Sick

Eleanor is sick. The doctor said she has an ear ache among other things.

I set aside this week to prepare for school but it hasn't worked out. Yesterday I was in quite a bad mood about this, but today I'm slightly more philosophical (but still stressed).

Eleanor is asleep now so I have time to do this. Time is a tricky customer. One day the little girl who clings to me for comfort will be an old woman.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast Eternity.

Amazon

Amazon.com attempts to recommend things to you based on what you have bought in the past and what you have browsed on their website.

I mainly buy two things from Amazon: (1) foreign arty movies, and (2) wanky, literary books. As a result of this Amazon has recommended I buy a whole range of gay and queer films and books. Recently it asked me if I would be interested in the DVD: Target your female fat zones. I can only conclude from this that Amazon believes I am a body-conscious lesbian.







Image courtesy of: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

Music - The world won't listen

The gospel according to Morrissey:

• Sweetness , sweetness, I was only joking when I said I'd like to smash every tooth in your head


• I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar then it meant you were a protest singer. Oh I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible


• She was left behind and sour, and she wrote to me on the hour, she said: "In the days when you were hopelessly poor... I just liked you more."


• Don't forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life, yes, you're older now and you're a clever swine, but they were the only ones that ever stood by you

I got this record from the World Record Club. They posted them to you wrapped in cardboard after you ordered out of their catalogue. It's always nice to get something in the mail. It was nice then and it's even nicer now when most stuff in the letterbox has the word bill in it somewhere.

The Smiths have been my favourite band for about fifteen years, but when I first got this record I didn't really like it. It was too sophisticated for a fourteen year old (I can just see Dr. Ahcir smirking as he reads the word sophisticated). I truly came to love The Smiths in the very chaste bedroom of a girl at university. I was doing unrequited love at the time and she said that when she heard The Boy With the Thorn in His Side she always thought of me. It was a very apt choice.

The boy with the thorn in his side / behind the hatred there lies / a murderous desire for love / how can they look into my eyes / and still they don't believe me / and when you want to live / how do you start? / where do you go? / who do you need to know?

I was an emo.

Richard (again)

My daughter is fascinated with Richard. She always wants to see what's inside him. Sometimes she finds tissues and sometimes she finds food scraps. I suppose Richard thinks a lot about food. Maybe he's crying on the inside. I don't know. I try to tell my daughter off whenever she goes though the contents of Richard but she can't speak so I imagine she just thinks I'm making a series of funny noises (which is actually what I'm doing I suppose).

I do my best to keep Richard safe as I think the contents of people's souls should generally be left unmolested, but Eleanor is a tricky customer and I'm pretty slow moving so accidents happen. I will do my best.

Family - Red Folder

This is what your life might look like after you're dead: a folder with some letters in it. It's not much but it's better than nothing which is what most people get.

The next entry in the folder says that in 1936 Frank left the paper company and joined the RAF to train as an engineer.

With the benefit of hindsight this might have been regarded as a bad move, but then again he would have ended up in the war somehow so perhaps an engineer for the RAF was not so bad.

Interlude VI - Richard

Richard sits in the corner of the kitchen. I believe the model number is 3565-KP-Whiteboy. You have to buy special bags for it.

At the moment Richard is thinking about The Wellingtonian (and why it has not been recycled), bread, and sausage packets.

Eleanor likes to go over to Richard, lift up the top of his head and see what's inside. This makes me very annoyed because what's in Richard's head is very dirty and I don't want it all over Eleanor's hands. Also what is inside people's heads should stay there and not get pulled out and left all over the kitchen floor (for example).

I quite like Richard. You can stand on his foot and his head comes open.

Music - Hitbusters

My god. I could tell you a story or two about the songs on Hitbusters. The two albums I first worshipped have singles featured on Hitbusters (Volume One): Purple Rain and Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. I also owned Rebel Yell, Private Dancer, various tapes by The Cars, and a stack of stuff by U2. Seeing the Pointer Sisters reminds me that there was one other show on television at that time featuring pop music and it featured the completely lame Solid Gold Dancers.

It is the songs that weren't hits that I really cherish now because this is the only evidence that they even existed. I too have been in bands and I too have craved the immortality of just one song on some crappy album like this. Who now would remember Jermaine Jackson's Dynamite or Bronski Beats' Smalltown Boy? And whatever happened to Ray "I ain't afraid of no ghost" Parker Jnr? Thanks to this album they will always have a place in my heart.

