Man of Errors

Moving

2009-01-28T00:24:00.001+13:00

I'm moving.

Man of Errors is here from now on because I like this system better.

See you.

JY

Thoughts

2009-01-20T21:22:00.002+13:00

One: If Shelley has finished reading The Stone Diaries she might enjoy following all of these ongoing ramblings about the book on this blog.

Two: I have started a project about a guy living in 1905, but I have moved it to another site. Cathy thinks I should leave Man of Errors purely to bicker/banter with Richard. Even though I continue to resentfully contradict my wife I have learned through prolonged humiliation that she is in fact always right. I’m not sure why this is but it appears to be an immutable law.

I am making up the 1905 story as I go along, but I feel that the main character might have a story to tell. I’m doing it because:
1) I’m odd
2) I want to read books from a different time (about 1880 to 1905)
3) I think the past is an odd place and I want to visit it for a prolonged time.
I intend to do this blog for a year.

Three: I read in the Listener a TV reviewer commenting that there used to be loads of shows on telly that were courtroom dramas, but most of these have now been replaced by forensic shows. This is true. I wondered why. Is it because people crave scientific proof of guilt, and became frustrated by the doubt and nuance of a courtroom debate? I probably thought this because I have been watching Criminal Justice which is fantastic, but have never watched more than one episode of all the crime porn shows that give loving close-ups of brain matter spattered on walls.

Four: Has Richard ever seen Sweet and Lowdown? It’s a film by Woody Allen about a fictional jazz guitarist. It’s funny and sweet and quite sad and has a lot of Django music in it. I saw it along time ago and watched it again today. Aside from the fact that Sean Penn does a very bad impression of playing the guitar, it’s a really good movie. Samantha Morton is in it. I think New Zealanders are supposed to dislike her because she was “difficult” in River Queen. Having seen River Queen I think she may have been right to try and change it, because that really is a shit movie.

Five: We’re going away for a few days. Back on Monday.

Wednesday, 18 January, 1905

2009-01-18T14:39:00.003+13:00

R,
A gloomy, gusty day. I should press on and do all sorts of things but I am just feeling, what? Down? Washed out? I spent yesterday in my room, and the morning today. Made myself go out and get the newspaper. I am in a boarding house nearby a cricket ground called the Basin Reserve. While this is a peculiar name, it is nice to be near the cricket.

Basin Reserve, 1905 (Alexander Turnbull Library)

Yesterday I began to read She again. I devoured most of Haggard's books when I was a boy. Perhaps She was my favourite. I sort of hestitated before I began it again. There were various reasons for me to pause. Firstly, there is the strong chance that what I once idolised as a youth will turn out to be mush now that I am a man of twenty-five. Secondly, since I read his books all those years ago I have had experience of Africa, and the "heroism" of the Briton abroad and don't think much of it (the heroism that is; Africa is simply too much to digest). I picked the book up again because, I suppose, it is a comfort to return to something familiar when you are somewhere new and strange, and because I have heard that a sequel is expected shortly. Well, I have read three chapters and am enjoying it. Probably it is mush, but Haggard has a certain style to him.

The German I reported on in my last entry is still in the paper defending himself for saying New Zealanders dress badly and talk with a "twang". His criticisms seem to have touched a rather raw nerve. I am surprised that the people here care so much about the thoughts of a solitary European. Aggrieved letters have been pouring in telling the unfortunate Dr. Herz to go home although one paper has quite amusingly defended the doctor: "the New Zealander [has] a profound disinclination to have any of his faults pointed out to him." "The average tourist humours this national weakness to the top of its vainglorious, swollen-headed bent, and tells the colonial that he is the salt of the earth, and that the Almighty never made anything like him, and that his manly character and the physical beauty are too entrancingly magnificent for the English language to describe, and that his country is absolutely unparalleled and that J. G. Ward and R. J. Seddon are the two most flabbergasting politicans in the world." I had better hesitate before criticising my new home too harshly.

My landlady is threatening to take me to a show. She was bustling out the door as I came back into the hall with a paper and asked me if I had ever seen the "moving pictures" before. Fatally I said that I had not. She crinkled her nose at me as if about to sneeze, I have come to realise through observation that this is her expression when thinking, and then announced that I would be going with her to see this amazing event next week. Actually I am curious, and she seems an open soul who is being kind to me so I shan't try and wriggle off that hook. Where was she going? I asked to be polite. To post a letter to "her cripple" she replied! I must have looked surprised for she went on to state that she was a member of the Crutch and Kindness League, and it was her job to write a cheery letter to her assigned cripple every month! I think I managed to conceal my amazement with a fit of coughing.

J

Monday, 16 January, 1905

2009-01-16T13:33:00.007+13:00

Dear R.

Clear blue skies and not a breath of wind. I am still not really used to being on land, after all the rocking, rocking, rocking and the deep bowelly rumble of the ship's engine. It felt odd, I almost want to say startling, to go to bed last night in silence and stillness and wake ten hours later (yes, ten) in the same silence and stillness. Of course it was wonderful because of its novelty, but I found it rather hard to go to sleep initially because the silence was absolutely DEAFENING. It seems that the relentless throb of the ships engine had become soothing.

I will write down my impressions of that journey down here at some later date, but for now I must get on with the business of being in a new city, in a new country.

Basin Reserve, 1905 (Alexander Turnbull Library)

Later
One penny for what passes for a newspaper in this town. Many things made me laugh while I was reading through its pages looking for more suitable accomodation, but I will record two that particularly grabbed me. The first was an interview with a R.E.N. Twopenny (is this his real name?) about New Zealand. According to Mr. Twopenny it is indeed this city of Wellington that has made the greatest strides and leaps since he first began visiting New Zealand in the 1880s. Where he sees prosperity and bustle I see a certain shabbiness and quiet. Everything sort of emptied out. The streets which must have been at their peak of business when I ventured out to pick up this newspaper, simply seem deserted to me. Mr. Twopenny goes on to praise the trams. Has Mr. Twopenny travelled anywhere else in the world? To London perhaps? A few grumpily run trams clacking and clanging their way about a miserable little clump of a town does not a fine transport system make.

In the other piece it is reported that a German in Christchurch has been writing about New Zealand for a German newspaper and not saying very flattering things. The locals are outraged. I quote: "The New Zealander speaks bad English, and with a 'twang' which is horrible.... The whole pronunciation has more similarity to cat music than the King's English." On dress: "The New Zealander puts no importance on outer appearance, and there is not a good tailor to be had", while the "ladies dress without taste, and their dresses hang on them like sacks.... Worst of all is their hairdress, quite horrible, they wear their hair down to their nose." On New Zealand: it is "like one big family, where everybody knows everybody else." I noted also a passing reference to the school system where I will soon be starting: "in the schools there is only joking going on." Indeed?

The Japanese have beaten the Russians at Port Arthur! Impossible to really believe.

I see that The Sign of the Cross is playing tonight at a local theatre. You know I never saw it in all the time it was on in London. Montgomery's Specialty Company is coming to entertain the folk of Wellington next. I see that they have a Mr. Fred Gibson (coon specialist) and Zeno (the juggler) to enthrall us. The mind boggles. A season of Gilbert and Sullivan is also promised.

Last
Sir, I apologise for how we parted company, and fear I may have given offense to your lovely wife, and guests. One day I hope that you will read my little diary and forgive me. Let my punishment be banishment to this miserable, little edge of the Empire called Wellington, while you continue to thrive in your splendid house at the centre of it all.

J

Five - Am/Am not

2009-01-09T11:23:00.005+13:00

The challenges in Breath become greater and greater for Pikelet and his mate Loonie after the initial simple thrill of learning how to surf a wave. Their mentor Sando takes them further out towards the extremes of surfing, where the waves rise higher out of deeper wilder seas, further into fear. Once Pikelet finds his limit and Loonie finds he doesn’t have one, the two friends begin to move apart; Loonie gravitating to Sando and Pikelet towards Sando’s wife Eva, and then into loneliness and despair.

There are a couple of words that have power in this book. Ordinary is one of them. Ordinary represents a life lived as far away as possible from threat, fear and death. For Pikelet it is the worst thing you can be. In Sawyer, his home town, “the locals in the street looked cowed, and weak and ordinary,” (p.116), “they liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk.” (p.136) The way to break with the ordinary is through another word in the book that has resonance: fear. One of the attractions of someone like Sando to someone like Pikelet is that he isn’t settled, he acts as if “he hadn’t finished with himself,” (p.66) he pushes himself to find the limit of his fear. Sando describes the feeling when you find yourself at this limit: “[it’s] like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive.” (p.111)

The problem is that to find this feeling requires you to go to further and further extremes, going further and further out to find fear again, and this can become dangerous and destructive. Sando’s wife Eva: “Once you’ve had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it’s hard to give up. Gets its hooks in you. Afterwards nothing else can make you feel the same.” (p.133) In the end Pikelet is so shattered by these experiences that it takes him a few decades to recover: “bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow cohered.” (p.211) Other people in the book don’t. Eventually they push so hard at fear, and finding the edge, that they die. They get found by staff in hotel rooms with a belt around their necks. They lose balance on the edge between being and not being, breathing and not breathing, and tumble into death.

Towards the end of the book Pikelet learns something about death and fear. He learns that they are sitting right there in the middle of the ordinary: that death can burst in upon your ordinary life; and that fear flits around the bedrooms and living rooms of suburbia in the gnawing thought: is this it? Is this what life holds for me?

Four - Two Guitarists

2009-01-08T10:05:00.004+13:00

There is no sudden or dramatic encounter with it; it is just there, spreading over a few square miles, streets intersecting, houses clustered together – and from any vantage point, if one were to be found, the glitter of backyard swimming pools in the sunlight. Welcome to the cult of the ordinary.
- Neighbours, Carl Ruhen

Paraparaumu didn’t look like much to a teenage boy circling around the streets on his bicycle. It was mainly lawns and one-storey family homes with a scattering of kids' trikes and rubber beach balls on the drive. School was school and the shops were boring, and because I was boring or unappreciative or something I didn’t like beaches, or swimming, or all the things people actually drove to Paraparaumu to do. Of course it was like any other place, and the waves, and the roads late at night, and the fields on the weekend, and the garages and the bedrooms were full of teenagers acting out their dreams.

Corran’s bedroom always had the curtains drawn. When I remember his room it is always half dark, with an unmade bed, and balled up rugby socks and tops tossed into the corners. Corran himself used to sit on his low bed and huddle over his electric guitar. He was a good guitar player. Down the road was Steve. He was also a good guitar player. I spent less time at Steve’s place, but the rooms there were bright and full of light, and the house felt modern and ordered. I probably felt more at home in Steve’s house, but I think I only went there twice. I must have spent hundreds of days at Corran’s on the weekends in the 1980s in Paraparaumu.

The way that I am going to separate Steve and Corran in this story is a little arbitrary. There were plenty of times when their musical tastes coincided, but my memory has sharpened the story this way so this is how it will be told. We also need to keep in mind that this was a time and a place where it really was not acceptable to try and be cool and not like rock music. While I went home and devoured A-ha, and Prince, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, my public self paid homage to rock bands. Which rock bands you wrote on your school bag, and the type of school bag you had were very important. The coolest kids had little canvas satchels with AC/DC, Iron Maiden and ZZ Top on them. I wasn’t cool. I had a Gino Borelli bag.

If I had to pick a track to represent Steve at this point in the 1980s it would be Satch Boogie, by Joe Satriani. I have the album this track is from: Surfing with the Alien. I don’t like it much, but I still like Satch Boogie. Satriani’s sound was very clean. The distortion on this album is light. He is a real technician, and there is always going to be a part in each song where he shows us how well he can do finger-tapping triplets. Eddie Van Halen was the popular master of this kind of solo.

For Corran I would choose a track that he never actually played me, but it somehow perfectly represents him: Wings of Steel by Stonehenge. American “heavy metal” bands had fancy clothes and big hair. The British version had smelly clothes, lank hair, and quite often beards or dodgy moustaches. Their music was often feral, sweaty, weighed down by stodgy British food and warm ale. Wings of Steel sounds like all that. It rumbles. It’s not quite perfect. It thunders and collapses into its changes, and then suddenly soars in a brief, beautiful arc. Corran listened to plenty of bands like this even if they weren't all actually British. Man O’ War, Iron Maiden, earlier Def Leppard, Motorhead, Yngwie Malmsteen.

I should say that I never really felt at home in either camp though I enjoyed both for awhile. There were exceptions. I did like Steve Vai and Eddie Van Halen on the one hand, and I did like AC/DC and Guns ‘n’ Roses on the other. I was wowed by technique and sprezzatura in one case, and fascinated by the brazen darkness, and blunted emotions in the other. I suppose that all three of us were busy learning who we were by trying things on for size. Because everyone else did, I wore stone washed black jeans, and long T-shirts, and basketball boots. Because my friends did I listened to WASP and Motley Crue and Skid Row, and even though I didn’t like them much, I didn’t know why, and so I kept listening to them.

In the end all three of us ended up in a band together. It wasn’t much of a band, and it only played one song at one gig, but it was something better than pedalling around the summer streets of Paraparaumu with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Three - INXS

2009-01-07T14:06:00.005+13:00

“Say hello from the band in the interview”
Tim Farriss to Michael Hutchence
Rolling Stone Magazine, 1988

It is exciting being young and starting a band. Even if you were like me and not very good, and in a band that was very poor, and too timid to do anything more than a couple of gigs, even that kind of watered-down version of being in a rock band was exciting. So much more exciting then to be in a proper band, working its way up from the garage to the top of the charts.

I own two INXS albums: Listen Like Thieves (1985) and Kick (1987). These two albums represent this band’s peak. Listen Like Thieves was their peak as a group of musicians; Kick was the peak of their popularity. On the 1985 album INXS sound like they’re playing in a bar or a club, by 1987 they sound more like they’re playing in the corner of you room, on the telly, or in an arena for 70,000 people. Somewhere between these two albums something went wrong.

In the 1980s in New Zealand it seemed that there were quite a few Australian bands on the charts and that they all sounded the same: tough. Even if they weren’t doing straight out rock like Cold Chisel, The Angels or AC/DC they still sounded muscular, like they worked hard, all the parts of their band locked together snugly through graft. Bands like Midnight Oil, INXS, the Divinyls sounded like they could have taken Split Enz in a bar fight any day. Reading about that scene now it is clear why all Australian bands from that period had that edge to them:

[The punters come] to gigs… to let something go, a sort of catharsis. We always feel like there’s this implied confrontation between band and audience. They’re saying, ‘Lay it on! Do it to us!, and it’s like a veiled threat that if you don’t, you’ll get canned.
– Doc Neeson (The Angels)

Canned here means they’ll start throwing glass beer mugs at you.

Being in a band in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia meant playing in the thriving, testy world of the beer barns: spartan, terribly carpeted, sweaty, smoky, weathered and packed to the rafters.
- INXS, The Authorised Biography, p.38

For a suburban teenager growing up the 1970s and 1980s, pub rock was perhaps the ultimate rite of passage. If you hadn’t spent at least one night in a beer barn, where the carpets were tacky with spilled lager and sweat literally flowed down the walls, risking terminal ear damage and the ever-present danger of being conked by a beer glass, you just weren’t a real Australian, mate.
- Long Way to the Top, p.188

This is the music scene INXS came from and you can hear it on Listen Like Thieves. They play a set of songs that sound as though they have been worked on; not in the studio but in front of the punters. There are six musicians working together to put all the little pieces, all the fills, and all the short jagging riffs, into one thing called a perfect pop song. A perfect pop song is catchy, it moves around a bit with its riff, there are no boring bits, and then it stops.

Of course the other thing that is handy for a pop band is a hot lead singer.

Two - Beginning to Breathe

2009-01-06T12:06:00.006+13:00

I wonder what the ordinary people are doing today?
- Breath

The main character in Breath by Tim Winton is nicknamed Pikelet. When the book starts its main story Pikelet is just at the beginning of secondary school growing up in a small town in Australia called Sawyer not far from the coast. Sawyer is not much of a town and Pikelet doesn’t think much of it, or the people in it. In a way it is like a backwater, a small pool at the spent end of an estuary: safe, flat and boring. What Pikelet comes to crave are the places just over the dunes where things are more unsettled: both the places and the people.

A lot of reviews say that this novel is not about surfing. I suppose they are right. I suppose it is a novel about that exciting time when you begin to find out what it is like to be alive, about breathing and not breathing and what can happen when you push at the edge between those two states. Surfing is the main way that this idea is explored so I still think it is ok to say that the book is about surfing.

I like not surfing. I like not swimming. My metaphors about the sea are to do with drowning, and murky depths, but Tim Winton’s surfing sounds bloody exciting:

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light…. Though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of joy and happiness for all the mess I’ve made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living. (pp.32-3)

When Pikelet first sees the boys out surfing his imagination is seized by this fact:

How strange it was to see men doing something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers… men did solid, practical things…. [T]here wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men. (p.23)

So this is how the book begins: the exhilaration of being alive and the discovery of useless beauty. It reminded me of being Pikelet’s age. My early heroes were Prince, and A-ha and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. These are a specific kind of pop star. These are not AC/DC, Iron Maiden and ZZ Top, these were flamboyant performers, over dressed, over coifed, men who sang, and danced, and hung desperately onto microphones and said things like – love is like an energy, rushing in, rushing inside of me. So much useless beauty, and so different from Paraparaumu, and the men there, and the boys I shared classrooms with.

One - Paraparaumu

2009-01-05T12:07:00.004+13:00

Off went the boys into the big, blue sea.
- Puberty Blues

I was a teenager in Paraparaumu. I didn’t like it much. There is a chance I wouldn’t have liked anywhere much, but this is something you can never know. There is more to do and buy in Paraparaumu now than there was in the 1980s, but I still think it might be shitty to be a teenager in Paraparaumu. It doesn’t feel like a small town it feels like a suburb, a suburb without a city. Suburbs were invented to comfort the middle-aged, and give the youth something to kick against.

I went to school at Kapiti College which was next to the Raumati Beach shops, and about a ten minute bike ride from my house. The students of Kapiti College wore the same uniform as everyone else in New Zealand (grey, shapeless) with a maroon jersey. Going to school was the main thing that I did. I was ok at school, quite good at English, but diffident towards it. I played soccer, and Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t read a single book for pleasure during all of my years at Kapiti College, but I did have a weekly subscription to Smash Hits.

