Enter the ‘Wolf

Hi and welcome to the first Werewolf issue of 2012, and our return to regular publication after concentrating late last year on election campaign coverage. Fittingly, our cover story this month focuses on the role of government in the modern economy, and suggests that newer, smarter versions of state-led capitalism may be outperforming free market capitalism around the world. Is it perhaps time for New Zealand - where the state continues to play the dominant role in economic performance but likes to pretend it doesn’t – to come clean, admit the state is the only real engine of innovation and economic growth, and get on with it? If only because free market rhetoric and practice has chronically under-delivered over the past 25 years, for most of us.

Elsewhere, we interview Lawrence Collins, a recently retired judge from the UK Supreme Court on human rights law in Britain, and particular cases – like the extradition proceedings against the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the attempt to freeze the assets of Libya’s Muammur Gaddafi – that helped establish the personal responsibility of heads of state for torture, and the boundaries on when and how US law can reach beyond its shores. As we head towards the Oscars, Philip Matthews examines the remarkable career of US director Terrence Malick and his ambitious new film The Tree of Life, while the children’s book column this month features the Philippa Pearce classic, Tom’s Midnight Garden. Satirist Lyndon Hood shows this month that music can make a very telling point or two about a lot of stuff – some of it involving Muppets and policemen. In The Complicatist music column, we feature a new biography that finally does justice to the astounding career of Alan Lomax, the relatively unknown saviour of much of the folk music traditions, country music, blues and - subsequently rock’n’roll – that we know today, and largely take for granted. If not for Lomax, much of this music would have been lost to history.

In her Left Coasting column from California this month, Rosalea Barker provides her response to this year’s Martin Luther King Day commemorations in her home city of Oakland, while Mark P. Williams reports back from the frontiers of new writing in Britain - and finds that the avant garde and the whimsical in literature share much the same outsider perspective and subversive function. Finally in Cartoon Alley we welcome back the new adventures of Ranga the Ape and his creator, Brent Willis.

Thanks again, to David McLellan for helping me post this online. Werewolf is a thank you to Scoop readers and is intended as an outlet for local writers and artists. If you want to be involved, contact me at gordon@scoop.co.nz.

Cheers,

Gordon Campbell

Werewolf/Scoop

gordon@scoop.co.nz