Notes

1. It was about 20 years after I bought this album that I found out that the original Song to the Siren was by Tim Buckley, Jeff's dad. Both the orginal and this cover are fantastic.
2. "One man comes on a barbed wire fence." If I had one question for Bono it would be: what the f**k does that mean? Is it some kind of S&M thing?
3. Drive was used in the original Band Aid so that must have all happened around this time. I bought my mother Bob Geldoff's autobiography when he was famous. I read it at my Gran's place and dropped it in the bath. So now it has that bulging, accordion look that all books that have been wet get.

Family - Walmsleys

It still exists. The paper company Frank worked for in England in the 1930s. Established in 1866. Bury in Lancashire is a part of Greater Manchester.

Frank arrived in England in the early to mid 1930s. He lived and worked in the north of England. The north of England was the worst hit area of England during the Great Depression which saw unemployment rates soar above 25%. There were millions of unemployed, whole families destitute, soup kitchens, all the usual benefits of a capitalist system "transitioning downward".

Everyone who would know why Frank travelled across the world to this situation is dead. Maybe he was just like a lot of young men: heads full of dreams and hopelessly naive. His dream might have been about planes.

Family - To England by ship

The first piece of paper in the red folder that has all of Frank's letters in it is a typed sheet summarising his career up until 1939. It begins:

• After leaving Otago Boys' High School, served as Apprentice Engineer with the Otago Harbour Board.
• Joined staff of Messrs. Walmsleys Ltd., Paper Machine Makers of Bury, Lancashire, in 1934 as Engineer and Draftsman.

I wonder why he decided to go to England. I suppose he went on a ship and that it took quite awhile. Did he go through the Suez Canal?

If I could get away with it I would wear this kind of outfit, but I think I would need more hair.

Family

This is a story about Frank. He was my grandfather's brother (my grandfather who we met singing opera earlier in this blog). My grandfather had two brothers and a sister. This is photo of Frank in his Otago Boys blazer. I think he looks quite handsome and certain. He also looks much older than seventeen or eighteen which is how old he must be in this picture.

My school photos at this age look distinctly different. I am simply occupying space in them. Although I was a vain teenager (like all teenagers) I do not look well groomed, or confident or capable. Frank looks all of these things in this photo.

Of course a photo is an illusion and we try to compose ourselves for them. Who knows what doubts, or troubles or fears were either side of the shutter clicking on this moment seventy years ago.

Music

My records. I bought all of them while I was at secondary school when you could still buy records at mainstream record stores. By the time I left school tapes had taken over and the new thing was going to be something called the CD.


Even though Richard may not be happy about this thread (it's all pop) I think Hix might approve.

I believe that the ad for Hitbusters involved the guy in the funny hat on the album sleeve walking around with a violin case pretending to shoot things. It was released in 1983 by TVNZ Enterprises as a spin off of the show Ready to Roll. I think that there was a time when Ready to Roll was the ONLY show on New Zealand television that played pop music. Of course this was at the time when if you were tired of watching TV One you could always change channel to TV Two, and if you didn't like that you could turn the TV off an go and do something constructive.

Later I discovered the joys of Radio With Pictures in the Dick Driver days. Who will forget the day Dick Driver got arrested for drunk driving. What a dick driver.

There was always a feature on Ready to Roll called High Flyers. This was the new release the "dudes" at TV One thought might become a hit. For years I thought that High Flyers was actually a band. I was always amazed at their quality and range - they never seemed to do the same thing twice. Eventually I decided I had to get a record by this amazing band called High Flyers. It was then that I made the horrible discovery.

My other memory of Ready to Roll is of dreadful number ones that were on for weeks and weeks. Particular low points were Star Trekkin, Dr Who - the Tardis (done as a prank to prove that any old drivel could become number one), and the Holidaymakers version of Sweet Lovers. The nadir though was the Alf song: Stuck on Earth. The video for this song featured a guy from TVNZ holding an Alf doll and bouncing it up and down in different rooms of a suburban house. Even when I was thirteen this was hard to believe.

Passport - TB Townhouse

We landed at Kansai Airport at night and took a train to the city:



"Osaka was in darkness as we whistled by seeming only to be an endless sprawl of streetlights and neon. I looked at the people waiting at the stations we passed. They looked reassuringly human: tired after a days work and wanting to go home."