Music was heady stuff for me in Paraparaumu. It was the planned route of escape from the ordinariness of small towns and suburbia. I carefully took the posters out of Smash Hits and blu-tacked them across the walls of my bedroom. It wasn’t a serious magazine, but the 80s were a rich period for glossy singles, and hairdos and blocks of bright colour, so it was the right magazine for the time. I began to accumulate cassettes and LPs. After awhile I bought a second hand electric guitar off a friend. My mother took me to the local guitar shop and bought a small amplifier and some lessons. I had found my obsession.

It is virtually impossible to get a teenage boy to do something he doesn’t want to do, but a teenage boy in the grip of an obsession is a fanatic. The obsessed teenage boy will go through the rituals of their dreams over and over again. They will spend weeks that turn into months kicking that ball, or swimming the sea, or pulling apart that engine, or making his hand into the awkward, painful, contorted shapes necessary to make an E chord. The skin on your finger tips will hurt, the back of your hand will ache, but it is worth it to hear that buzzing, rattling, out of control first chord come out of the strum of your free hand. Magical.

And because magazines like Smash Hits don’t record failure it will seem possible to you in your bedroom in Paraparaumu that you too will be able to strum and sing your way from nowhere into the glare of worldwide fame and riches. If it were possible for bands like Crowded House and INXS then it was possible for you. You may look at the photo of our hero and laugh at the naivety of the dream, but naivety is always a part of dreams; they go together like inhale and exhale.

The Year In Review - December

2009-01-03T11:26:00.004+13:00

A December Selection From Richard

Happy Last Day Of Year Day to you all.
Chick flick and tea at the old Turkish restaurant this evening
This is my Aunty Maureen (in)
Hell, Afghanistan, Iraq, Cester
Uncle Steve is here (too) – reading

It's a bit like an ad break in the movie we call life
Where I get ideas for jazz solos

Okay, imagine that it's Christmas day
The mall is very busy and everyone wants money
tra la la la la

When my son was little, I remember taking him into his first music shop
Do you understand duck?
It's time to get down to some serious practice
To play solo at a wedding
My old friend

Very soon
Each teacher will have a code name
There would be obvious limitations:
Ich schreibe auf Deutsch heute Morgen als ein Zeichen der Feier, and
Chardonnay gets you pissed

My mother used to like to say at Christmas,
“Peace on Earth and goodwill to Ian.”

A year is made up of twelve months.

The Year In Review - November

2009-01-03T10:43:00.005+13:00

Eleanor turned two in November.

I am still overwhelmed by how large love can feel. Not that there aren't moments of frustration and frayed temper in that love, and not that this love is ever without it's deep undercurrents of fear like sharks gliding the depths far below the surface of life, but that's love isn't it? Love is always love with something else swirling through it. This love of a parent for their child is love with worry about the future. Sometimes it feels like a bubble rising up inside me and threatening to burst.

One morning we went out early to a children's playground on Oriental Bay and to the library. It was a glorious morning.

It is hard to be glum when you are a teacher in November. The weather is beginning it's slow warming rise into the lethargy of Summer, and the holidays lie ahead.

Richard played trumpet at the senior prizegiving and felt a rush of human empathy. I wish he'd give me some money, but he better not start touching my hair.

The Year In Review - October

2009-01-02T16:32:00.012+13:00

In October JY and family went to Riversdale for a holiday. It was nice. We stayed in a rented "bach" with some friends. It was one of those new versions of a New Zealand bach that are flasher than the house you normally live in. Eleanor took advantage of the excellent bathing facilities.

JY decided to try writing longer things on his blog less often. Two things happened as a result: JY's sense of humour disappeared, and Richard got sulky. JY wrote a couple of book reviews to see what it was like to write a couple of book reviews (see sidebar).

Richard ended the month playing at a folk festival. Bass players are so rare at these events that he was allowed to play even though he didn't have a pony tail or a beard.

Richard wrote as beautifully as he plays about other things that happened in October too. The Dancing Snifter asked me if I was going to the funeral, but I felt it was a family affair and declined, although our thoughts were with Richard and his family on the day.

The Year In Review - September

2009-01-01T21:34:00.005+13:00

What happened in September? There was a dreadful teacher only day in which I was told at three different presentations by the people who had been paid to come and present that they "didn't have the answers". Money well spent there then. Mind you, I spent the year attending the meetings of an area-wide committee that took the whole twelve months coming up with a vision statement. Actually, it's not quite finished yet, but I bet it will be really good - most things written by twenty people over a twelve month period are.

On the upside the holidays started.

It was sort of a good month writing wise, but it was also a bit fragmented. There was this about being an ape (confirming rumours floating around the staffroom for three years), and this piece about New Zealand history.

I seem to have taken very few photos of Eleanor in September, but I like this one even if it's out of focus.

Richard bought a car. It's called a Maxima. In Latin this means small penis. I shouldn't laugh too much, my car is a Sprinter which isn't a very flattering comment on my sexual prowess either. Still, better than the Honda Impotence or a Toyota Flaccid.

The eternal struggle between man and beast continued in the classroom for Richard who was still haunted by his sexuality issues, reflecting on the universe and occasionally saying nice things.

The Year In Review - August

2009-01-01T08:38:00.005+13:00

One of the ongoing themes of the year was Richard's problems with men with long hair. This reached a peak in August when he was confronted with pictures of Led Zeppelin on JY's blog. At a teacher only day later in the year JY deliberately wore a bright pink polo shirt to see Richard's reaction. It was a wonderful reaction to see; a series of facial expressions burst across his face in dismay before settling on feigned indifference.

Richard's blog... well, the highlight was probably this:

(Other photo: Eleanor learns how to wear a hat in August)

The Year In Review - July

2008-12-31T21:53:00.003+13:00

Because JY is so devoted to his students he spent his holidays in July with 18 students in Japan. It was a great trip. It had been five years since Cathy and JY left Osaka to come back home and do things like get real jobs, buy a house and have a kid.

Eleanor was a hit wherever she went in Japan. This is pretty unfair. I've tried my best to learn the language and embrace the culture and no elderly Japanese have ever stopped to smile at me and pat my head.

Richard had a slow month, but he did write this. Because life doesn't like it when you feel like you know something the following day he was forced to write the sequel. Little did Richard know, it would get even better on Father's Day.

JY didn't write much. A couple of things about sonnets were ok.

(Photo: Eleanor on the train in Osaka in July)

The Year In Review - June

2008-12-31T07:15:00.003+13:00

I read through June and it seems like this was the highlight. It actually was a pretty low high point. Richard's post was way better than mine. Actually, Richard had a good month in his bass bag: he started my favourite story of the year, managed to get an American sword swallower on his blog, and started off on a story about knocking on God's door which he really should finish sometime.

The Curmudgeon started whinging. Second fiddle started the 53rd version of his site.

Presumably the sun came up and went down a few times.

(Photo: Eleanor copying Richard's table manners in June)

The Year In Review - May

2008-12-29T14:50:00.006+13:00

My favourite post from Richard in May was this one. Otherwise, Richard seemed to be obsessed with getting some guy called Murray to be the Pope. Richard and JY were limping like wounded sloths towards the middle of the year.

Eleanor had a little operation to put grommets in her ears. At the time this was upsetting, but since the operation she has been a much happier little girl.

JY wrote about how 300 was a movie that promoted fascism (see sidebar), but Richard thought it was just an excuse for more pictures of nearly naked men on this blog.

(Photo: Eleanor in May)

There are photos of Richard on this blog because, well, I'd rather look at Eleanor.

The Year In Review - April

2008-12-29T06:51:00.007+13:00

Richard began posting about his long repressed fascination with Jesus, and then he went to Tauranga. In Tauranga he met some students. The followers of Richard's blog couldn't decide if this story of meeting ex-students busking was comic or tragic.

JY wrote a long series of posts about nearly-naked women and Prince. This was very frustrating for Richard. Often he would log on hoping to see a woman in a swim suit and instead he would see an skinny little man with bum fluff. In the end Richard got quite angry.

He should have remembered that for every trip to Tauranga there is another term at school to pay for it.

(Photo: Eleanor in April)

The Year In Review - March

2008-12-28T08:08:00.005+13:00

In early March JY spent a couple of weeks at home nursing his injury. Having a broken collarbone means you can't do monkey impressions that involve flailing your arms up in the air. This severely limited JY's ability to teach.

Richard no doubt complained to someone else about 9YJ while JY was away. It was a rough month for Richard. He quit his band because they saw the gift that he bought JY for his birthday (a box set of Samoan music) and made some unkind comments. Moths and stick insects featured heavily on his blog.

The Wine Guy debuted by telling us to drink 22 litres of wine (or something like that).

JY wrote the equivalent of a blovel (blog novel, a word coined by FM) about a man with a normal sized penis who liked to jump around in tights (Nijinsky - see sidebar). Richard seemed concerned about this fixation with the male form. In the end both bloggers took a break. When Richard staggered bleary-eyed out of his blogging den Shelley called the police because she thought there was a strange man in the house.

It turned out she was right.

(Photo: Eleanor in March)

The Year In Review - February

2008-12-27T15:31:00.007+13:00

In February of this year we all went back to school for Term One filled with pointless optimism and hope. By Friday of Week One Richard was already complaining about teaching 9YJ Music, little knowing what horrors lay ahead in the class of 9AD. JY blithely mocked and ridiculed Richard, and smugly wore a green T-shirt to Athletics Day with a sign on it saying "imagine this is yellow". Richard, finely attuned to the easily angered nature of the Gods, suspected that Athletics Day would not end well for JY. It did not. Tragically cut down performing superhuman feats on the sports field JY broke his collar bone. So noble was his bearing after the accident that those who witnessed the event were moved as a man to cheer him from the field.

While the ambulance was taking our hero to the hospital it took a detour to go and check in on someone else. The paramedic asked JY if he minded and JY told them it was fine, and that they could go ahead and pick up some groceries at the dairy as well if they wanted. The paramedic got a bit snippy after this and kept asking him to rate his pain on the Powley-Prowse Face Pain Scale. JY found this difficult because there wasn't a face with the caption: "It f**king hurts."

At the end of the month Richard almost had to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance after listening to Ornette Coleman "play" the violin.

JY wrote a series of posts about an Austrian pop star called Falco (see sidebar), and Richard was reduced to petty insults to cover his lack of knowledge about the 1980s Austrian pop scene (exposing an embarrassing gap in the knowedge of a so-called music teacher). JY, forced to take time off school, began to formulate a long, Panadol-addled post about Nijinsky's penis (amongst other things).

(Photo: Eleanor in February)

My Mother's Records

2008-12-22T22:17:00.012+13:00

Three

Guess which one is Mum.

This might be my favourite photo of my mother. She looks very "contemporary" although this photo must be from the early 1960s. Of course it was the early 1960s in the far south of New Zealand so we should subtract at least a decade in terms of fashion. Looking at family photos from this period you get the strong feeling that living in Otago in the 1960s was not quite the same as living in America in the 1960s.

Early in my mother's marriage she started going to classes in creative dance held in a room in Otago University in the Physical Education Department. They were taken by someone called Lorna Brown. There were about a dozen people in the class, and they danced to a variety of records including Spanish stuff requiring castanets, shawls and a shuffling mastery of footwork.
When I was a kid one of my toys was a pair of black plastic castanets held together with a piece of red string. Of course I didn't know what they were or how to operate them. They seemed a very cryptic children's toy. Funny how your parents' lives before you were born don't exist when you are a child or a teenager. When you are a teenager you are utterly impervious to the idea that your parents were once young, and felt the things you felt and hated the things you hated.

Then you get older of course. Age does bring perspective. Strangely this reminds me of a piece I read in a book at the beginning of the year. The person writing is a very old Jesuit priest, and he says:

"I am sometimes very conscious that I am following a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Evedrybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox and ambiguity that comes with years."

Although my father lived to a reasonable age he died when I was five. It struck me this year that I really knew nothing about him. Am I taller than him? What did his voice sound like? All those photos of my mother and me... he was there, in the room, holding the camera and pushing the button. I really think he must have loved the woman he married. He supported her in the barbarian culture of 1960s Otago to take fashion courses, to do a Masters, to dance.

While my mother was at Lorna Brown's dance classes she worked up an original dance piece set to Mars, Bringer of War from Holst's The Planets. Aside from Mars, Bringer of War and the bit that someone set to Blake and turned into Jerusalem most of this album reminds me of the theme for Star Trek. The last piece even has a female choir. If only von Holst had thought to have someone say "Stardate blah-blah-blah" over the top of it.

It was written in 1914. That means that you have to think about World War One. The liner notes say (about Mars), "It has been called a prophecy of the mechanised warfare that was to come." No. Just because there's a snare drum in there doesn't mean it has anything to do with World War One. I would say most people listening to it now would think of Darth Vader.

Holst composed 200 pieces of music. He's remembered for this. Ravel is remembered for Bolero. Rodrigo for Concierto Andaluz.

My mother bought this after going to see the movie starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. My mother said that seeing this movie in the late 1950s blew her mind. She thought Dandridge was a fantastic Carmen, and the music and dancing were wonderful. On the back of the LP Hammerstein says when he was a kid he went to the opera, liked the music but thought it was silly they were all singing in Italian. Listening to his version I think it's silly they're all singing in English. Frankly the toreador's song is not quite the same when it's about boxing and he says things like "punch him smack on the nose." Nevertheless, my mother passed on the Carmen gene to me. I was brought up on Carlos Sauras' version of Carmen. The Carmen Jones version starred Dandridge and Belafonte but they were both dubbed. So the record has neither of them on it. Dandridge's career didn't pan out very well.

"On the evening of the Pilgramage, the Gypsies gather together in their camp. On the second side of the record you will hear Manitas and his family. His brother plays the guitar with him. His sons, his cousin and his nephew sing, and during this Provencal night they are all present for you, singing, dancing, playing for your pleasure which, today, thanks to this record, is also yours."

This album. This is the jewel in the crown of the collection for me. Manitas' playing is so rough, raw and percussive. Side Two, the live side, is fantastic. Somehow I have never been bothered by not understanding what people are saying when they sing (sorry to the guys who wrote Carmen Jones), it has always been about conveying emotion for me. The wonderful thing about listening to these guys sing is that they are like the brass section in a jazz band, doing their long bluesy runs, and filling in each others gaps, while underneath are the clapping off-beat hands, and pulsing heavy guitar rhthyms. Strong stuff when I was a kid.

About as far away from this as you can get is the "New Flamenco" of Ottmar Liebert. I have two of this man's CDs and have been to one of his concerts. All because my friends knew that I loved flamenco and were being kind. I think enough time has passed for me to say (1) thank you for your generousity, and (2) German flamenco! Oh dear. It sounds like it is being performed by robots. The back of Liebert's CD says (please read it with a fake German accent): "we are dedicated to a process of continuous refinement both artistically and commercially. As in music, so in life." Dreadful. Reminds me of another slogan: "Work Makes One Free." Yeah, right.

The Year In Review - January

2008-12-22T20:10:00.012+13:00

This is a photo of my favourite view from our backyard. At the bottom of our garden there is a small pool of lawn surrounded by trees. I like to go down there with a blanket and a book and watch the leaves.

Looking into the depths of the branches reminds me of the idea that you can see the infinite (sorry, Richard) by getting smaller and smaller as well as bigger and bigger in scale. When Eleanor was a new born I would look at the skin on her face when she was sleeping. I found that it was only if I took my glasses off and leaned in until I was almost pressing my nose against her cheek that I could actually see her skin. It existed in a whole other layer of fine detail that you cannot see in a glance.

I think it is a common enough to sometimes feel that you are letting most of life pass you by. When it bothers me enough I make myself notice by drawing things. I like to take a notebook and sketch when I go on holiday. This is probably the only way I will meditate on something. Getting lost inside music can erase your ego (unless you're Andre Rieu), but concentrating on drawing a building or a landscape makes you hyperaware. How has a building, or a tree, or a mud flat bleeding out into the silvery, tidal rivers and reeds, how have they been put together?

Like sketching, writing this blog has made me notice the year a bit more. I have decided to return it to its former shape because I like it better. Even though this is a generic template it still suits me more than the other thing I was mucking around with. I also miss the gravestones (like I miss Nostradameus on RBB). While I was looking over the year of posts on this blog I realised that for the first time in my life I have actually managed to keep a diary for an entire year. I have quite a collection of abandoned diaries around the house so this is a real landmark.

I'm going to go back and tidy up some of my old posts and then put them on the list to the right. So far I've only done one. It was January, there was a sense of optimism in the year, Richard had a spring in his step and a rising sense of dread in his stomach. Even though school was drawing inexorably closer he knew he could get some relief by hitting the bottle and reading: My Mother's Records.

Being Good

2008-12-19T07:39:00.006+13:00

There's always a moment at the Christmas party where Santa says: "Have you been good this year?" and everyone laughs. If I were forced on to Santa's knee and directly asked this question I think I would say "define good". This would probably disqualify me from presents.

Actually the smart arse who says "define good" turns out to be the problem that Professor Blackburn only just disposes of in his book Being Good. He satisfactorily gets us to the point where we can say that there is a need in human society for rules governing behaviour, but he can't get us to the point where we can make these rules universal without a bit of fudging. The closest he gets is Kant who suggested that we test each of our rules as if it were going to be applied universally. If we could live with the rule as a universal principle then it is probably a good rule.

Of course there are all kinds of potential problems around this. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fine and noble thing on the whole, and it is very brave to put some of these things down on paper, but when you start to poke even the simplest of the rights you end up with all kinds of debates. Take the third article:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person

I couldn't agree more. Of course there are the small problems of abortion, euthanasia, war, and capital punishment to be negotiated. Further, what about the problem of rights that require other people to give up something? If everyone has the right to life, and the right to medical care (Article 25) then this means someone else has to give up a portion of limited resources to pay for the liver transplant of an elderly alcoholic.

Personally I agree with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in entirety, and find this sort of intellectual hair-splitting distasteful. I also think that countries that criticise the Declaration as being Western, or disrespectful to Islam, or whatever, are... well, not to sugar coat it, wrong. Who can disagree with this: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood? Notice that it doesn't say we are all equal in ability, just that we are equal in dignity. Any qualification on that equality is wrong.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems to me a good balance between rights and responsibilities. For every right that is stated you must imagine the unstated responsibility that goes with it. It is not simply a list of things that we should feel we are owed, because every right has an unspoken responsibility, and, I feel, a duty attached to it. Everyone has the right to life, and so we therefore have a responsibility not to take life, and a duty to speak out when we see this right threatened for others. The rights of the individual are really the rights of the individual within a community, and the community in this case is supposed to be the brotherhood of man. Relativity taken to its conclusion works the other way and becomes the subjectivity of the individual, alone, proclaiming their opinions to no one. Being a person is being a member of a group. I will let KC speak for me here:

"At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I'm sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed that much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I beleive in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.... I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs."

