by Brian Tracy:

Step three: Set a deadline on your goal; set subdeadlines if necessary. A goal or decision without a deadline has no urgency. It has no real beginning or end. Without a definite deadline accompanied by the assignment or acceptance of specific responsibilities for completion, you will naturally procrastinate and get very little done. Step four: Make a list of everything that you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer, offers life advice thus:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

Meditation is the focus of this selection from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can DoTo Get More of It, by Kelly McGonigal:

Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness.

And, oh yes, there is one of the several quotes from the Fifty Shades of Grey adult trilogy, by EL James, that could pass as valuable business counsel:

The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.

David Blandy, “Soul of the USA” (2004), part of the “Barefoot Lone Pilgrim” project

BRIGHTON, UK — While laid up in Freud’s final consulting room, artist David Blandy was moved to recall a childhood trauma: “I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side.” A hypnotherapist encouraged him to continue: “Yo, dwelling in the past, flashbacks when I was young. Who ever thought that I would have a baby girl and three sons?” Astute observers will recognise those experiences as rap lyrics, so why was a floppy-haired English artist channelling Raekwon and Ghostface Killah? And, although beside the point, just what would the grandfather of psychoanalysis have made of life on the mean streets of Staten Island?

This strange performance, in which a hypnotist acted as midwife to every single hip-hop lyric the artist could recall, will be screened in film version at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in May. It should be an interesting sight: a tall, mild-mannered, bespectacled middle-class white dude spitting rhymes from a room more usually associated with long, traumatized pauses and sudden cathartic breakthroughs. But then, don’t we all have baggage like this, through the music, films, and books we consume? An “alternate subconscious” is the territory Blandy explores.

The rap-loving, London-born artist has long been around consulting rooms, and growing up with a mother who worked as an analyst has given the son a longstanding interest in the process. “But,” he says, “I feel as if the self-analysis of my work performs that function. I don’t know, maybe I’m worried that the angst informs the work. If therapy was to smooth everything over and return me to a state of normal sadness, rather than despair or mania, I’d lose some urgency.”

Over the past 15 years, that creative urgency, even mania, has seen Blandy develop at least half a dozen performative identities. They range from a kung fu monk to a white-face minstrel, from an apocalyptic manga character to a 16th-century explorer of the Far East, plus a guitar player from the Deep South whose lot in life is to follow in the footsteps of Robert Johnson. The result is a body of autobiographical work that resonates for anyone who likes rap, soul, video games, anime, and other facets of pop culture.

Episode 1 of David Blandy’s Anjin 1600 (2012), an ongoing anime series about 16th-century English explorer William Adams

These interests and commitments have won Blandy fans beyond the narrow world of art. In his most extensive exhibition to date, last year’s Odysseys, he brought an entire gaming arcade into Phoenix Brighton. Many of the consoles, or cabs as the artist refers to them, were fully customized artworks. Serious fans of Street Fighter came to the gallery to battle and were quite happy to adopt one of the artist’s contemplative personae.

“Computer games are the other big defining force in my practice and in my life,” he says. “In my practice, I deliberately allowed the lines between artwork and life to be completely blurred, so by practicing Street Fighter, is this a rehearsal for an ongoing performance work or is this just me practicing Street Fighter? It’s very difficult to make the distinction.” Needless to say, Blandy would most likely pwn you or me in the gaming arena — although compared with many players he knows from tournaments like the one he staged at Phoenix, he describes himself as lower intermediate.

As both consumer and artist, he likens himself to an “embedded correspondent”: “I’m inside the fight game community or I’m inside the hip hop community … and it’s from that place that I make the work, almost as fan-made artwork, but obviously with an artistic sensibility.” As for the current debate around the aesthetic value of computer games, for him there’s no question. “I’ve had what I would call artistic experiences inside games,” he says. “Of course, it’s art. It’s been art since Super Mario 64. Even Tetris is an art; it’s so pure.”

Without the aid of hypnosis, Blandy recalls a transformative moment from his time at art school: “I was at home with flu and played Final Fantasy Seven for a couple of days, 10 hours straight each day, and, yeah, one of the characters died. And I think partly because I was quite flu-ed up and partly because it was a very emotionally charged game, I ended up crying my eyes out.”

“You don’t expect a game to have an emotional impact, do you?” he adds. “I think it’s moments like that, analysing those moments that provides fuel for a lot of what I’ve gone on to do.”

Those activities include pilgrimages to New York, LA, and the English Lake District in search of “soul” as well as a trip to Japan where Blandy explored feelings of guilt about Hiroshima. (He had a POW grandfather whose life was probably saved by the atrocity.) His latest, ongoing work is an episodic anime series about 16th-century English explorer William Adams, who settled into a new life as a Japanese samurai. Such powers of assimilation are appealing to the chameleon-like artist.

David Blandy, “Child of the Atom” (2010)

“Every time I make a version of myself, I exorcise that part of me. There’s a minstrel, the Lone Pilgrim — they’re obviously affectations; they’re obviously made up. So if those elements are made up, are fiction, then what is the me and, you know, the David Blandy of artist talks?”

Peeling such an onion, when your living depends on it, is a high-stakes game. “I think all artists are in a state of perpetual anxiety, because you’re banking your existence on coming up with something fresh, something new, tomorrow. And you don’t know what that’s going to be. So anxiety’s always there, and that’s part of what drives you.”

But like many artists, Blandy is resigned to the fact he will never not be making art. “I think once you’ve entered art in its broadest sense, like literature or music, etc., that never leaves you.” Citing actor Mickey Rourke’s attempt to leave acting behind and take up boxing, he explains, “It can never just be fighting because of the context you’ve given it.” And such is his confidence in the context of his work that Blandy is more than happy to continue his fighting on and with the console screen.

“It’s taking something that’s completely outside the art environment and putting it in a gallery and creating that tension, where the participants are engaging with it, and they’re engaging with it for completely different reasons than the reasons why the space has been made available for them. I like the rawness of that energy.”

He laughs at this and breaks out another rhyme: “The raw, we give it to ya with no trivia / like cocaine straight from Bolivia.” And there’s not a hypnotherapist in sight.

David Blandy’s Biter premieres at Whitechapel Gallery (77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London) on May 16. Tickets are available online.