The first place we lived in Osaka was apartment 305 in TB Townhouse. I don't know what the Japanese designer of TB Townhouse thought TB stood for but it was a building that I would describe as being lung red in colour. Maybe it had been built originally to house the consumptive. We lived there for three years and I never saw a single neighbour.



My first letter home says:



"I think our apartment is big by Japanese standards. When I stand in the middle of our bathroom you can touch all four walls and the ceiling without stretching."



The badly blurred photo (above) gives you a summary of urban Osaka: bicycles, drink machines, and rubbish.


We had the good fortune to live around the corner from this tea room (left). As with TB Townhouse's designer I often wondered what the rather sour-faced owners of this little tea room thought Boob meant.


There must be about ten million of these little tea rooms across Japan and if I was going to suggest one thing to a visitor to Japan it would be to go to as many as these tea rooms as you can. Although each one serves an identical selection of food and drinks each one would have its own quirks reflecting the quiet eccentricity of the supposedly uniform Japanese.


There's a rather nice tea room in Koyasan filled with mounted and stuffed animals. Adds an interesting angle to the iced tea and cake.

Passport - Education can be overrated

I got my passport in 1998.


I spent 1997 doing a Masters in English Literature. That's it to the right. It was called:



Theatrical Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England



and God it's a dull read.



"Greenblatt is eloquent in his description of the pluralism of theatrical practices and seems to suggest that the court is an equally complex site, full of a diversity that cannot be contained or expressed in the unitary vision of an ideal monarch." (Etcetera, etcetera.)


Site! Site? What's the matter with the word "place"? Unitary vision? Ugh. Writing like this is actually encouraged. I went into debt to learn how to write like this. Dreadful.




My superviser didn't even care enough to proof read the final draft and it got a pounding from the external marker.

I passed. Most people don't bother with all the effort of doing a Masters just to pass. So what do you do if you're over-educated, in debt and unemployable in 1998 in New Zealand?

You get someone to put one of these in your passport.

Interlude V - Sheer Genius

Actually, before we move on to the next thread, there was one thing I wanted to show you from Auckland.

It was on this device to the right that I first heard about the death of Sir Ed. It's hard to believe that I have never seen a radio toilet roll holder before. I think the only thing holding this company back is coming up with a catchy name for their product. All I can think of is:

- Radiolet rolder

or

- Crap man

Seriously this thing was like crack. Every time I was in the toilet I had to turn it on. I think this device is tapping into the male urge to find somewhere to hide where the wife and children won't dare come. It reminds me of my grandfather disappearing into the outhouse with a newspaper for half an hour.

Passport - She could be tidying up

I was going to write something about going to Auckland. Something like:

"It's a lot nicer than I remember it being."

But then I thought that was a bit long so I'd like to change that to:

"It's nice."

I had an English teacher in Form One that forbade the use of the word nice. Whenever we wanted to say nice we ended up saying things like:

"It was good. Not really good, but, you know, better than average. Pleasant"

And everyone in the class (including the teacher I bet) was thinking - "he means nice".

I went to a primary school that streamed. I was in the mediocre class, between the brainy class and the cabbages. Sometimes I would ace my English tests and beat everyone in the brainy class. This annoyed the teachers because I think they felt people in the mediocre class should be mediocre at everything, and not have hidden talents or personalities or something. It was alright though because I was pretty mediocre at everything else.

I was pretty dim at school really. Things just sort of passed me by. For example, it was only after I had been away from school for about fifteen years that I realised that the funny man in the bat cape who came into our class and told us very odd stories once a week was actually giving us religious instruction. What on earth did I think was going on at the time? It certainly never occured to me to believe that the stories were true.

You might think, based on what I have just said, that my next thread will be about memories of the old school yard. That would be a reasonable thought. Actually, I could cover my reflections on school for you right now:

It was horrible.

There. That wasn't too bad.

Actually my next thread is about the little book to the right. I got it ten years ago and it is about to expire.

The End

I bought this record for my mother as a birthday present. It is the soundtrack to the David Lean movie A Passage to India. David Lean made those big epics Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and earlier a very good Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. By the time he did A Passage to India he was out of fashion. In fact, it was fashionable to sneer at him. Which once again illustrates the perils of being cool, because it is a very good film but if you were being fashionable you would have to say it isn't.

A Passage to India is a very, very good book. It might be one of the wisest books I have ever read. My mother has always highly prized it. When I was doing my first full year of university A Passage to India was one of the novels we were supposed to read, but most people didn't. I tried to read it and gave up. Then David Norton did his first lecture on it focussing entirely on the first chapter. He did exactly what a good lecturer should; he illuminated the text and made me understand why it was so brilliant.