Kenneth Clark

I think it must been horrendously unfashionable to love Kenneth Clark, but I unashamedly do, and this statement from the end of his fantastic series Civilisation is something that means a lot to me. The end of this series is actually somewhat pessimistic. He quotes the following portion of the Yeat's poem Second Coming,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

For Kenneth Clark in the 1970s it seemed that there was no centre, and it can seem that way now too. We have a centre though if we choose to remember it. The best of civilisations have maintained themselves through tolerance, and tolerance is about brotherhood and brotherhood is about love. This is very hard work. It is much easier to practise fanaticism. Sometimes I am pretty intolerant. Sometimes it is just easier to be rude, meanspirited and petty, even to people I love. Mr. Munro Leaf had this to say in his children's book Manners Can Be Fun,

Very often the people we like most live in the same house with us. We see them so often we sometimes forget to be as nice to them as we are to others. Most of the time it is just because we do not think of it.

The society we want, and the centre we crave is in our home and with our family. This might be why the story of Christmas has some resonance still. I have not always been good this year and I ask your forgiveness. There is always today, and renewing ourselves.

Why asian immigration is good.

2008-12-18T08:21:00.005+13:00

Two recent headlines stated exactly how bad our education system is supposed to be.

The first headline gleefully announced that we were crappier than Kazakhstan at science in primary school. We all know this is dire because we have all seen Borat which is a gripping, fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Kazakhstan primary school education system.

The following day we were told that “New Zealand has been ranked second worst among 37 countries when it comes to bullying in primary schools, according to a major international report.” The solitary country below us was Tunisia.

These seemed like remarkable claims so I decided to investigate further. Both stories come from the same report. The report is from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study which “provides reliable and timely data on the mathematics and science achievement of U.S. 4th- and 8th-grade students compared to that of students in other countries. TIMSS data have been collected in 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007.” New Zealand participates in this study for our equivalent of 4th grade; students who are nine to ten years old.

In science, where the average score was given as 500, Kazakhstan was ranked 11th on 533 points while New Zealand was ranked 22nd on 504 points. This is a gap of 29 points, and 11 rankings. Curiously the bigger gap between New Zealand and its academic arch rival Kazakhstan was in maths where they were placed 5th on 549 points and we were 23rd on 492 (below the international average).

Maths (36 participant countries)
Average Score: 500
1. Hong Kong 607
2. Singapore 599
3. Taipei 576
4. Japan 568
5. Kazakhstan 549

11. USA 529
23. New Zealand 492
36. Yemen 224

So, how come the story in the New Zealand media was about science and not about maths which was an even worse result?

I have a friend who is doing a PhD in Mathematics. He once observed that he thought it was incredible that in New Zealand it was laughingly accepted if someone was barely numerate (“I can’t do division!”) but regarded as a shameful secret if someone was illiterate. He thought both things should be regarded as equally shameful. He’s right, and I have spent my life as part of the joke.

I was never very good at maths and always faked an illness on maths test day at primary school until my Mother told me she was taking me to the doctor and I was forced to confess. From a very early age I had it in my head that I was going to be an architect. I did Technical Drawing at secondary school and was very good at it. Then someone told me you had to really good at maths to be an architect and I gave up the whole plan.

I got 50% School C. maths. 50%. Actually I probably got 2% and it was scaled up to make a perfect bell curve. I have spent most of my life being very proud of this result. In fact, it is only now that I look back on it and think for the very first time that I was an idiot. My maths education stopped when I was 15. Maths was connected with a career dream that I was still harbouring in my early thirties and yet I still skited about my “perfect” exam result.

Last year I had to take a third form maths class for one spell a week. Sometimes it was a bit hard but what surprised me was that you could actually just sit down, use the textbook and your brain and problem solve and then you would get the answer. A good discovery to make twenty years after School C.

I think how our maths result was non-reported in New Zealand in favour of science tells us something about how we view maths in this country, and when you begin to trawl through how the test was received by the media in participant countries around the world you begin to see certain cultural viewpoints shining though. Here are a few that I thought were interesting.

The Koreans did very well but were glum: “Korean students tend to perform much better in mathematics and science than students in other countries, but have a low level of confidence or interest in the subjects.” The English were quite pleased with themselves, although the Daily Express reported that the reason Singapore was number one was because they were using a textbook from the 1930s, a time when the Empire was still in evidence in that part of the world. The Japanese like the Koreans seemed to be trying to find negative things to focus on in their success: “the decreasing motivation for study among junior high school students is becoming another concern. The number of students that said they enjoyed studying was among the worst three in 48 countries and territories for science, and worst six for math.”

In New Zealand maths isn’t taken seriously. If the headline had been “New Zealand Behind Kazakhstan in Maths” I suspect most people would have just shrugged and thought about how their own maths skills were rubbish anyway. Reading the news in Korea and Japan it’s clear that being in the top five doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Perhaps muddling along being adequate in maths and science is a part of the core identity of what it means to be a New Zealander. Just as it is to beat ourselves with whatever international stick we can find to prove how rubbish we are.

And what about that other headline I mentioned at the start about bullying in our primary schools? In this survey bullying was defined as “having something stolen, being hit or hurt by another student, being left out, made fun of, or made to do something you didn’t want to do.” WHAT? Being made to do something you don’t want to? Isn’t that called BEING ALIVE?

Out on the Weekend

2008-12-01T06:36:00.003+13:00

Three

In the afternoon Eleanor played in her paddle pool and I carried on reading. I went and lay down on the grass under the trees. When the light of the sun comes to you through the cool green of leaves it is a fine tranquil thing. I started a book called Being Good by Simon Blackburn. It’s interesting although sometimes I have to reread bits to really get it. The author is trying to explain to me what ethics are and why they are unpopular.

“Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world’s resources, or the ways our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world.” He’s right of course. Sometimes when I reveal a particular absurdity to my History students (things people said about women getting the vote, or the intellectual capacity of the Negro, that kind of thing) I also say: “don’t worry, in 200 years people will be appalled by us.” I hope this is true. I hope that in 200 years people will find our global injustices and arrogance appalling, because that will mean things have changed.

Blackburn’s book begins by going through all the reasons people use for dismissing ethics. This bit of the book would have been really handy if I’d had it in tutorials at university.

First annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: God is dead. There are no morals.

Professor Blackburn’s response: Good things exist separately from God. We know this because God also must decide what is good, (gay=bad, straight=good) and then punish accordingly.

Second annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: It’s all relative.

Professor Blackburn’s response: Quite probably, but given that we have to make a decision what are we actually going to do that we think is best?

Third annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: People just act out of self-interest.

Professor Blackburn’s response: Often people don’t act with enough self interest and ruin their lives by doing things like murdering people over a love affair and wind up going to prison. More importantly, saying this kind of thing is lazy and proves nothing. It gives the illusion of explaining everything, and therefore it explains nothing.

I would have read more but Eleanor had gotten out of the paddle pool and was busy not being good over by the rosemary and I had to go and stop her. Still, I rather like Mr. Blackburn, and I look forward to hearing what else he has to say.

Out on the Weekend

2008-12-01T06:20:00.006+13:00

Two

I can take myself too seriously. It actually happens a lot less than it used to. When I was a teenager I think I took myself very seriously most of the time. Nowadays I’m more likely to see myself as a baboon trapped in some elaborate prank. I was taking myself quite seriously when we got back from the library. I was taking myself so seriously that I farted. Eleanor stopped what she was doing and regarded me quite philosophically for some time before saying: “Daddy poo time?”

I think that you’re supposed to take comics seriously if they’re called graphic novels. This seems unnecessarily pretentious. This is probably a way for academics who like comics to justify their study by giving them a serious sounding name. When I was at school I think graphic design was called technical drawing. It is likely the subject got a name change because “drawing” didn’t sound serious enough. It’s funny that the word novel now gives weight to something when it used to be regarded askance, not as a serious art form itself. Still, some stereotypes hold up when you think about comics: the three people over in the comic section when I went there were young men, by themselves with hygiene issues.

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken is a comic by Seth. The lead character takes comics very seriously. He buys old issues, collects them, thinks about them. He is a hoarder of old comics and old records. He is alarmed by change, he is a bit of a loner. One day he discovers a one frame gag comic by a guy called Kalo in a back issue of the New Yorker. He becomes fascinated by Kalo and begins to try and find out more about him. I like this about the lead character. I love to do this kind of thing; to hunt down information about people who were once known, and try to put them back together again. Last summer I tried to do this with Captain William Hobson.

In the end we find out quite a bit about Kalo, although quite a bit turns out to be not very much. The protagonist reflects on how a life can be reduced to half a dozen comic strips in another person’s folder. There is a great deal of attention to the beauty of things in this comic. Just as the lead character pays attention to the design and brush work of the single frame gag comics of Kalo so he also stops to notice ordinary things: buildings at night, the passing landscape outside a train window. The collage of our senses and the slowly changing continuity of our identity seem to be what life is really. When a person we know dies then the glue that holds a whole series of things together also dissolves leaving only the their possessions, objects somehow drained of their power. There is memory of course, but memory of a person is different from the person themselves. Memory of a person is mixed up in the identity and perspective of the one who remembers.

Writing a book is a way of putting things back together – taking scatterings from the past and fitting them in a way that makes sense like building a motor out of scrap. I mentioned awhile ago that I was going to write a book. It’s going to be a bit like this motor-building. It will be disguised as a set of biographical essays about people from New Zealand history. I have had a long standing obsession with Richard Seddon so he will be in there. Writing this has reminded me about Hobson. I’m going to start with Hobson.

After Eleanor said “Daddy poo time?” I looked back at her quite steadily and said no. Fatally, I then smiled. Probably it was because I smiled that she didn’t believe my denial. I can tell you this, after you’ve been chased around a bedroom by a two year old who is grabbing at your bum and shouting “Daddy poo time” it is very, very hard to take yourself seriously.

Out on the Weekend

2008-11-30T15:37:00.006+13:00

One

Because it was a beautiful morning we got up early and went down to Oriental Bay. The children’s playground on the beach by Freyberg Pool must be one of the most beautiful locations for a children’s playground in the world.

Wellington is a very pleasing city to look at. It fits the land and sea well. The geography of the land has dictated how the city is built. When I am in towns where the land has been more pliable in the hands of its people I feel uneasy. The flat grids of places like Christchurch or Palmerston North prove that reason has nothing to do with character or beauty when it comes to town planning. In Wellington people have been trying to squeeze what they need onto the sides of hills and up and down little valleys for 160 years. In Christchurch they merely tacked on another grid.

We walked along the waterfront from the playground to the library. There is a new statue clamped to the side of the wharf near Te Papa. It is a man who appears to be arching his back and leaning into the wind. He faces out to the sea, standing on the wharf's edge. If the wind failed you sense he would fall into the sea that washes and slaps the piers below. When you stand beside him you can see his face. His heavy lids are closed and his mouth is serene. He is at peace. The statue is called Solace in the Wind.

At the library I got out a pile of books. This one is a comic about friendship. Robot Dreams takes about twenty minutes to read. It is cute. A dog builds a mail order robot. They hang out. One day they go to the beach and the robot rusts up and stops moving. The dog leaves him behind. The rest of the comic is about how the robot and the dog eventually find new friends. The ending is wonderfully touching. The dog gets a new mail order robot. He takes better care of him. None of the other friends he has tried out since leaving his first friend behind have worked out. The original robot is found in bits and pieces at a scrap yard by a fox. The fox rebuilds the robot using a radio for its body. The robot is happy. He plays music and hangs out with his new buddy. One day he sees the dog with his new robot friend on the street, passing by the window of his house. The robot is shocked, then sad, and then thoughtful. He goes to the window and turns his music on. The music drifts out across the street to where the dog is walking. The dog hears the music and likes it. Carrying on down the street without even seeing his former friend he begins to whistle the tune and wag his tail. THE END.

Friendship is complicated and uncomplicated. When you’re Eleanor’s age you tend to make friends with whoever is around. It’s remarkable. When we were in the library a little boy came up to Cathy and they read a book together about fish. I think it would be nice if grown ups could do this. When I was in the mood I would like to think that I could go to the library, sit on a couch with a stranger and read a book out loud together. Mind you, to be fair, this isn’t friendship, this is making friends, the first bit of the much bigger thing called friendship. Eleanor doesn’t have friends yet, but she is making friends. She has a buddy at crèche called Tom. They like each other. They share a sense of fun and physicality. Tom came to Eleanor’s birthday party. When I went out onto the deck in the middle of the party I found Eleanor dragging Tom across the deck by his feet while he chortled with glee. Next time Richard comes over I must drag him across the deck and see if he likes it.

All Blacks 18, Munster 16

2008-11-19T22:24:00.004+13:00

The build up to this game and the excitement of the result reminded me of why I used to really love rugby. When I was a kid and the All Blacks went north to play Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England they always played the local teams midweek. Most of the games were pretty straight-forward, some of them were muddy, brutal affairs and occasionally they were magic. Over time it was decided to drop these games, to put sponsorship on the All Black jerseys, to let the All Blacks name be used to promote American cars and Australian cereals, pay everyone too much, and then let them go off-shore to make even more money.

Awhile ago I read two books. One was called The Book of Fame. It was a novel about the Invincibles tour by Lloyd Jones. The other book was a history book about the same tour. This was back in the day when you had to take a steamship to the other side of the world and be prepared to be away from home for months and months on end. The All Blacks played all comers, winning every game except a very dubiously referred match against a certain Welsh club team. It was hard work that tour. They played all the time, even with injury, and the travelling was long and hard. Oh, and they got paid bugger all. If you like rugby you should give the Lloyd Jones book a go.

What struck me about the book and watching the game against Munster was how much the All Blacks are admired in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The last time I remember the All Blacks doing a proper tour there were a few morons in the British press who thought the All Blacks should stop doing the haka. If these critics had bothered to watch how the haka was received by the crowds in the provinces they would have known what a dumb idea this was. The crowds loved it – they listened in silence and gave a roar at the end. Just like when the kicker from either side lined up a kick at goal. Did you hear the crowd at the Munster game? Even when the All Blacks kicked they were silent, and then clapped. We used to do this. In New Zealand this also used to be considered good form.

A few months ago I was listening to the panel on National Radio and one of the panellists commented on seeing an old faded sign behind the counter in a rather old faded shop. The sign said: Service Before Self. The panellist said that he thought most people would think that this was quite a quaint idea nowadays. Of course the most extreme form of this idea was somewhat discredited by asking hundreds of thousands men to march into machineguns in World War One. On the other hand self before all else is not very attractive either. It may be petty of me but I have little respect for All Blacks that leave mid-career to play club rugby in the Northern Hemisphere for cash, or people like Sonny Bill.

This is not a post about what the NZRFU should do about rugby; it is a post about doing things for the magic and honour of it. If we don’t believe in anything but ourselves or do anything except for our remuneration what a cold and venal world we will pass on.

Filler

2008-11-16T20:50:00.008+13:00

While we were walking down Lambton Quay on Saturday I had to say I didn't want a pamphlet on:

God
The Red Cross
Battery Farming

It was annoying. It's annoying being polite to strangers. Much easier to be rude to friends. To deal with this problem I invented the following T-shirt:

So handy when you have to run the gauntlet of leaflet handers on a Saturday. But wait, there's more.

Tired of having to select expensive cards for an endless variety of occasions? Try this:

Just sign and send. Seconds saved here can be spent cruising pointless websites or watching advertising on television.

Now I'm getting nasty?

2008-11-09T21:13:00.007+13:00

I read Danyl's blog this afternoon and was somewhat distressed. I left a snippy comment. The fifty five million people who left comments later all disagreed with me (people read Danyl's blog, as opposed to this one... Hi Richard! Hi Mum!).

Apparently my comment was nasty, but then I don't think it is nice to talk about voters this way:
Mad props to all those Green Party supporters in Ohariu (all 2229 of you!) who gave your electorate votes to the Green candidate, ensuring that Green Party arch-nemesis Peter Dunne could return to Parliament with a majority of only 1170 votes over Labour candidate Charles Chauvel.

Congratulations to Simon Bridges, new National MP for Tauranga who helped rid Parliament Winston Peters and ensured that the eighty eight thousand assholes who voted for Peters simply wasted their votes.

It just isn't.

It reminded me of an article that Julian Barnes wrote about going to watch a very important chess game, and how all the chess geeks used really violent, sexua and offensive language to describe the various players, the strategies they used and their careers. They all thought they were right, they develop hatreds and allegiances, they forgot that opinions are like arseholes. Political bloggers also seem to be an intensely inward breed, whose tone can be pretty strong stuff and yet are highly offended at the strong stuff of others.

Listening to people who are into politics can be similar to what happens when you tell people you are a teacher. They spend quite a lot of time telling you how it is.

How is it? F**ked if I know, but I know it's pretty messy and there really isn't ever going to be a clean solution to all the problems of the classroom. I potter along doing my best, holding my stupid political outsider opinions and voting how I feel. I don't vote based on what the insiders think I should do strategically, and outside certain electorates I don't think that's what most people do - the 88,000 arseholes, the 2229 fools and the other 220,000 of us. Shame.

My other reflection on this blog's brief foray into things loosely connected to politics is that it can be quite hard to make a point if you use Winston Peters as an example. My point was the media have had undue influence here and overseas with some candidates which may not have been entirely fair. Danyl left a long comment on my blog about this but it went on a bit and didn't seem related to my point. I think he was trying to prove something. The other side point in my post was that even if you don't like someone it's not fair to deny their followers representation. Hey, if 88,000 people want Winston, good luck to them.

But frankly I have no interest in Winston Peters' political career (although he did have the best cheeky grin in politics... probably in the world). I couldn't give a jot about the elaborate ins and outs of the finances of his party many moons ago. He's gone. Next time I will use a different example, and try and make my point a bit better.

Postscript: I reread a few things and I've decided that Danyl's post was bitter and self righteous, and rather, well ... nasty. Maybe the comments section was satirical too. Anyway, scratch the apology.

Punching Bag

2008-11-07T10:43:00.009+13:00

Journalists tell us stories. In their stories there are characters that have certain roles to play. Because journalists, like teachers and novelists, are mostly liberal in their views it is unsurprising that certain types of people are given certain roles. Right-leaning buffoon is a popular character. Recently there have been two examples of this in two elections on opposite sides of the world: Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for the office of Vice President in the American elections, and Winston Peters, leader of New Zealand First in the New Zealand elections. While I would never vote for either, I have also thought that many in the media have covered them complacently.

Winston is generally now portrayed in the New Zealand media as a smug, blustering man who has probably done some dodgy things but prefers antagonising journalists to giving answers. Sarah Palin is generally portrayed as an idiot. An idiot with some idiotic views, some of which might have been potentially dangerous should she have become Vice President.

Sarah Palin. Man. There are moments in her interviews with Katie Couric where you just can feel yourself die inside. It's very much like watching that genre of comedy perfected by Gervais where you feel as if you're watching a car crash in slow motion. Tina Fey realised this. Parts of her parody of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live are actually just word for word what Palin actually said. What's the problem with Palin? What’s the fundamental thing that led to her performing so disastrously in media interviews? She was unprepared. That's about it I reckon.
You can't, if you believe in democracy at all, discount her from the political debate because she has views you don't agree with - after all she represents the views of many in America. So if she was unprepared why didn't she just admit it instead of trying to bluff? Firstly let me say that I think it was encouraging that she wasn't good at bluffing. Secondly, how could she admit she was unprepared if she was running as Vice President? She was in a nasty situation. Unused to bluffing, talking on subjects she didn't know much about (and hadn't needed to know about in her previous roles), but not able to admit to not knowing the answers. Which makes me think that the people who put her name in the ring and ultimately chose her are really the ones to blame.
Some commentators in America were noting that the media were making a lot less of Joe Biden's gaffs, and he made a few. If Sarah Palin had said that FDR in 1929 jumped on the TV to reassure Americans about the depression (he wasn't President, and there was no such thing as TV) it would have been all over Saturday Night Live and the blogs, but Joe Biden hadn’t been given that role to play in the story of the election in the USA.

Winston Peters. His own assessment of the whole donations scandal is pretty accurate: cleared by the three investigations that counted, and censured by a kangaroo court. I think that any court where a figure as antagonising as Winston Peters is tried by his peers shortly before an election seems likely to be fairly biased. Who the hell is Owen Glenn? John Campbell's research on this was a comment to a reporter who went to Glenn's press conference: "You heard him speak? He seems credible doesn't he?" By any standard this is pretty poor. Constantly we heard the statement: "What possible motive could Glenn have to do this?" I can think of plenty. How about he is a man who likes to feel he has influence? How about he is a petty man who has a grudge about not getting what he thinks he paid for?

I also think Helen Clark's assessment of Peters was fairly accurate: his relationship with the media "is not the best" and he does himself no favours. True. His dealings with the media are infantile, and Guyon Espiner was right to call Peters' behaviour pathetic when Peters stormed off because journalists were standing on the wrong step. Pathetic. On the other hand, if he actually didn’t do anything really wrong then it seems a disservice to the democratic process that his political career is finished, as is his political party, the careers of the members of parliament who were in it, and the representation of the people who loyally voted for that party.

Still, it’s more satisfying sticking the journalistic boot into a man who has enjoyed sticking his own nicely shined business shoes into your gut for the last few years, than it is to be a little dispassionate and not call the result (wrongly) before various investigations are concluded.

Right wing whinging about the conspiracy of the left-wing media is usually wrong, but it is also sometimes right. Sarah Palin is not a bimbo. She has had a fairly successful political career in Alaska and raised a family of five. She holds views on social issues that are right wing, but she doesn’t seem to be fanatical about believing everyone should adopt her views. Winston Peters is antagonised by journalists in New Zealand. His other biggest flaw is probably self-delusion, but he has had a long career, represents a section of our population, has great charisma, and actually didn’t do too badly as minister of foreign affairs.

I suppose it is one of the perils of entering the public world that you have very little control over the role you are given in the national story.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

2008-11-05T16:00:00.010+13:00

There are two pictures of people on my classroom wall at school: Martin Luther King Jnr. and Robert Kennedy. They both were shot in 1968. Bobby Kennedy lived to see Martin Luther King's death, and he spoke about it. Although Martin Luther King is the obvious link to Barack Obama it is the younger Kennedy I thought of when I felt that bubble of hope grow and seemingly burst up inside me as I followed the last 48 hours of the Obama campaign.

I only came around to Obama at the end. I heard him on the way to work yesterday speaking at a rally in Canton, Ohio. For the first time in a long time I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. For the first time in awhile I felt that hope was actually permitted, and that it was not a word being used insincerely in the mouth of just any man. Obama in the last few days of his campaign seemed to reach into the oratory of the black pastor, of the Afro-American minister, of Martin Luther King Jnr. I think this is the obvious comparison, and it was moving to see Jesse Jackson tonight standing with all those other people in the field before the first Afro-American President of America, it was moving to see him standing there crying and know that he had walked beside the coffin of Martin Luther King and had lived to see this day, that the hand that had rested on King's coffin was lofted now in celebration, forty years later.

When I got home tonight and heard that Obama had won I went and found my CD of Robert Kennedy speeches and played this:

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Whether we like it or not, America is the moral compass of the West. It's revolution at the end of the 18th century forms the basis of our beliefs today. It has the scale of empire, its rhetoric is listened to, the poetry of its oratory is accepted as meaningful, and it has been meaningful right from the start:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

And today we see this exact principle enacted with the election of Barack Obama. How comfortable Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would have been with Barak as President is a moot point, but the truth of the statements at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence stand the test of time. America was founded on a mixture of pragmatism and heady idealism expressed in poetry and violence. Poetry and violence is a chapter about Bobby Kennedy. Poetry and violence is a chapter about Martin Luther King.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

When I got home tonight I listened to Bobby Kennedy and I played with my daughter. I thought two things. First I thought how glad I am that my daughter is alive in an age when people can talk about hope again without sarcasm. Then I thought I would put another picture on my classroom wall tomorrow.

A picture of Barack Obama.

My Mother's Records

2008-11-02T21:35:00.006+13:00

Two

When I was a teenager in Paraparaumu it was all the rage to fill up old 1.5 litre soft drink bottles with water and leave them all over your front lawn. It was supposed to stop dogs doing their business on your property. It got to the point where every single lawn in Paraparaumu had these plastic bottle droppings on them (usually with dog droppings in between). There were various theories as to why this was supposed to work. The only one I remember was that the dogs were supposed to be frightened of their reflection in the water bottle. Of course it didn't work. In fact it was utterly ridiculous. Nevertheless, thousands of adults across New Zealand covered their lawns with old Coke bottles in the belief that it did work.

The past is a strange place. Even the past of twenty years ago can seem very odd indeed. The movement of time eradicates context and leaves you with objects. It’s hard to say why people in the 80’s thought neon coloured sweat bands were cool, but they were. The reasons things were done tend to be forgotten leaving only the objects behind like, well like a hundred soft drinks bottles filled with water on someone’s lawn, or a book dropping suddenly out of the sky.

My mother first met my father at a wedding, and afterwards they went to a Joe Brown dance at Dunedin's town hall. My father was at the wedding because he worked on the family of the groom's farm shearing sheep. He sheared sheep to pay to go to university. My father didn't have a really great upbringing, he was brought up by a prickly Aunt, but he was decent at school, good at sport and a great ballroom dancer.When my mother first met my father he owned three records: two by a fellow called Mantovani (Immortal Classics and Tangos) and Belafonte’s debut record. They are still in the collection, and still treasured although Mantovani’s star has dipped so far below the horizon that it is hard to believe he was once so popular.

Mantovani Plays the Immortal Classics, Decca (1953). Mantovani released four other albums in 1953 including I suspect the less than immortal An Album of Christmas Music. It's hard not to make fun of Mantovani. Even the fan website is defensive: Quality Light Orchestra Music is sometimes confused, with "background” music, or "easy listening" music, it surely is not.... Have you ever heard of a category of music called "Quality Light Orchestra Music"? A reviewer of the latest Mantovani biography cryptically comments: As years pass, we realize that art glows at different angles when and where it is examined and experienced. And generally the world is looked at differently afterwards.

Sure.

The thing is I rather like this record. I like it for two reasons:

Firstly, I love things that were once enormously popular and have now vanished off the radar. Mantovani fits the bill. He was the first person to sell a million stereo records, phenomenally popular in Britain and America, one of the recording stars of his era. Now he would be unknown to everyone under fifty.

Secondly, the little sticker my mother put on the album cover says: "Please keep this record. It is very old, but it takes me back to when I first met M. and contains two of my most loved pieces of music: Handel's Largo and Schubert's Ave Maria." When I was a kid my mother had a tape of something like the London Pops Orchestra playing classical tunes. It had, predictably, a version of Pachelbel's Canon on it. It was an "interpretation" of that piece and it ended with a French horn. The thing is I never knew until I was a lot older that it was an interpretation and I got rather attached to that French horn. Even now when I hear versions of Canon I am always listening for the surging horn at the end, and always disappointed when it doesn't happen. My point is, with some songs it doesn't matter if the first version you hear of something is a supposedly "inferior" - it will become the version that matters most for you.

For years I had this memory of a book I had been made to read at school. It was about a boy living on an island and he was obsessed with Harry Belafonte. For a long time I had no idea who Harry Belafonte was (even though he was sitting in my mother's record collection). One day I dragged his record out, dusted it off and gave it a spin. Brilliant.

Belafonte’s debut album is wonderful. It was released in 1956 and it was the first LP to sell a million copies in the USA. It is very hard to be depressed and listen to this album. What a great cover.

Many years after I read that book I was talking about, still at school but now a teacher, I was leaving my classroom after the day was over. It was a windy, high-cloud day, rubbish blowing through the halls and across the field, and out of the sky dropped a book. Some student had thrown it on the classroom roof and it now flapped its way to my feet. It was called The Cay and I realised as I picked it up that this was the book I had read twenty years ago at school.

My Mother's Records

2008-10-27T13:40:00.009+13:00

One

There are some places that live on in your mind. Long after you have walked out of them for the last time you find yourself back inside them in your dreams. It has been many years since I walked though the rooms of my grandmother’s house, but it remains an important place to me; not as it is now, in other people’s hands, but as it was when I was a child.

While each room of my grandmother’s house has a set of details that I can vividly recall, the centre of that house, its heart, was at the back, off the kitchen. It was the room we came to for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the room we sat in to watch Coronation Street or play card games like Happy Families. Every meal had a ritual. At lunchtime part of the ritual was Gran turning on the radiogram. It was a large piece of oblong furniture made of wood that sat in the corner of the room. To turn it on Gran lifted the lid and propped it up like the bonnet of a car and then turned one of the chunky dials inside until it clicked. After the radio had been turned on you had to wait awhile in silence for it to warm up. Gran would be in the kitchen preparing sandwiches while I sat at the table and slowly the sombre voice of the National Radio news announcer would fade into the room calmly stating the catastrophes of the day.

When I stayed with Gran in the holidays I sat in Grandpa’s chair at the dining table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Behind me there was a large cabinet. The cabinet had cupboards at the bottom, a bench in the middle, and cupboards above. On the bench space were piles of papers and books: Grandpa’s papers and books. It was a jumble of things all crammed in a row, and a huge edition of Webster’s dictionary sitting un-consulted amid the jumble. It was Grandpa’s side of the table. Gran’s side had the toaster and a chair for the cat. It was on Grandpa’s side of the table that I can remember being swung and dropped through his hands, and given horsey rides on his knee, and the giggling fear of it.

I hear from my mother that her father was a man of dark clouds and bursts of light. In the days of light he was a man of great charm. In the days of bruised clouds and thunder he could be mean. He died when I was five; the same year as my Dad. I never really knew him. A heart attack. It came in a massive bolt at the table one lunchtime and he was gone.

There are only three things I remember about him: the horsey ride; a curiously lonely looking figure out in the middle of a field at the back of his house; and a bike ride on the Taieri Plain.

On this bike ride Grandpa sat me on the handlebars of his heavy, black bicycle between his arms, and pedalled out into the long, deserted back roads behind Mosgiel. Here you can find the fields, and ditches overrun by weeds, the high holly hedges and the hills off in the distance lying like a woman on her side. Here is the old landing strip and hangers used for the reserves in World War Two. Everything silent and shrunk against the largeness of the sky, filled with the heat and the rasping of crickets. I have no memory of Grandpa talking on this bike ride. What would he have said if he had known this was our last time together? What parts of him are parts of me?

Quite sometime after that trip my mother gave away a pile of 78s. She gave them to a kid I knew that had a wind up gramophone and collected 78s to play on it. I didn't know what 78s were at that time, or why she had them or what they meant.

They were her father's records.

Grandpa liked opera arias and he bought 78s of Bjoerling, Caruso and crooners such as Lanza. He was a decent tenor himself and liked to sing at church or embarrass my Gran by serenading her while she scrubbed potatoes or shelled peas at the kitchen sink. My mother has some tapes that have Grandpa singing on them. He sings a lot of hymns. There is a kind of plodding melancholy to many hymns which can be comforting or depressing depending on how well they are sung. On these tapes he sometimes sings them well, and sometimes without much enthusiasm. He was quite old then, although he was never really old, and his voice wavers a bit, especially as the recording goes on. I think he was attracted to the emotional weight of certain hymns and sang them well. A hymn with a decent melody, and a reasonable lyric or two gets a better treatment than a dirge with noble protestations of faith. He also sang the odd Italian tune: O Sole Mio, that kind of thing.

Buffalo 66 is one of my favourite movies. In it the anti-hero’s father sings a song. He sings it in the spare room of the suburban family home. It has been clear from the scenes before that he is not a good father. That he is a bitter and angry man. The son remains at the kitchen table, upset, while the father takes the girls he believes is his son’s wife down to the spare room to hear him sing. He’s made tapes. He finds a Nelson Riddle record. It’s a record of orchestral arrangements that you can sing a long to. He sings Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread). As he sings it the lighting changes in the room: it goes dark, there is a soft spot light on the father, he is standing in front of red drapes, and he spreads out his arms. It is magic. All anger and bitterness is gone, the accumulated muddle of the room has disappeared, he is alone with himself, made better by song.

I think that The Great Caruso must have been a very influential movie. It certainly made the reputation of its star, Mario Lanza. While Lanza was often criticised for being an amateur without the stamina to learn an operatic role, in truth this was probably part of his appeal to all the men around the world who could sing a nice song at parties, or in churches and dream of other things. Lanza, like Caruso, was also a bit of a ham. Technicians tend to forget, when they criticise tenors and sopranos who are hams, that opera is also about drama. It is not sufficient simply to hit all the notes, you have to sell the song as well. Caruso could sell a song. Even though it is going too far to take a big sobbing intake of breath in an opera aria as Caruso does in Pagliacci I still love it because he seems to be swept away by the drama itself.

I have never much liked art that is realistic. Art for me has always been about escape. Realistic art is false. If you want realism just open your eyes: it's a toddler reaching for food at the table; it's a mother with rollers in her hair; it's breakfast tables and net curtains. Do you think Grandpa sang Italian arias in Mosgiel in the 1960s because he wanted realism?

If you read closely between the lines of this story I think you can see what I am saying: that music comes to me from my Grandpa through my mother; that I inherit opera from him and perhaps the urge to perform; perhaps also some of my dark clouds and my desire for escape. But then what do I really know of him?

It's a nice story.

American Dreams

2008-10-19T14:32:00.006+13:00

I’ve never been to New York. Like most people though I have visited it. I have been to the New York of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman. Each one shows you a particular New York. They are guides with their own agenda, happy to show you what interests them but indifferent to your own tastes. Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser is about New York turning itself into New York. As such it is about The American Dream, and Martin Dressler is an American Dreamer.

At the end of the 19th century, when this book is set, Martin, the novel's main character, moves into a hotel built by a hopeful land speculator in the middle of farmland. The farmland is in the north of Manhattan Island:

Up here, in the wilderness, even the names changed: the Northern extension of Broadway was the Boulevard, a wide avenue of hard-packed dirt. From the high platform of the Eighty-first Street station he could see to the west the half-iced Hudson and the red-brown Palisades, to the east the thin dark river and bluish-brown hills of Brooklyn. (p.74)

It is, as I said, a book partly about New York turning into New York, the same place that Whitman observed:

On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

That’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. There are times in the Millhauser’s book where Martin walks though the city of New York paying close attention to its energy and industry. He observes it as a capitalist but it is described as if he were a poet:

From trains rushing north and south he pointed at the tops of horsecars and brewer’s wagons, at wharves and square riggers and barrel heaped barges, at awnings stained rust-red from the showers of iron particles ground off by the El train brake shoes. He pointed at open windows through which they could see women bent over sewing machines and coatless men in vests playing cards around a table, pointing at intersecting avenues and distant high hotels - and there in the sky, a miracle of steel- frame construction, the American Surety building, twenty stories high… (p.95)

Both authors are clearly describing the same place: a city making itself - from the busy hands of women at sewing machines, to the steel-frame buildings and the foundry chimneys burning high into the night. A place of capitalist dreams.

The curious thing about The American Dream is that it is both the hard-headed, restless, pursuit of business, and a dream with all the fantastical, surreal and languid possibilities of a dream. The pursuit of business and the experience of dreams both seem to share other characteristics though. They have a never ending, never satisfied quality to them, and as they go on they both seem to become more and more elaborate, eventually over-extending and collapsing into thin air.

The beginning of Martin's vision starts when he is nine and he goes with his family to Coney Island. Standing in the sea, with his back to the beach, he has the first of many visions:

Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England – and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction. (p.16)

Martin is attracted to vast networks of order. Here he is sitting in the lobby of hotel:

What seized his innermost attention… was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge. But could you say that a bridge or a steam boiler was an idea? (p.24)

They are ideas that turn into things, and these things are impressive, but they also seem to urge us on to both greater achievements and greater follies. As the book progresses the capitalist fantasies become grander to match Dressler’s growing business success.

And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming. Above the dynamo was an underground hive of shops, with electric lights and steam heat, and above the shops an underground park or garden with what seemed to be a theatre of some kind. Above the ground a great lobby stretched away: elevator doors opened and closed, people strode in and out, bells rang, the squeak of the valises mingled with the rattle of many keys and the ringing of many telephones, alcove opened into alcove as far as the eye could see. Above the lobby rose two floors of public rooms and then the private rooms began, floor after floor of rooms, higher and higher, a vertical city, a white tower, a steel flower – and always elevators rising and falling, from the cloud-piercing top to the darkness where the dynamo hummed. Martin had less the sense of observing the building than of inhabiting it at every point: he rose and fell in the many elevators, he strolled through the parlour of an upper room and walked in the underground park or garden – and then it was as if the structure was his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators. (pp.173-4)

It is passages like this in the book where I feel the magic of Whitman tips into the madness of Fritz Lang where a city might look like the grand, anonymous vision above, and where people might feel like this:

Whitman and Lang sit either side of the time when this novel is set. Whitman can see the smokestacks without alarm, although not perhaps without unease:

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

Lang, creating his movies after World War One, from a country prostrated by inflation and unemployment, has a less romantic vision in mind. It seems to me that both Whitman and Lang exist in the book Martin Dressler, as both exist in the idea of the American Dream. It is dream that is restless, and we live in a restless age. What has been built by the hands at the sewing machines, and the cranes pointing through the sky has been wonderful, but Whitman were he alive today would not be bathing in the waters around Manhattan, nor would he be able to take the fresh farm air from the ample hills of Brooklyn.