He began by reading the first sentence:

Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

Then he stopped reading and said:

"So we know immediately that the Marabar caves are extraordinary, that they are in fact an exception."

I realised that I hadn't really read the first chapter of this novel, and that we were in the hands of a very subtle, exceptional writer.

And so we come to the end of my Mother's record collection.

I'm going on holiday.

Wife, child, red jacket and hat.

We're going to Auckland.

Horton

Lionel Barrymore is Drew Barrymore's grand uncle. He was in Doctor Kildare and It's a Wonderful Life. I note that he is not credited with Horton Hatches an Egg on Wikipedia. I may have to send an email to their editorial board.

In the world of orchestrated children's records the elephant is always represented by the tuba. I imagine that tuba players might resent this. The conductor stands up and says to the orchestra:

- We have an exciting new work to play written especially for children

And the tuba player sits there glumly reflecting

- I bet I'm the f**king elephant again.

Mind you the piccolo player is probably thinking

-Oh goody, little mice scurrying for the millionth time.

Bringing the cowboy hat up to date

We're getting near the end. Only a few records to go. I have cheated a bit and skipped a few that were buddies of other ones (there was more flamenco, more Brubeck), but you got the idea. The theme for the rest might be: when you have a kid you stop buying records. There aren't many records after I arrived on the scene. Mind you there were other more depressing reasons for the sharp decline.

Behind the budding John Wayne to the right you will notice the full record collection. Poking up at the back is a Rodrigo album that we still have. I have one record from the Opera Choruses double album, but mysteriously not the other one or the cover. I have never seen the Mikado album.

There is quite a good book called What is History? by E. H. Carr. He starts off with this:

"The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was justified by the fetishism of documents. If you find it in the documents then, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do these documents tell us?"

He gives an example of time's whittling effect on documents. When a prominent German diplomat died in 1929 he left behind 300 boxes of documents. This was turned into a six volume book, and this was turned into a single-volume edition translated into English. Carr's point is that not only are about 299 boxes worth of information left out, but what has been left in has been selected for a reason.

What should I make of what is left of this record collection? What was culled?

The 1970s

Your parents existed before you were born. This is something surprising I found out when I was in my twenties and slightly less self-obsessed (slightly).



When you're a kid you wonder why these other adults who aren't family members sometimes show up for dinner and you're sent to bed a little earlier than usual.




When I think about all the garbage I talk about with my friends I wonder what my parents talked about with their friends in the 70's. Has the nature of late night conversation changed? I suppose not.

My mother and father lived next to a Greek family in Dunedin. This explains the Without Words album. Apparently Xarhakos got in trouble for saying something and was censored so he released this... without words. This album has been floating around in the background of my life for thirty years and I'd never even once thought to wonder why.

What happened in the 1970s? Suddenly New Zealand relaxed a bit. The formality of the 1960s photographs has slipped away. Everyone is looking more comfortable and relaxed. I blame it on polyester and wine.

Ungrateful children go to shows

I distinctly remember sitting in the Opera House in Wellington as a child absolutely rigid with boredom while some fools in tights pranced around the stage. The problem was that I wasn't rigid at all I was wracked by the need to fidget. Terse whispered exchanges took place:

- Do you need to go to the toilet?

- No

- Are you sick?

- No

- Then sit still!

Sometimes it was hard work being eduacated in the arts with my mother.

Other times it was great. I can remember being transfixed by Marcel Marceau, Paco Pena, Nureyev, Nina Simone and Garth Fagin Bucket Dance.

My mother went to shows in the 1960s in Dunedin. She saw Ravi Shankar and Porgy and Bess (not at the same time) amongst others.

We went to see Nureyev at the Michael Fowler Centre. We were sitting right at the front. At one point Nureyev came right to the edge of the stage where we were sitting and I saw the strain in his arms, the sweat pouring down his body, the solidity of his feet on the ground. It made me realise the physicality of dance. From a distance it looks effortless, but it is the intense working of a body.

There was also Nina Simone. She was grumpy in a likeable way. At one moment, while the drums rolled and bass uncoiled beneath them, she rose from her piano stool and shimmyed to the front of the stage, provocatively and magnificently shaking her impressive bosom at the thousand odd grey-haired, white middleclass Wellingtonians sitting in the audience. Wonderful!