Martin Dressler
Steven Millhauser
Crown Publishers, New York, 1996

Time is the school in which we learn

2008-10-07T11:03:00.004+13:00

In May, 1998, the day before I went to Japan, my mother and I walked along Oriental Parade in Wellington. It was a sunny day. We sat on one of the park benches on the Parade and looked out across the harbour to the dock cranes and the office blocks. My mother told me that one of things she missed when my father died was someone to tell things to. I knew that what she was telling me then was that this was what she would miss again when I went overseas. At that time I was supposed to be going for a year, but it turned into five, almost six years in the end.

The story my mother told me about missing the simple act of being able to tell my father something came back to me when I was reading Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking.

In December 2003 Didion’s daughter fell ill and went into septic shock. While she was hospitalised and put into a coma, Joan’s husband John died of a heart attack. They had been married for forty years.

For a long time I read The Year of Magical Thinking and enjoyed it, but didn’t feel the impact I thought I was supposed to be feeling. When people write “I can’t imagine dying without this book” in the blurb on the back cover I think it is fair enough for the reader to expect impact.

The impact came in Chapter Seventeen when Didion’s record began to resonate against the stories in my own family:

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I need to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of a response. I read something in the paper I would normally have read to him. I noticed some change in the neighbourhood that would interest him. (p.194)

I know that in 1978 the Terrace Tunnel opened in Wellington. I believe this was the final stage in the new motorway development. This was the motorway development that controversially bisected the Bolton Street Cemetery. I also know that Star Wars came to New Zealand in 1978. I know both of these things because my father died in 1978. My mother told me that my father wanted to see Star Wars when he was sick, and that they went, and that he enjoyed it but she didn’t because it was so loud and he was ill. She also told me that it seemed like a race at times when it came to the Terrace Tunnel; would he live to see it opened?

My mother and father were married for quite a long time given that he died when I was five. Given that he died when I was five I have not learned a lot about how a marriage works from my mother and father; just about how it is remembered. Although Didion’s book is about the death of her husband it is also about her marriage: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.” The final part of the book is about how marriage and a person are begun to be remembered:

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

I have lived my life with the photograph on the table. It was only really when I became a father that I began to be bothered by silly questions. Was my father taller than me or shorter? What did his voice sound like? Was he a dad that changed nappies or was he a chauvinist? It is curious that this book makes me reflect on these things, because most of the book is not likely to.

Quite a lot of this book specifically describes the events surrounding John’s death, quite a lot is about the daughter’s illnesses. Didion’s observations are interesting. She notices for example that when tragedy erupts the survivors and witnesses normally note afterward how ordinary the day was before the lightening strike of catastrophe. She notices that although grief is actually seriously deranging it is not something people expect treatment for even in the modern American age of counselling and therapy. These are interesting things to say and combined with the awfulness of the events described make the first two thirds of the book compelling.

However, I felt that the book only really began to speak in its final third:

We are not idealised wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious, about her “self-pity,” her “whining,” her “dwelling on it.” Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

I think this is very good writing. The death of my father means more to me now that it did when I was five. The phrase: “marriage is memory, marriage is time” makes sense to me now. Fifteen years ago I would not have noticed these six words in the book. Time is the school.

What do we learn in the school of time? Wouldn’t most of us rather be twenty-two again and able to sneer at the middle-aged? I used to think so, but now I must acknowledge that when I was twenty-two I had no wife, and no child, and was really only a boy who hadn’t noticed that his father was dead. I was a boy that didn’t really understand how loss operated in the life of those left behind. It is now the time for my generation to begin to understand those things for themselves.

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate, London, 2005

Back on the treadmill

2008-10-02T10:30:00.004+13:00

"In short, getting out of bed in the morning and making breakfast involves more complex decisions than the average game of chess."

- Naked Economics

I read this sentence while I was waiting to get my hair cut. The guy who cuts my hair is from Iraq. He charges $15. There were three people ahead of me, and nobody after me. That means he made $60 and worked about one hour. There will be other customers in the day, but I would say the morning rush was over. I wonder what the rent on his place is? It can't be much because it's a single, small room at the far end of Newtown, right down near the zoo, but still, it must be something. Then there must be the rent on his flat, and power, and food on the table and all that.

I have to teach my Year 10 students about economics next term so I am reading about it. This is sort of interesting, and sort of annoying. The first book I read was Freakonomics. It was a book that perfectly captured the interesting/annoying feeling for me. It's interesting to hear their theories, and it's annoying that they're so frigging confident that they're right. It's an imperial thing. Sorry to be tangental, but I am also watching a documentary about the British empire and I noticed how all the soldiers in the old photos look cocksure in their swishy uniforms. Nowadays when you think of a British soldier you think drab, or dowdy or brown. It comes through in the writing too. The Undercover Economist (British) is so much more prudently written, more hedging and helpful. Freakonomics is brash. America is the current imperial power.

The quote at the beginning of this post made me think that you can only really understand this sentence if you are all grown up. If I had read this book when I was a teenager or at university I wouldn't really have understood it. He's talking about weighing up the costs of doing things. Not the monetary cost alone, but the social costs and what not, even the cost in your head of having a big fry up for brekkie against your age, the death of someone about your age in the morning paper, and the health warning on the packet about cholesterol. Cost. While I am here typing this I am thinking about how I need to wash the car, attend to the lawn, sweep the floor, and pick up E. at 12.30. When I was a teenager my mother's labour allowed me to laze around and believe I had problems. Ha!

When it was my turn for a haircut I noticed a picture of two boys stuck to the hairdresser's mirror; one boy was probably about three and the other about one. They looked like Dad. I suppose his children are playing out in the sun this morning, or helping mum with the housework, or with family while mum works and wondering where dad is. E is running around at creche getting her clothes dirty and playing with Tom. For them there is also a cost. It's a cost they do not see. It is our turn now to labour so that they can be free.

Taking the piss

2008-10-02T10:03:00.004+13:00

If only reading were like exercising: the more you read the nicer your brain looked. I could walk into a room and people would think, "check out the guns on that guy's brain; his frontal lobes are really ripped". Instead, my brain remains flabby and out of breath. I spend hours on the treadmill and when someone asks me to explain something all I can usually muster is a blank look. Sometimes when I try to explain something I find that I only really remember odd fragments of the overall pattern and crucial pieces of the puzzle seem to escape me. One thing I have learned though: being able to tell a funny story about the topic gets you off the hook. What I don't know about the Roman Empire is a few volumes longer than the complete Hansard, but I can always divert people by telling them how the Romans washed their togas and brushed their teeth with urine. This trick saves you from answering the original question about Augustan tax policy and, curiously, makes everyone think you must be quite bright because you know obscure stuff about urine in Rome.

Things I read in a book today

2008-10-01T20:28:00.005+13:00

I've been reading again. The book's first chapter should be called: Dumb product ideas in History. Here are my two favourites.

1. Goff's Low Ash Cat Food - "Contains only 1.5% ash"

This is fantastic because you go on a real emotional journey responding to this product name. Here's how my emotions played out. First: Yuk, it says this cat food has ash in it. Second: Wait a minute, the slogan sort of implies ALL cat food has ash in it. Third: Why the hell do they put ash in cat food? Four: Could it be for health reasons, to add some mineral supplement or something? Five: But then why would this company be promoting a low ash range? Etc, etc.... In the end there is no reason not to buy this product because it has ash in it (if all the others do too), but you're not going to, right? Why? It's called shooting the messanger.

2. The Impact

In 1994 General Motors released their first electric car... the Impact. How could this name have gotten through the fifty three billion planning and marketing meetings without being knocked back? How could the guys at Goff's not think through how most people would respond to the idea of ash being in food?

Here is the answer:

"It was thought that the mountain could induitably be climbed were it five thousand feet smaller."

Summary of the committee meeting in London to discuss climbing Everest in 1921

Which neatly demonstrates why almost all meetings are bad, and likely to produce conclusions that radiate stupidity.

For Richard

2008-09-30T10:42:00.004+13:00

Richard spends a lot of time wondering about the meaning of life, God, and that kind of stuff. Turns out there is a God, he's American, and heaven looks like this (click here to see it bigger):

I'll be seeing you there, buddy (through the DAMNED VIEWER).

Juxta

2008-09-29T08:47:00.005+13:00

I wonder if comedy is really anything other than a variant on the art form of juxtaposition.

Juxta is latin. It means: closely connected, side by side, yoked. Which shows you how words shift around in meaning when they change languages. Side by side position is close to what we mean in English, but juxtaposition does not mean closely connected, in fact that seems like an antonym.

Recently some of my students found this picture on the internet. For them it was hilarious. Actually, it is a pretty funny photo. My hairstyle is absurd, and my jeans are far too tight at the bottom.

What was funny about this photo was that they got to look at it on the computer screen and then turn around and look at this:

Without having lived the twenty years inbetween the contrast between these two versions of the same person is striking. For them, the students, it will be another ten to fifteen years before they begin to notice the glaring difference between what they thought they would be and who they are.

For once, I am not trying to be depressing. It is usually a good thing that by the time you are in your mid-thirties your desires and dreams have diverged wildly from those you had when you were a teenager. I'm still in a band, but most days I feel happy that I play music for my own enjoyment, and I don't have to think I am a failure if I am not trying to get a gig at a bar and have people think I am cool.

Still, I can see why my students were laughing.

Tiger

2008-09-22T21:38:00.006+12:00

In the children's books from the 1970s the Dads are absent because they're at work. Quite often you just have to assume this because the Dad isn't even mentioned. In this book Dad is at work, but we get to see him at the end of the day when he comes home and suggests dinner out at a cafe.

This is one of the few children's books from my childhood I can actually remember. It still delights me. I love how everyone is polite while something absurd and impolite occurs, and I love the ending; the little girl lugging home a big can of tiger food in case the tiger comes again... but he never does.

It strikes me that the substitute fathers in both these books are wild animals. I suspect this isn't a compliment. Still, girls seem to like us anyway. Even the big ones who should know better.

Ape

2008-09-21T21:08:00.003+12:00

I've been reading children's picture books. This is a good one. It's about a girl that loves gorillas and wants to go to the zoo but Dad is always too busy to take her. He gives her a toy gorilla instead. It is the toy gorilla that transforms; that takes her through the trees at night to the zoo; that acts like a Dad.

There are a lot of children's books that are a little bit sad. This must be because they're written by adults. There are also a lot of children's books with no Dads in them; or Dads at work; or indifferent, distant Dads. This is a little bit sad too.

Men are uncomfortable with love. Not all men, but most. Children don't really want to read you for love, they want a simple return of the open displays of affection that they give to you. I am surprised that I am good at being a Dad (so far). I love our exchange of kisses before bed, and our holding hands for a walk. I'd rather not trade these things for the other equally special future moments we will have, but I suppose I have no choice.

I must always try to be the gorilla swinging through the trees at night.

Final notes on Mr. Aguirre

2008-09-14T08:27:00.004+12:00

When the expedition to find El Dorado had had enough, when they realised that it was never going to happen, and that they were somewhere in the middle of an endless nowhere on the seemingly endless Amazon, they turned on their leader and killed him. Afterwards, trying to cover their arses, they wrote up a document making excuses for their actions and handed it to Aguirre to sign. He signed it: "Aguirre, traitor".

Revolutionary leaders are often the terrorists that won their campaigns. Terrorists are the ones who lost. Aguirre seems to have had this pretty clear in his head. Either we are murderers who killed a guy, he thought, or we are defying the whole of the system and breaking away by killing that system's representative.

Never let yourself become a symbol of something; they're so much easier to kill than real people.

I suppose he decided that this was to be his last throw of the dice. He was fifty something with an ambition that outran his opportunities and (probably) his talents. He went on a rampage. More than 400 years later you can feel the rage coming out of him. His run lasted about a year until he was hunted down in Venezuela.

"If it is my fate to die ruined in this land of Venezuela, then I believe neither in the word of God, nor in the sect of Mahomet, nor in Luther, nor in the pagan world: I believe that there is nothing for man except birth and death."

Before he died he killed the only person he loved: "My daughter, my love. I thought I should see you married and a great lady. But my sins and great pride have willed it otherwise.... Commend yourself to God, my daughter, and make your peace with Him."

Here comes the Renaissance. Here comes Shakespeare's dark laugh, here comes the beauty of man and the modern age.

Why Aguirre went bad

2008-09-14T08:06:00.005+12:00

I'm pretty sure Aguirre went bad because when they were halfway down the Amazon looking for El Dorado some smart bastard said: "You know, it's not about the destination... it's about the journey."

While I was being professionally developed the other day I turned over the leaflet someone had given me about leadership and it said something about journeys versus destinations and I thought: for once I'd just like someone to tell me what the f**king end point is. All three presenters I watched did the same thing; they all said "I hope you weren't expecting answers", and "you have all the answers". In that case can I go and do something else?

There is a flaw in the you-have-all-the-answers presentation. You don't learn anything. You don't add to your knowledge. This kind of presentation works for awhile, but in the end you need some fresh ideas and information.

So, perhaps we can imagine the following scene:

A watery spot on the banks of the Amazon, 1560

Leader of expedition: You know, it's just occured to me, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.

Aguirre: Pardon me?

Leader: It's not about the destination.

Aguirre: Actually I'm pretty sure it is. If you're looking for El Dorado then I'm pretty f**king sure it is about the destination.

Leader: Let's not play the blame game.

Aguirre: (drawing sword) Let's.

Leader: I don't have the answers. You have the answers.

Aguirre: Damn right (sticks sword through presenter, sorry, leader).

Pandora's Box

2008-09-13T07:36:00.005+12:00

There is a book called Malinche's Conquest, by Anna Lanyon. It is concerned with Cortes' conquest of the Aztecs and, more specifically, with a native woman called Malinche. She acted as a translator for Cortes. In these stories of first encounters between cultures there are often these curious inbetween figures. In Captain Cook's story it is Tupia, in Hernan Cortes' story it is Malinche.

The book is good, but I want to talk about the ending. It is the fashion for (male) politicians to use Malinche's name in Mexico as a metaphor for betrayal. Anna Lanyon finds this interesting. More interesting than it seems at first glance (men blaming woman is nothing new... "dammit Eve, why didn't you tell me a f**king snake gave you the apple?").

Lanyon finds that Malinche's demonisation coincides with the rise of Mexican nationalism. In 1821, as Mexico became an independent country, Lanyon notices a curious double act taking place. The nationalists, who were often of Spanish descent, identified themselves with the Aztecs (who they were not related to, and who their ancestors destroyed), and called Malinche a traitor for helping the conquistadors. In fact, they seem very upset with Malinche. Why?

As the book ends Anna Lanyon notes that Mexico, unlike many other ex-colonial places, is a nation made up of a race that is neither Spanish nor Aztec but a blend of the two. It is a nation that symbolically starts with the child that Malinche bore Cortes. Lanyon quotes a book by Richard Rodriguez, an American of Mexican descent:

He described his first visit to Mexico City. How he stood on the busy street corner and everywhere he looked he saw his own countenance. That was when he recognised for the first time the absurdity of Europe's boast that in 1521 Spain has conquered Mexico. "Where, then," he asked, "is the famous conquistador?" Vanished, he concluded, as he stared into the mestizo faces around him, vanished, absorbed and diffused by the endurance of Ameriindian women. Richard Rodriguez understands... that Mexico's problem with Malinche is, fundamentally, a question of how to honour a rape.

It is hard not to think about New Zealand when reading things like this. The ex-colonies of Spain are about 200 years further down the track then the ex-colonies of Britain, and of course not all these ex-colonies are the same. Anna Lanyon is an Australian. The New Zealand and the Australian experience of race relations has been quite different. New Zealand seems a little closer to the Mexican version of events. Perhaps not if you are living in Khandallah; more so if you are teaching in Wainuiomata. New Zealand has recently gone through a growth spurt of identity forming. There have been some uncomfortable moments, and some good ones.

In Kororareka in the 1820s Maori women swam out to the whaling boats to trade their bodies for weapons and tools. Neither the whaler nor the woman have a name, but perhaps New Zealand history starts there: as the hand of the whaler reaches down to pull her up onboard.

I don't have much to say

2008-09-10T20:49:00.008+12:00

that's worth listening to.

I think people can be very inspiring and moving. I would like to show beauty, wisdom and kindess to my students but I am either incapable or it is too hard. I must do better.

We went to Florence. It's one of the most incredible places on earth. You can see Michelangelo's slaves writhing within their marble, almost physically trying to struggle out of the rock in front of your eyes.

I think this might be Michelangelo's greatest work because it is about struggle, not about perfection. Of course the artist didn't intend it this way, but that's what he left us so we may do with it as we may.

Then again there's this. Who am I to argue with this vision of man: confident, beautiful and assured. Wasn't it also the Renaissance that gave us Machiavelli.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Crazy for love. Machiavelli catches you off guard sometimes with this kind of thing. Crazy for love. What a funny thing to say.

I want this:

How exciting this is. How wild and full of life it is. I can feel the bass riding up; the drums going out to the cymbals; the voice soaring up above the guitar.

It's nothing really. A finger on a string, a stick on the skin of a drum, a chisel on the flesh of the marble, but it is everything we can be. Crazy for love. Struggling out of the stone.

Unassured, unbeautiful, unfinished and flawed.

Late one night in Lima

2008-09-07T21:36:00.005+12:00

At the moment I'm reading a book called Aguirre by Stephen Minta. It's one of those books where the author retraces the steps of someone famous; a sort of travel/history book. I came across this passage in the book, where the author is in a bar late one night in Lima:

Someone from the next table stood up and began to recite a drunken poem. A romantic, brooding piece, as far as I ould tell above the noise of the traffic. As it reached what might have been its climax, Gustavo waved in Jane's direction. "You don't like it?" he asked, as she raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders. "It's too sentimental? But look, what is there for us except suffering and death? Without public emotion there is only private misery. It's like the English," he said, running his fingers absentmindedly through Jane's hair. "I know the English. They brought me up. They're like those giant fish. When they're wounded they go down very deep and die in the ocean where no one can see them."

I know the English too. Man hands on misery to man. And the capacity for other things.

This is the 200th post on this blog.

Last Days (of the Incas)

2008-09-07T11:20:00.003+12:00

This is a good book. It's about the Pizarros and the end of the Incan rulers. A real page-turner without any academic vices (footnotes, obscurity, point-scoring off other academics in your field). You can get it at the Wellington Public Library.

In order to make history real I think you have to fictionalise it. As living, breathing humans we are aware that existence is very much to do with the little things, and the basic sensations of being alive. Whenever I have been at an important event I have always noticed how banal it is.

I went to the burial of the unknown soldier at the cenotaph a few (?) years ago. It was a big deal. Important people were there and it was covered live by TV ONE. What do I remember? I remember Rodney Hide stopping photgraphers without the proper passes from entering certain enclosures, I remember worrying about getting sunburned... that kind of stuff. Probably the same for people who were 123 rows back at the "I have a dream" speech. This is why the "Sermon on the Mount" sketch is so f**king funny in Life of Brian. When you're in row 123 at gig a lot of the moment is lost.

There's a bit of making stuff up in this book about the Incans, but it's a better book for it.

As the sky began tuning red from the setting sun, several Spaniards fastened around Atahualpa’s neck a garrotte – a loop of rope attached to a stick that could be turned like a wheel, thus tightening the loop until the blood supply though the carotid arteries was cut off to the brain. As the friar began intoning the last rites – Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death – one of the Spaniards began to twist the stick, the rope slowly tightening around Atahualpa’s neck – I will fear no evil, for thou art with me – until the emperor’s eyes began to bulge and the solitary vein on his forehead rose distended and illumed by the final rays of sun – and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Saturday 26 July, 1533

I suppose some of the Spaniards watching the death of the Incan emperor were moved, and I suppose others were batting away mosquitos, or were wishing they had been kinder to their lover, or had thoughts about dinner.

What is for dinner?

Last Days

2008-09-06T14:56:00.004+12:00

I have been reading books about the conquistadors in Central and South America. I started reading about the conquistadors because in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel he has a chapter about the conquest of the Incan empire by Pizarro in 1531-2. It is a staggering story, and one that perfectly illustrates the problem that the book starts with. Framed as a question by a man called Yali to Diamond on a beach in New Guinea in 1972 the problem is: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Why is it that the world is so unequal? How can it be that Pizarro and 168 Spaniards can conquer an empire of 10 million? Why was it not the case that the Incans conquered Europe?

Whether you accept Diamond's arguments or not seems to come down to which side of the fate versus free will debate you go for. The more I read about history, and the more of my life I have to compare against it, the less I am inclined to believe in free will. If it exists it seems to me that we freely choose to make the same (often quite bad) decisions from generation to generation.

There's nothing we can do about it: permed mullets, boring National Prime Ministers and the same five news stories will keep coming back, over and over again.

Stiff Upper Lip

2008-09-04T20:14:00.005+12:00

Tuesday was a bad day. It was hard being a teacher on Tuesday. At the end of that day I remembered a poster a friend had on the wall of her living room. It is a print of a poster that was put up around London during the time of the blitz. I printed out a copy and put it on my classroom wall.

I am a repressed Anglo-Saxon. I don't much like displays of affection. I think emotional repression is undervalued in the current age. I blame America. You didn't see British soldiers blubbing to each other in World War II films. Stiffen that upper lip chaps.

I played one of Winston Churchill's speeches to my Year 13 history class today. They found it hard to get past his voice; that sort of slurred, jowly, "is he drunk?" sound he had, but they listened when I told them to, and at the end I told them how important those speeches had been. I told them about people throughout the British Empire listening to that rising, resonant voice that lifted out of its slumber sometimes and gave people hope. There is no forgetting that the world confronted a terrible evil and that the British Empire seemed all but finished in 1940 when Winston stood in the House and delievered his maiden speech as Prime Minister.

"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, "come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."

Very little in life is inspiring, and when "heroes" are investigated they are found to flawed and human, but let's take something from a few moving words in a time of dread.

Do we stand for something? Will we resist?

Three poems about Led - Three

2008-08-24T21:26:00.007+12:00

Since I've Been Loving You: is just a blues song about losing love.

I like Led Zeppelin. I like a lot of their songs, but these three are the ones that I personally find most resonant. The other thing that makes me like this band is that I can hear the excitement in them when they play. When you're playing right you disappear: you float free of yourself and of time, and when the song ends it is like suddenly waking from a dream and finding yourself in some place that is briefly strange and disorientating.

I think John Bonham got lost inside the music. I wonder why so many musicians turn into addicts, alcoholics and madmen? Is it because they're trying to extend the state they find when they're playing?

Who can explain this magic? Since I've Been Loving You is just a blues song about losing love, but...

But Jimmy Page plays one of the best guitar solos in rock in it. Listening to him playing here makes you realise what a load of absolute rubbish gets peddled as guitar solos in 99% of songs. It's not about flashiness. Neil Young does solos mostly involving about five notes that make me want to cry. It's about feeling and being true to yourself. There's a lot of flashiness in Pages' solo to be fair, but it comes out as a stream of consciousness rather than a guy trying to show off.

Since I've Been Loving You is just a blues song about losing love, but.... Robert Plant has sold the song to us along time ago. We have quietened down a bit in the final verse, knowing that the final onslaught is coming. He even warns us:

"Just one more, just one more..."

And then he let's go.

The whole band hits it's pained, heartaching note under his breaking moan in a roar and it raises the hair on your arms. How come certain combinations of notes rub us the right way and create a physical response?

Robert Plant makes me think that great singers are great actors. There must be a moment when they first record a song where the acting is intense and not forced; when they give their defining performance in the role. Later though, performing the song for the one thounsandth time it must all be about being a great actor.

Mind you, losing love is an easy thing to sing about. Every young man knows what that feels like.

Three poems about Led - Two

2008-08-24T20:20:00.007+12:00

Dazed and Confused: imagine a fat man heavily plodding down stairs.... ba-bom, bom, bom, bom (breathe), ba-bom, bom, bom, bom. This is how the song starts, with this ominous descending bass line, and then the guitar comes in; following the same bass line but with more angst. Against this basic centre of the song comes the bashing rush of guitar chords and matched drums smashing it all up.

It's the long middle section that makes the song a rock masterpiece. I believe the middle section of this song is Led's finest moment. They play so well together. The bass doing it's quiet modulated riff, the bowed guitar mimicked by the singer's voice and the drummer keeping a steady beat, sometimes doing a call and response to the bass on the toms.

And then... oh lord, and then the drummer hits the hi-hat three times: t, t, t, and suddenly the madness expands out - the bass uncoiling in rapid swirls underneath the flailing cymbals, the guitar lifting out above, while the drums begin to gather so much fury they seem to be coming apart.

And the critics at Rolling Stone loved the debut album:

Here, as almost everywhere else on the album, it is Page's guitar that provides most of the excitement. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" alternates between prissy Robert Plant's howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.

In this album review Dazed and Confused is not even mentioned.

What is good writing about music? I think it involves listening to the music not to the other stuff. When I was in Japan I was cut off from critics and had to form my own opinions. At that time Radiohead released Kid A. having not read any of the hype about this album I just bought it and listened to it. I thought: man this is good.

Shortly afterwards I went back to New Zealand for a holiday and was told that Kid A was "the worst kind of art rock pretentiousness" (which is a pretty pretentious thing to say). Many reviews panned it and derided Thom Yorke and I wondered: how much do you really hear something properly and how much are you loaded against something by what other people say and surfaces? It was actually a defining moment for me in listening to music.

Even though Britney Spears is garbage Toxic is a decent pop song.

If you actually listen to it.

Three poems about Led - One

2008-08-24T15:39:00.005+12:00

Immigrant Song: This is what rock music is supposed to sound like. A driving riff and a wailing howl. Listen to how the machine of the band drives forward together: how the bass switches to quick, brief upward runs and then back to the hammering main riff; how Bonham's cymbal crashes match the guitar's open shimmering chords, but the kick drum and the toms follow the bass and the main riff tightly. Listen to the end where the guitar drops in its dissonant open chords at unexpected places in the riff, signalling the end.

The lyrical match is perfect. Because it is a driving, relentless song the idea of the Vikings is ideal. It is certainly a song that moves forward, but it is also a dark song, and the Vikings were a dark scourge on the coastal villages of Europe when they came. Unsurprisingly it has been used to inspire college football teams in the USA and US miltary pilots in the Gulf War. It is a battering song, a sudden mob with bats, ugly and lost, a riot on the streets, a truck driver pulled from his cab in LA, a black man being batoned on a freeway.

I remember Kenneth Clarke talking about the Vikings in the first episode of his documentary Civilization. How the prows of those ships thrust up high on the horizon against the slate sky must have struck terror in the hearts of farmers and priests on the land. Those prows are a symbol of the West; with all it's beauty and brutality, bearing down on the vulnerable, filled up with an insatiable greed.

Of course it is a fashion to bash the West, but I've just been reading a lot of books about the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. The Aztec and Incan empires were empires based on oppression. They dominated and controlled a patchwork of groups some of which allied themselves with the Spanish when they had the chance. It seems the lesson here is that all cultures that advance use their strength to crush those that have not.

How heartening.

Who is coming for us?

The 1990 Rockquest

2008-08-24T08:00:00.004+12:00

Corran wanted to enter a band in the Rockquest. In 1990 the Rockquest was called the CocaCola Rockquest and it was in its third year. I'm not really sure why Corran believed it was possible for us to do this because about half the band had little to no experience of singing or playing their designated instrument. The other flaw in the plan was that Corran really could play his instrument and had very high expectations of us.

I can vividly remember the exact spot at Kapiti College where we came up with the breathtakingly silly name of our band. The others were wandering along playing with words that would go with touch when I suggested perverted. Someone else switched touch to thrust and the "magic" happened. They were the adjective and noun that had always wanted to be together. Perverted Thrust. The name was sealed when Corran performed a series of demonstrations of what a Perverted Thrust might look like. You have to remember that this was a time when The Young Ones was a popular comedy show. Oh, and we were a bunch of 17 year old guys.

Track Six - Welcome to the Jungle

2008-08-18T08:43:00.012+12:00

ONE
My best friend from fifth form on was Corran McHugh. He taught me how to play my first song on the guitar: Highway to Hell. He was a very good guitarist. He listened to a lot of heavy metal: Iron Maiden, AC/DC, WASP, Man O' War... it's sort of an endless list of hair and guitar shredding. He was into the heavy metal where they didn't do sit down acoustic ballads and their hair was long but it was lank. Before Def Leppard were absurd they released quite a decent album called Pyromania. Before Guns 'n' Roses became an overnight sensation their album Appetite for Destruction spent years(?) building up a cult following. Corran introduced me to both. Hearing Welcome to Jungle for the first time introduced me to a new feeling with music: excitement and fear.

TWO
I was not bad at school. I did not smoke, I did not wag, I did my school work, was civil to my teachers and got good marks without making too much effort. There ain't much darkness in the first five tracks on this mix tape. It's a sound track of light and melody and bopping about. We're about to enter a dark musical period that's about hardness and anger. The other thing rock music does. Young men (or should that be old children?) are attracted to it for some reason.

Welcome to the Jungle is Guns 'n' Roses best song. A lot of their other songs are good but unoriginal. Sweet Child O' Mine is a cracking good rock ballad (where do we go now?) but it's just a rock ballad, and songs like Paradise City are stadium wank songs that are just silly. Guns 'n' Roses were best when they were fast and nasty. Most of Appetite for Destruction is fast and nasty. They had no class, and they were incredibly juvenile. Here's the last line from their liner notes:

..and all those who taught us hard lessons by attempted financial sodomy, the teachers, preachers, cops and elders who never believed...

Believed in what? A bunch of hairy alcoholics playing music about having sex and taking drugs? And before we move on... could there be a better guitar-as-penis-fantasy photo than this one of Slash? I could say all kinds of things about this photo, but I think the photo really says it all.

THREE
The problem with me being interested in the devil's music is that I looked like this. It was never going to fly in the end. The end, as it turned out was four years away, about the end of my first year at university.

This period is an interesting one because I never listen to any of this music anymore. The only band I can still tolerate is Bon Scott's AC/DC. They were pretty catchy and had a sense of humour. The rest of them were just dreadful.

Guns 'n' Roses

"I'd just like to say that I have a personal disgust for small dogs, like poodles." (Axl)

"I hate to take showers! Guitarists don't like showers 'cause we like the grease to build up on our fingers." (Izzy)

"I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it." (Axl - Take me down to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty - Rose.)

I don't have to go down to the Comedy Shop to qet a joke. I can find that here." (Slash)

Really, it was only a matter of time before Axl started wearing bicycle shorts and writing ten minute ballads about rain.

Dead Poets

2008-08-17T08:10:00.004+12:00

One: I dislike being told something I like is dumb. I don't mind if people don't like what I like, or are prepared to argue about the merits of something, but I hate the snobby sneer of superiority: "Oh, you like that?" I have a very strong sense of myself so I know that if I like something then I REALLY like it, it hits some chord in me and makes it ring. It is impossible to have bad taste about things that mean a lot to you personally. To thine own self be true.

Two: Dead Poets Society. Love it. It was a big hit and then at some point everyone seems to have turned on it. People say its manipulative. I've never understood this criticism of a piece of art. Art is manipulative. (I've just noticed that the word manipulative sounds a little bit sexy if you drawl your way through the second half... maybe because the lips go into the shape of a kiss when you start out on the "pu" sound.)

Three: I think part of being a teacher is being inspiring. There are two scenes that inspire me to teach better in this movie. The first is when he has the students read out what the definition of good poetry is and then gets them to tear it out of their books. The second, and far more powerful, is the scene we are now supposed to sneer at: the carpe diem scene. I shamelessly ripped off part of this scene in my class the other day. "In 3,000 years when they clear the mud off Wellington what will they find of us?" My Year 9s looked back at me blankly. "Tyler's rugby cup? Emily's favourite book? We are food for worms..." There is a real power in that scene - it comes out of looking at those photos. How mighty and confident those young men look. How time cuts us down to size. Resist, laugh, sing, be different, be happy - sometimes I want to shake all of my students until they agree.

Four: And it captures the way that good teachers are often odd people. When we see the teacher alone in his room we realise that teaching really is his life, and he is a bit odd, and a lot of things have happened to him.

Five: And, finally, it gets the white heat of youth. That can lead to wonderful things and terrible things. The final twist of feeling sympathy for the father when he discovers the body... how awful, I can't imagine anything more awful than that, and you realise that the father loves, LOVES, his son more than anything. How perverse love can be. The great creater, and the great destroyer of things.

Mr. Cooke

2008-08-14T22:15:00.003+12:00

I bought a best of Sam Cooke on Sunday. Quite a few years ago I heard a radio documentary about him on National. Actually, the first Sam Cooke song I heard was Chain gang but it was a cover by a New York reggae guy called Shinehead. I can remember seeing the video on Radio With Pictures and the chorus getting stuck in my head.

Probably my other favourite song by him is Cupid. I love singing that chorus to myself in the shower and imagining I have a voice as sweet as his (sweet, but with a little bit of rough in it).

The song I've been listening to over and over though is A Change is Gonna Come. Everything about the music in this song should make me hate it. Infact, when you hear the opening it almost sounds like Mantovani - all sugary strings and flourish - but it settles straight away to the steady pulse of the bass and the wonderful opening lines:

I was born by the river

In a little tent

Oh, and like the river

I've been running ever since

It's been a long time coming

But a change is gonna come, oh yes it will

And then the lyrics deepen. How hard it is to hear a man, a religious man, say these lines, and know that by the time the song was released he was already dead:

It's been too hard living

But I'm afraid to die

Cause I don't know what's out there

Beyond the sky

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17267529

I don't believe in God myself, but I do believe that people are capable of extraordinary things, and that they can be carried there by inspiration. Without inspiration I have no poetry and no songs, my tongue is dumb and my heart is dull - with it I can sing my little songs. Sam was filled up when he wrote this song; it may have been God, it may have been anger; it may have been love, but he was filled up. We may be food for worms my friends but we can pull beauty out of the wreckage.

We are having a short break

2008-08-11T16:19:00.003+12:00

For the reasons stated below:

"I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all
my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me
than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving
how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zEVZGuU3BU

Track Five - You Give Love a Bad Name

2008-08-07T21:45:00.006+12:00

ONE

I bought my first guitar off Paul Brown. Paul Brown is such an amazingly dull name that we used to joke we would get T-shirts made saying: "I know Paul Brown".

I think Paul must have joined my class about halfway through fifth form. Suddenly there was a weedy alabaster Brit sitting next to me in Social Studies. He seemed friendly. He was always talking to me and laughing. For two weeks I honestly had absolutely no idea what he was saying. I took smile and nod to new levels. After a fortnight some part of my brain must have adjusted and I could miraculously understand him. We were great mates for the rest of secondary school. Every mufti day he would show up like he was dressed for a tennis match; all in white. I asked him why. He told me that it made him look tanned.

Paul Brown used to listen to a lot of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. This means that he had taste. I was still labouring under the impression that bands like Bon Jovi were hard rock.

TWO

There was a very odd trend in the 80's for "hard rock" bands to become known for their solitary lovey-dovey acoustic ballad: Poison - Every Rose Has its Thorn, Extreme - More than Words, Mr. Big - To Be With You. I think it was Mr. Big that finally annoyed me sufficiently to break away from 80's hard rock hair bands and start listening to actual hard rock. I still have a soft spot for Bon Jovi though. I can remember singing You Give Love a Bad Name at the top of my lungs with two friends outside the gym at Kapiti College. I think the trick to Bon Jovi was that they didn't take themselves too seriously (this photo aside). Very important to have a sense of humour if you're going to dress like this.

THREE

Or this. Here I am all dressed up (?) to see Nureyev perform at the Wellington Festival of the Arts. There aren't going to be anymore hair shots in this genre so savour it. Out with the permed mullet, out with the snare drum, out with Bon Jovi - here come the bad boys of the 80s.

Bang bang

2008-08-07T15:20:00.002+12:00

Why did I dress like a builder when I was thirteen?

I'm almost smiling in this photo. It's Christmas and I got a snare drum. I thought I was going to be a drummer. Turns out I was wrong.

We're about to enter a period of real men and rock'n'roll. It's pretty grim. Just to recap the playlist so far:

A-ha - Take On Me
Prince - Let's Go Crazy
Wham! - Club Tropicana
Frankie Goes to Hollywood - The Power of Love

There were a lot of other bands of course, but let's move on.

Follow the leader

2008-08-06T22:09:00.004+12:00

Because my mother feared (correctly) that I would be savaged if I played rugby she got me into soccer at an early age. This was in the era in New Zealand when soccer was looked on as very suspect. If you were normal you played rugby, so if you weren't playing rugby there must be something wrong with you. I was a dogged, determined character on the soccer field, and as I previously mentioned I had a relentlessly determined quality. One day to my great surprise the coach of my team called up and told my mother that he wanted to make me the captain of the team. I was a little bit flattered, and very surprised. My mother advised me to accept, because if I didn't I would regret it. I declined. I suppose the fact that I am writing this now shows that I did come to regret it although it really made little difference to my life in the end.

When I was in Japan I became the Head Teacher in the South Osaka area. There were about 30 schools in that area probably employing about 200 teachers. I trained the new teachers, observed the established ones and gave them feedback, "managed" the naughty teachers, and ran the professional development programme (oh, and taught a full load of lessons... it was a very cheap company). It was extremely fulfilling. I even read books about professional development in my own time, for pleasure.

In the library today I saw that one of my Year 13 students was reading a book about how to become a leader. I think this is a bit like reading a book about how to be charismatic. Somehow I don't think this stuff comes out of a book. I think people have become a bit silly about leadership. I would say that you need to be charismatic and you need to lead (while you listen). A teacher is a leader. It's about what you make other people feel: valued, respected, inspired, loyal - that kind of stuff. When push came to shove the British Empire needed Winston Churchill. When Martin Luther King was shot, America needed Bobby Kennedy to tell them what it meant. They didn't want to break into groups and write things on pieces of paper and feedback to the sodding group.

Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters

Track Four - The Power of Love

2008-08-04T19:53:00.007+12:00

UNREQUITED LOVE - ONE

I didn't have a girlfriend at school. I was what is called painfully shy. The first girl I was crazy about was called Kara (middle row, second girl in from the teacher). She was in my fifth form class. I thought she was terrific. Of course I thought she was good looking, but what I really loved about her was her... sense of humour. We passed notes to each other in class. I still have those notes somewhere. They were long cherished tokens. They are absolute drivel, and looking back I may have been over-estimating her sense of humour, but then again I was only 14.

TWO

I was obsessed with this album. Probably my favourite song was Two Tribes, but I'm going to put The Power of Love on the mix tape because my theme is unrequited love. For a long time this is what I thought the lyrics of a love song should be. I can still sing the whole thing with all the inflections. As usual with these songs it was the bridge that I was hanging out for:

Envy will hurt itself / Let yourself be beautiful / Sparkling love, flowers / And pearls and pretty girls / Love is like an energy / Rushin' rushin' inside of me

Let yourself be beautiful. Swoon. "Pretty girls" is odd, but "love is like an energy, rushin', rushin' inside of me". That sounded right when I was 14 and thought it was love rushin' inside of me (now I know it was hormones - a worse lyric, but more accurate).

THREE

As for Kara. I met her last year at the end of year Telecom party. I did not expect her to look like a woman and work for Telecom. She did not expect me to look like a man and still be at school. When are you going to grow up?

Track Three - Club Tropicana

2008-08-03T20:29:00.006+12:00

ONE
I have included this photo only because of the jersey. In 1986 in Kapiti this was cutting edge fashion (the shorts less so). I wanted to stand out. I had a friend that admired this jersey. He asked for the pattern. I got it from my grandmother. He gave it to his grandmother who promptly returned it. She refused to knit him the jersey because the model on the pattern packet was a woman. This jersey says many things but I don't think it says "GAY" particularly.

Mind you, it was a confusing time to be growing up for a young man. Most of the men in the bands that I admired had spent a lot of time on their hair and, perhaps more alarmingly, their make up.

TWO

There's no point in pretending I was cool or anything at school. I liked Wham! What's not to like? They wrote catchy songs that are still great to sing along to at parties.

Club Tropicana drinks are free...

All that's missing is the sea

But you can still sun tan

George Michael is a very good singer. One of those white British boys who love black r'n'b music. I love how he completely side-stepped everyone when he went solo and wrote a song so cool (Faith) that not even his biggest critics could whinge.

THREE

But if you grow up admiring bands and singers like this it can lead to decisions like the one on the right.

I can remember going to the hairdresser and getting this perm. It was on the second floor of Coastlands. Getting a perm takes a long time (not many guys know this), and is pretty expensive. You also have to do a lot of sitting around.

Funny thing is that when I walked around with this "do" on my head nobody mocked me (to my face), or laughed at me (to my face). Actually quite a few girls gave me compliments. I find this quite surprising. I'm pretty sure in stories like this one I'm supposed to get picked on.

Although I loved bands like Wham! and Duran and Duran I never wanted to be them. It was a different kind of thing I wanted.

Give us a smile champ

2008-08-03T14:24:00.006+12:00

The Raumati Hearts Soccer Club really splashed out on this cup: Best Under 14 Player, 1986.

Keeping things in perspective our team came bottom of the bottom league. I was a defender. I had a lot to do. Our biggest losing margin was 15-0. I am very stubborn when I play sport. Even when we were down 15-o I refused to give up. I was the only player on our team still moving. The other ten were sidling to the sidelines and pretending to be spectators. I single-handedly saved us the margin 20-0.

So what? I don't know. Who cares what some 13 year old did one Saturday morning in 1986 on some muddy, claggy field at Queen Elizabeth Park? Nobody. Except me. I care. I'm still proud of myself. Stuff all the jerks who laughed us off the ground, and tossed mud at us, and kicked us in the shins.

There's some larger metaphor in here somewhere. I'll leave you to decide if it is comic or tragic.

Mix Tape: Volume Two

2008-08-03T11:25:00.006+12:00

ONE

The only thing that a tape is still good for. Swapping mix tapes used to be a sign of love (generally unrequited) in the 80's. A guy could give another guy a mix tape, but it was bit, well, "funny".

I was thinking: what if you had to get all the music that mattered throughout your entire life onto one 60 minute mix tape. It would be like a 60 minute autobiography.

Unfortunately my ego is too big to get my short life on one sixty minute tape. This is Volume Two of my mix tape. Volume One must be 1973-1985. Volume Two is 1986-1997.

TWO
1986 starts here. I'm probably twelve in this photo. I went to Scots College for Primary and Intermediate (another story), and then we moved out to the coast and I started Secondary at Kapiti College. The first few days at a new school in a new place are friendless. The guy standing next to me in this photo was probably the first guy I talked to at this school. We didn't become friends as it turned out. He could perform simple songs by burping. It was impressive and repulsive. I wonder if he has hung onto this skill. Maybe his wife gets him to do it at parties.

I quite fancied the girl sitting in front of me. She was very good at art. I also took art but was... let's say "tolerated" by my art teacher. At either end of the back row are two people who would become friends (actually the guy on the back right is the bass player in our band).

Twenty-two years on.

THREE
Secondary school is where you begin to emerge out of the shadows of your parents and begin the messy business of trying to figure out who you are. This process doesn't really end I suspect. Funnily enough, for me anyway, once I'd spent twenty years trying to find out who I was I've ended up realising it might have something to do with my family and the place where I started.

There's a lot ahead of this twelve year old, and all the kids in this picture. The following pictures will prove that:

it can take a long time to find the right pair of glasses
some people do so many bad things with their hair that they deserve to have it taken off them
it's hard for an adolescent boy to smile or dress themselves

Four Things - Four

2008-08-02T16:21:00.003+12:00

"He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them."

I remember this anger. It still comes on me sometimes. It comes on me in the middle of advertising on television, it comes on me in the classroom. But the anger turns into sitting on the couch, and a failure even to toss change to the poor.

In Vietnam a little boy followed me around offering to polish my shoes. He wanted money, but he disguised it as an offer to polish shoes. He wouldn't stop following me around. I hid in shops and he would wait for me to come out. I was shopping. He was begging.

He still follows me around.

Four Things - Three

2008-08-02T16:03:00.004+12:00

They're waking up on Kenywn Terrace

Cigarettes and leopard print dressing gowns

We have no class, but

The rich are fucking assholes

Go to look at the trees on Saturday

They've lost all their leaves

But the flowers are as beautiful

As they seem

Four Things - Two

2008-08-02T15:54:00.003+12:00

Duck, Death and the Tulip.

“Who are you? Why are you creeping along behind me?”

“Good. You’ve finally noticed me,” said Death.“I am Death.”

Duck was scared stiff. You could hardly blame her for that.

I read this picture book in the school library on Thursday. It's the best thing I've read in awhile. Very moving. A children's book about death. It's about 100x better than that sounds.

I was in the library because some of the year nines in my form class have been making a nuisance of themselves in the library. One of them saw me reading the book. He ran around the library telling everyone I was reading a picture book (before he was thrown out for running around the library).

Year nine boys (on the whole) have not yet noticed death.

Four Things - One

2008-08-02T15:28:00.004+12:00

He writes well:

You used to get it in your fishnets / Now you only get it in your night dress / Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness / Landed in a very common crisis / Everything's in order in a black hole / Nothing seems as pretty as the past though / That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco / Remember when he used to be a rascal?

No, I don't, but I remember when I used to want to be a rascal. Does that count?

Flicking through a little book of sex tips / Remember when the boys were all electric? / Now when she tells she's gonna get it / I'm guessing that she'd rather just forget it

He's tender and funny, and tends to see things from the woman's point of view. From the woman's point of view I think some men are charming and most men are laughable. It's the charming ones you have to look out for.

She walked away, her shoes were untied, / And the eyes were all red, / You could see that we've cried, and I watched and I waited, / 'Till she was inside, forcing a smile and waving goodbye. / Curiousity becomes a heavy load, / Too heavy to hold, too heavy to hold. / Will force you to be cold. / And do me a favour, and ask if you need some help! / She said, do me a favour and stop flattering yourself! / How to tear apart the ties that bind, perhaps fuck off, might be too kind, / Perhaps fuck off, might be too kind.

The British are unimpressed. They see through you. The good ones see through themselves as well.

I knew before the invitation that there was this ploy, / Oh but she carried on suggestin, a struggle to refuse, / She said "its the red wine this time, but that is no excuse"

In the meantime

2008-07-31T16:04:00.002+12:00

I found out that my friends' entry in the 48 Hour Film Festival is on Youtube. If you look it up on Youtube under Truth On Your Face - 48 Hour Film Competition then you can see it. I play the father of a mormon (plausible?). I modelled my performance on Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Track Two - Let's Go Crazy

2008-07-28T21:26:00.003+12:00

I won't dwell on this track, because I've already written about Prince. Previously I said:

I think what we’re really supposed to take from the song is this: let's have a party.

And then there’s the end of the song. The end fits with the beginning. We have had the stately start, been lifted up by the song sermon, and now we get the big finale (as in a black gospel church finale, not a hand-around-the-tea-and-scones white-church finale). When that guitar lifts out of all the synthesized pomposity and scorches alone, slightly breaking up – oh, man! It had more impact for me back in 1984 because playing guitar that fast seemed impossible, like we had entered another realm, like Prince had really leaped beyond the song and gone to, well, the afterworld.

Later on, sitting in various bedrooms around my crummy hometown with heavy metal albums and guys with guitars replaying solos note perfectly, I realised that even though it seems like you want more of that kind of Let’s Go Crazy guitar solo you don’t… less really is more.

I bought a lot of Prince albums. I even had his first two albums which were pretty poor (although the original Nothing Compares 2 U is on the second album I think). I still have 1999, Sign O' the Times, Under the Cherry Moon and Around the World. He really was amazingly good in the 80's. It still sort of amazes me that Madonna is the one who has survived - I would have backed Prince first, and Michael Jackson second.

What really attracted me to Prince (and the next "artist" on the mix tape) was his flamboyance, his ability to create a total fantasy world that included music, and clothes, and dancing and a persona. When I entered the album Purple Rain I wasn't just listening to music I was doing that magical thing called ESCAPE.

Track One - Take On Me

2008-07-27T15:24:00.005+12:00

The first three tapes I "bought" (probably my mother bought them for me) were:

A-ha - Hunting High and Low
Elton John - Too Low for Zero, and
Sting - Dream of the Blue Turtles

They were bought at a electronics shop that doubled as a LP and cassette store in the Paraparaumu shops. A rotund man with little hair and a rather dull white shirt and brown pants sold them to us. My evaluation of these three tapes was as follows:

Sting - The singles were good but the other tracks were a bit "difficult"
Elton John - Naff
A-ha - Wonderful!

A great many girls at my high school wore a little collection of leather wristbands in honour of the frankly pretty dishy Morton Harkett. Nowadays Take On Me is probably considered one of the signature tunes of the 80s. Curiously it had to be released about three times before it became a hit. The third time it had the still "nifty" animated video attached to it.

The lyrics are sweet:

We're talking away / I don't know what / I'm to say I'll say it anyway / Today's another day to find you / Shying away / I'll be coming for your love, OK?

I always liked the delivery of the line: Slowly learning that life is ok. Although I was around that time slowly learning the opposite, Morton sounded convincing. It's a song that still appeals to my rather naive and romantic ideas about love. It's a song with an endearing shyness.

You're all the things I've got toremember.

Sonnet 130

2008-07-23T12:37:00.005+12:00

When I was at school Samantha Fox had a hit called Touch Me. Sam Fox was a British page three girl with large breasts. At the end of the song she made a lot of moaning and groaning noises presumably suggesting sex, although she may have just been having a nice ice cream. She was supposed to be every teenage boy's fantasy of a perfect woman. I say supposed to be because she really didn't do much for me. In fact I always thought her large breasts made her look a bit uncomfortable (or maybe it was that all her tops were too tight). The best thing about the Sam Fox story is that I believe she is now a happily married lesbian.

At the time Sam Fox posed a problem for me. I knew that I was supposed to fancy her but I didn't so I had to fake it. If I had been insecure (instead of being lumpish and unthinking) I might have worried about my sexuality. On the other hand I did fancy girls, just not the girls I was supposed to fancy. I wrote love poems for these girls (of course I never showed anyone them). These poems were filled with lies. I can't remember an example so I'll make one up:

I love you, you're so perfect...

Your eyes are like pools

This kind of poetry is like make-up: it conceals the blemishes that make people really beautiful.

A body is a map of a life, and on it are marks of pain, of laughter, of age. The feet and hands have a roughness; the neck and inner arm are soft, pale. Real love poetry is specific and honest. It tells us not about what somebody should look like, but about who they really are.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

I don't know if Sonnet 130 is honest or not. I don't know if it describes a real woman, but it certainly has the feeling of truth. It's a neat trick Shakespeare pulls because he actually describes this woman by saying what she isn't.

She isn't Sam Fox.

Sonnets

2008-07-21T21:57:00.003+12:00

In my first year at University I took English Literature. I was young, hairy and sulky. My tutorial was with half a dozen other students in a small meeting room, and it was held after five o’clock. I remember that it was usually dark outside when we finished (I suppose that memory is from winter).

At the first tutorial the tutor asked us each to introduce ourselves and say an object that we thought represented us. I said:

“I am John-Paul and I am a stone.”

I was thinking of a smooth, round rock at the bottom of a stream. The tutor may have been thinking of her gravel driveway though, because she didn’t seem impressed.

Our first essay had to be about a short poem. I chose Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare. I chose it because I thought it was very beautiful. This is actually a good reason to choose a poem, but at the time I thought you needed more profound reasons.

My essay was quite poor. I rambled. Nowadays I might say something like:

Sonnet 18 is beautiful because it is romantic. Most of Shakespeare’s other sonnets are not romantic.

Actually I would probably say: go and read the damn poem.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

I believe in this idea that art can make “things” immortal or, if not immortal, at least it can make them far outlive their brief natural existence. When I write a poem for someone or play them a song I am attracted to two things in that act. Firstly, that the moment of the performance is so fleeting and ephemeral, and secondly, that the words on the page make that same moment enduring. In itself that double act is beautiful.

Personal Times

2008-07-20T11:31:00.004+12:00

It was pretty hard coming back to be honest.

I wrote a song for the first time in over a year yesterday. It was inspired by a few things: a book someone told me was their favourite, being unsettled and feeling up in the air.

School tomorrow.

The heart is
lonely, hunted
and blue.

Gifu

2008-07-20T11:22:00.004+12:00

At the high school in Gifu we were greeted by an all girl brass band in slippers. They played "Tequila" with impressive skill.

We sang our national anthem with tolerable success.

Our homestay family had a fully automated toilet. You walked in and the lights came on and the toilet seat raised itself expectantly. Once you finished, the act of standing up would flush the toilet and lower the seat. The tap in the sink came on automatically.

The toilet brush holder said: Personal Times.

Pontocho

2008-07-20T11:15:00.003+12:00

I used to visit Kyoto a lot.

There are parts of that city which are beautiful at night. We walked along the river where the waxy white flowers let out their rich sweet scent. Along the banks restaurants lit up and people gathered: smoking, talking.

We walked down Pontocho.

Alleyways and lanterns. Behind closed doors the sound of glasses chinking, the sound of laughter and singing.

Asakusa

2008-07-20T10:59:00.003+12:00

Eye candy. Shopping in Japan is a pleasure for the eyes.

In the shopping street in front of Asukusa Temple there are a hundred tiny shops: stores with glass cases filled with the porcelain high-fiving cats; glass cases full of the beautiful silk bags that the women carry with their kimono; shops full of food - rice crackers in boxes wrapped in highly patterned paper. Souvenirs and junk, junk and comedy moustaches, wigs and children's ninja sets.

Afterwards we wash our hands. We walk up the shallow steps and into the temple. Inside they are throwing coins into God's collection box and praying.

Harajuku

2008-07-20T10:44:00.007+12:00

We go to Harajuku. The bridge where the freaks go to be watched by tourists. They gather like flocks of birds, their plummage is magnificent, they twitter and preen in groups and then settle on the ground. Packs of photographers gather about them taking photos, not going too close, hoping not to disturb the quarry.

In the park the rock'n'rollers do the twist. The men dress like Elvis in his comeback year: sexy black leather and hips, a litre of gel pointing their hair in gravity defying directions.

Along the paths around the edge of the park are bands all in a line. Some play with ferocity and desperation; some play to amuse. It's wonderful to be young. It's wonderful all this sensation, this assault, this shot through the heart. As I stand there and watch a band play, and the lines of girls jumping up and down, and our students standing there sort of stunned sort of delighted, I think: "God New Zealand is dull".

Chotto matte

2008-07-03T08:00:00.002+12:00

I'm going to Japan.

I'll be back in two weeks.

In Search of Lost Time

2008-06-29T11:15:00.006+12:00

I have read the beginning of Proust's book about five times and really enjoyed it although I think it would be fair to say that it is slow moving. The normal translation of the title in English is: Remembrance of Things Past. This, it turns out, is a pretty inaccurate translation but is rather beautiful. The translation I now have has given a more faithful version of the title: In Search of Lost Time. I actually prefer this title. It suits the theme of the book much better, it's nearer my own heart as a concern, and it has it's own beauty.

I have done two strands of autobiography before on this blog: (a) Mum's records, and (b) Dance. It's sort of my thing really. If I were to start a third I think I would start it here, with this photo of my Gran.

Further paper folding

2008-06-28T15:12:00.005+12:00

On my last post I described a couple of frames from a movie called Hiroshima Mon Amour. I won't describe them again because all you have to do is scroll down slightly. While I was looking for these scenes on the internet so I could put them on my blog I came across another blog called 1000 of things. I rather liked it because of the post about things that make life worth living, and because I liked a lot of the books and movies listed on the author's profile (I think there are two authors, but Holly is the one I'm talking about).

Anyway, a few hours passed, I did some vacuuming and some dusting and then I went back to read 1000 of things again. There it was on the post from 8 June, 2008. The exact images I had described. And loathing, and misanthropy, and the joy of dance.

Shit life can be depressing. Hang in there Holly.

Folding paper

2008-06-28T12:59:00.006+12:00

Here's an old trick that story tellers like to do. You draw a line across a piece of paper. On one end you write "born" and on the other end you write "died". Then you fold the paper in half and... voila! Birth and death touch each other and are handily (tear-jerkingly) juxtaposed. Countless movies start with a death scene and then jump backwards.

For me though, it's how this trick can work in day to day life that is startling and moving. Proust talked about it at the start of his enormous book I've read the start of five times: he takes a little tea with a biscuit and this particular taste vividly and suddenly brings back his childhood at Combray.

The best movie I have seen that catches this way the mind can suddenly fold time is Hiroshima Mon Amour.

A woman is standing by the side of a bed looking down at her lover. Her lover is lying face down, asleep, with one arm outstretched across the sheets. His hand twitches, we see her seeing this movement, and there is suddenly a jump cut to another man's hand, giving the same twitch, but lying on some cobbles. As fast as it has flashed before us the film returns to the woman looking down at the bed.

Richard's last comment reminded me of something my mother said a couple of weeks ago. She came into the bathroom while I was bathing Eleanor and said how much Eleanor looked like me when I had been her age.

Soon I am going back to Japan. I have not been there for five years and a lot of me is tied up in that place. I think it will be a very intense experience, and time and memory will be very fragile things.

The Years Passed Swiftly

2008-06-28T07:51:00.003+12:00

Skylarks trilled over the quiet town of Simbirsk on the Volga, where the river makes a sharp bend. The river had just cleared of ice. The streets and gardens were filled with the chirping of birds and the birches swayed in the wind. There was the joy of spring in the air. There was great rejoicing in the Ulyanov home that day. The sun poured in through the windows, and the whistles of the river boats were clearly heard, for the house overlooked the Volga. As the mother bent over her newborn son’s cradle she wondered, “What will you be when you grow up? What does life hold in store for you?”

This was on April 22, 1870. Vladimir Ulyanov, the child who was born in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga that day, grew up to be the great Lenin.

The years passed swiftly. Volodya was now eight.

V.I. Lenin - The Story of His Life

Maria Prilezhayeva

First published in Russian in 1973

The years passed swiftly? No kidding. If we carry on at this rate Lenin will be dead by the end of page two.

Let's try me:

John-Paul was born. The years passed swiftly. He was now almost four. He was standing around thinking:

Run, run, the house is dark and cool, here is the outside, the sun, the heat, the sound of the sea over the dunes. Wheelbarrow. Put the ball in the barrow. Put the blocks in the barrow. Put the - run, run. There is a bird wheeling in the sky, there is a cloud. He says my name. There he is standing by the bush with the red flowers that look like toffee apple lips, there he is with the camera. He smiles and puts the camera to his eye, the bird calls out somewhere above the waves. That might be the click and squirk of mum cleaning the dishes through the white window, that shadow is my dad pushing the button on the camera.

Run, run.

An Unfinished Autobiography

2008-06-26T21:20:00.003+12:00

In view of the fact that there is much friction over Lenin among the soldiers of the battery, please let us have the earliest possible reply. What is his origin? Where had he been? If he had been in exile, what for? How did he return to Russia and what is he doing at present, that is, are his acts doing us good or harm?

Letter of the soldiers’ committee of the 8th Horse Artillery Battery (army in the field) sent to the Petrograd Soviet. April 24 (May 7), 1917.

Lenin began a reply:

I reply to all these questions, except the last one, because it is for you to judge whether or not my activity is doing you any good. My name is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. I was born in Simbirsk on April 10, 1870. In the spring of 1887, my elder brother Alexander was executed by Alexander III for an attempt on his life (March 1, 1887). In December 1887, I was arrested for the first time and expelled from Kazan University for students’ disturbances; I was then banished from Kazan. In December 1895, I was arrested for the second time for Social-Democratic propaganda among the workers of St. Petersburg....

So, key dates: 1870, 1887, 1895. Following the same principles my own autobiography would read:

My name is John-Paul Marshall Powley. I was born in Paraparaumu on 9 March, 1973. In the Spring of 1990 I had glandular fever and wasn't going to school for my last term in seventh form. In December 1998 I was spending Christmas in London after teaching in Japan for seven months.

Pretty good. I don't think you need to add to this in any way.

Lenin

2008-06-26T20:12:00.004+12:00

I looked at these two pictures for awhile today. I like them both, although the one in the wheelchair is my favourite.

Who was he? What was it like to spend an hour with Lenin?

The picture of him in full flight is inspiring, but it is a public photo. Even if he wasn't aware that he was being photographed he was in front of an audience and "on". The second photo seems quite candid although it is part of a series of photos that show he was aware of being photographed. Lenin died soon after this photo in the wheelchair.

What was it like to stand in the streets and hear Lenin speak without any of the cynicism or knowingness we have about Communism today. Trotsky wrote down his impressions:

When I try mentally with fresh eye and fresh ear to see and hear Lenin on the platform, as I did the first time, I see a strong and supple figure of medium height, and hear a smooth, rapid, uninterrupted voice, rather striking, almost without pauses, and at first without special emphasis.

Perhaps the other photo took place around this time:

That evening Nadezhda Konstantinovna read aloud to Vladimir Ilyich. As soon as he had shown improvement she had begun reading aloud each day from the newspaper Pravda. She was now reading him a short story by Jack London. Vladimir Ilyich sat in an armchair gazing out of the window thoughtfully. The old trees of the park stood deep in snow. The windowpanes were frosted over with weird leaves of ice, magical flowers and ferns that brought back memories of his childhood.

I think when we're gone that might be it - the dead can never be known again. Sometimes you read in a biography that someone was handsome or beautiful but when you see an old photo you think: "Beautiful? Her?" Photos strip us of life. Ordinary people stuck and mounted on the pin of photography can be quite dazzling in life when their features are full of animation and charm.

It is the job of the historian to make the dead seem alive. This is magic, this is poetry, this is lies. I would like to walk with Lenin for awhile.

The News

2008-06-26T19:33:00.004+12:00

The following things have been annoying me:

The main thing that pisses me off about John Key's comment ("We're not a country that's come about as a result of civil war or where there's been a lot of fighting internally, we're, we're a country which peacefully came together" ) is that the media have said that it is an insult to Maori. They have therefore interviewed a lot of Maori who have expressed views that show they are insulted. The problem is that I think Pakeha should be insulted too, and reporting it as an insult only to Maori is, well, racist.
The Governor General recently replaced his old flag (adopted in 1937) with a new one because: "it was considered that the old flag lacked distinctive New Zealand elements and reflected an era before New Zealand became a sovereign and independent nation." Firstly: where the frig is our sense of history? Who cares if the old flag was spack - nobody even knows what the governor general's flag looks like anyway, and it's been around for seventy years. Secondly: to represent modern New Zealand we get - sheep, hay, hammers and some boats. Gee, what an awesome job of taking our identity into the 21st century.
People whinging about Treaty settlements. This is the only way forward for New Zealand where we can hold our heads up. Affirmative action programmes that give scholarships or benefits to people based on race don't seem particularly effective for whatever reason. Treaty settlements allow past wrongs to be recognised and compensation to take a form that is specific to iwi, focuses on their land and gives them an iwi-wide basis to draw income and invest for the future. In a hundred years these settlements will be the reason New Zealand is a harmonious country.

Notes on Camp

2008-06-22T07:46:00.005+12:00

I also watch Project Runway. Recently I discovered a website called Project Rungay which offers a gay, bitchy, blow-by-blow commentary on each episode. One of the designers on the show likes to dress up in his own creations.

Which leads me back to Ms. Sontag. I'm reading an essay she wrote called Notes on Camp. It's her greatest hit according to a poll of top 100 pieces of American journalism (I think it's number 74 or something).

Point One for Sontag: "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation."

These pictures would be a case in point. They certainly aren't beautiful... artifical and stylised? Just a touch.

Inevitably there are a lot of Oscar Wilde quotes: To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. That kind of thing. I realised a few years ago that there is a trick to Oscar Wilde aphorisms and they're quite easy to make up. Let's make one for Richard. No wonder Mozart died young. It's such hard work to maintain an air of casual brilliance.

Nice!

2008-06-21T07:34:00.002+12:00

Life is grand. Honestly, things like this really cheer me up.

The Ministry of Education is defending printing badges to promote its new Maori education strategy, a move derided by some principals as gimmicky and infantile.
Principals have complained about the badges, which sport phrases such as "I love Maori success" and "Wassup!". The total cost for the information mailout was $230,000, Radio New Zealand reported.

It such an uptight, protestant, New Zealand thing to mention the cost of everything.

Ministry deputy secretary for Maori, Apryll Parata, said she was disappointed in the principals' criticisms. The badges had been designed to prompt discussion and engagement between teachers and students, using language young people used.

I wore my badge all day. It definitely prompted discussion and engagement between teachers and students. Here are some examples:

You look so gay wearing that badge Mister.
Are those the dumb badges in the news?
That's f**king stupid.

"And on the badges it simply says things like I love Maori success. If that's considered gimmicky then I think we've got bigger problems than we may have thought in education," Ms Parata said. She said if students found the language on the badges patronising, that was a discussion worth having in the classroom.

Awesome defence by Ms. Parata: let's slag of education. Always encouraging when members of the Ministry of Education do that. Considered gimicky? Isn't it a gimick? I mean isn't that the purpose of the badges?

As for the discussion about why I'm patronising the students, I think I'll skip it.

Looking forward to phase two badges: "Pakeha success is ok, too", "I love Chinese food", "The MOE is dumb"

A pointless interlude

2008-06-18T20:48:00.005+12:00

The biggest selling album of all time.

Whenever I look at the album sleeve I think of a 19 year old boy's bedroom. There is a leopard skin duvet cover, there are pictures on the walls of mysterious women smoking cigarettes, there is some kind of fashion trend hanging over the chair: fedora? trench coat? white suit?

The first track on this album actually features the lyrics: "you're a vegetable/you're a buffet/people dine off you". Nice.

Beat It is great. Billie Jean is fantastic. His best song really, and he did write some good songs. The less said about the duet with Paul McCartney the better.

Michael's ok.

Affirmative Action

2008-06-18T20:29:00.005+12:00

Do I believe in things or am I a weather vane? I walk around believing things but when my views are put under the blow torch I find it hard to really state rationally why I think that I am right. Why do I think that the Waitangi Tribunal is doing a good job, and that historical greivances should be settled?

One view of affirmative action is that it perpetuates the very things it is attempting to redress. The usual example is the average brown kid who gets a scholarship to university ahead of the better than average white kid. This is racist.

The opposite view is summarised by Aristotle: "There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals." When there are groups in a society that have been disadvantaged through deliberate historical discrimination then it is not fair to suddenly pretend we're all on a level playing field. We might all be able to shoot a goal in theory but Team Whitey is standing on the penalty spot, and Team Brown is down at halfway.

Who the hell are you JY?

2008-06-18T20:03:00.006+12:00

I know what I look like. Sometimes I act out what strangers expect from me. They expect me to vote National, to hate the Maori Party, to believe in free trade, work in business, all that right-wing, white guy baloney (what the f**king hell is baloney, anyway?).

Last election I was tempted to vote for the Maori Party. I voted for the Greens instead. You understand that I didn't vote for them because I think they would make a good government all by themselves, but because I think that they are a good pressure group.

I am not involved in business. I am a teacher. Being a teacher where I work is pretty hard work really, but I fundamentally believe that what I do is important for society, and that I should do it as well as I can.

Here some of the things that happened today:

Two students had a fist fight on the tennis courts at interval. I and another teacher had to physically intervene and try and pull them apart. Because they were large brown guys full of rage and we were skinny white guys we just sort of hung on to them until more big brown guys arrived and helped us pull them apart
I had to yell at some students who simply refused on any level to do what I had asked them to do about ten times in varying tones of firmness or politeness. I mean really yell at someone. YELL. When was the last time you (who are not teachers) actually absolutely yelled at someone?
A couple of students in my first class of the day seriously and intelligently debated the merits and drawbacks of affirmative action for Maori in New Zealand. It was a very interesting debate, one of those debates that challenge your views and make you really think about things.

All of these things were challenging for me. I wondered why it bothered me more that I yelled at someone instead of me being in the middle of a brawl, and I wondered about my values. I think this means I am going to talk about affirmative action.

Truth - On Your Face

2008-06-13T06:38:00.003+12:00

Congratulations to Danyl and Andrew for making the regional final of the 48 hour Film Festival. Out of hundreds of entries they made it to the top twelve, and were nominated for cinematography and script; meaning they were considered to be top three in the area for two of the more important elements in film. I felt that of the twelve in the final their effort was definitely in the top six.

Apparently some people said unkind things about their film on some forums. I have a thin skin and know how this stuff can really bug you. I wanted to say:

Your film was funny and memorable and most of the people who saw it on Wednesday had a great time watching it
You worked really well together over the weekend and afterwards, and you should definitely do another one next year
Andrew - you probably shouldn't laugh your arse off when your cameraman gets announced as being a nominee for best cinematography
Danyl - I don't want to be a heartbreaker, but I reckon you have absolutely no future as a Mormon boy band member.

Well done.

Anthropology tutorials

2008-06-10T10:03:00.003+12:00

When I took Anthropology at university I was in a tutorial with about fifteen other people. We met once a week to discuss the things we were supposed to have read and the lectures we were supposed to have been to. There was a guy in my tutorial that I wanted to punch in the nose. He was annoying.

I will illustrate his annoying qualities by giving the example of another annoying person I knew at university. This person once told me they believed in complete anarchy and wished the police were all dead. He was a bit of feeble poof so I said: "what would you do if a bunch of psychos raped your girlfriend, killed your family and stole everything you owned?" He looked a bit ill. So would I, if there were no police.

The over-educated white middle class pillock in my Anthropology tutorial said two things that made me want to punch him in the nose:

Western society sucks. I'd rather live in a mud hut.

You can't judge anything. It's all relative.

In my head I had two reponses to both his points:

Why don't you go and do it then?

Like Pol Pot and Hitler, they just had a different value systems... dude.

I think point two ("it's all relative") has been a pain in the (metaphorical) arse of Western art for quite some time, but it's sort of what you get if you say that wanky guitar solos, or silly paintings have no inherent quality of beauty.

Isn't it?

How did we get to the last step?

2008-06-10T09:20:00.004+12:00

We got to the last step this way:

If you say the vase you put in this box that I have not seen is made of clay I will accept that the vase has the inherent property of being made of clay. A certain, shall we say, clay-i-ness. Unless I'm being annoying there is no reason for me to question your judgement on this matter even though I have not seen the vase.

However, if you say the vase is beautiful I won't accept that it has an inherent property called beauty until I have actually seen it. I might think that you have good taste in vases and give the vase the benefit of the doubt, but I will not 100% accept what you say until I have seen the vase with my own eyes and made my own judgement.

If we follow this logic then nothing is inherently beautiful.

A question for Richard

2008-06-09T16:45:00.003+12:00

If I tell you that inside this box is a one foot long piece of grey metal you will accept that the object is a foot long, grey and made of metal.

If I tell you that the object is also beautiful however, you will not accept this until you have seen it with your own eyes.

Does this mean that objects, artworks and wanky bass solos don't have any intrinsic quality which we can call beautiful?

Happy Birthday

2008-06-09T11:34:00.002+12:00

Happy birthday, Mum.

Fascinating Fascism - Part Two

2008-06-04T20:36:00.003+12:00

[The] fascist aesthetic... flows from a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort , and the endurance of pain.

Sounds like a bunch of Spartans with a death wish to me (JY)

Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics - that of physical perfection.

Oh, the poor old hunchback. Even though he is devoted to the Nazi regime he must be rejected because he is handicapped and will spoil the perfect functioning of the Aryan machine. Let's not even go into the opening scenes where imperfect babies are tossed off cliffs. (JY)

Fascism also stands for ideals that are persistent today under other banners; the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alieanation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of intellect, the family of man. These ideals are vivid and moving to many people.

I have absolutely no hesitation in calling 300 a movie that promotes fascism. This is probably unsurprising; what was surprising for me was that my students all admired the Spartans in 300, and that many of the ideals that the movie expresses are vey close to ideals that we are taught to admire in our own culture.

Fascinating Fascism - Part One

2008-06-04T20:16:00.004+12:00

[The] film... celebrates the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistable leader.

Through Leonidas the 300 become a community, infact the movie title celebrates this (JY)

The... film is an epic of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission.

If the warriors follow Leonidas and his beliefs unquestioningly they will achieve greatness (JY)

[This] portrait evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.

The Persians are consistently portrayed as effeminate, deviant, deformed and untrustworthy in the movie (JY)

[The film] celebrates a society where the exhibition of physical skill and courage and the victory of the stronger man over the weaker are... the unifying symbols of communal courage.

The Spartans are cool because they kill everyone and they are a tight knit group.

All quotes from Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl's book of photography about the Nuba, and they are all quotes that I would apply to the movie 300.