New wallpaper

When it’s 6° inside and outside the weather is schizophrenic, raining, blowing and hailing with brief five-minute bursts of sunshine and fantails fluttering around the garden, when you don’t have chocolate you thought you had, sometimes the only thing you can do is grit your teeth and update your desktop wallpaper.

And that is all.

So, what did you do today? I defragged my hard drive. I thought the word ‘defrag’ might have a military origin, but it seems not.

Emiko Superstar

Emiko Superstar
by Mariko Tamaki & Steve Rolston
Minx 2008

I keep coming across Minx graphic novels in the library. It’s a tragedy that this line has been cancelled – aimed at the elusive teenage girl market, each of the twelve books they published is high-quality with some excellent female characters. Emiko Superstar is about a Japanese-Canadian teenager who stumbles upon the local version of Andy Warhol’s Factory at the same time as she notices cracks in the perfect life of the suburban couple she babysits for. It shares themes with some of the other books in the series – as in The P.L.A.I.N. Janes by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, the heroine discovers the joys of artistic expression in an oppressive environment, and like Confessions of a Blabbermouth by Mike and Louise Carey and Aaron Alexovich, there’s a slightly sinister unspoken mystery which threatens to turn the whole story dark. Very interesting and recommended.

I might go a bit quiet again for a while… normal operation is becoming extremely difficult again. I’m easily discouraged and paralysingly over-susceptible to the mood around me. Unfortunately.

More Nature: What happened to NZ music?

I sought out More Nature today, the 2006 update to the Nature’s Best series. These songs are from 2000 to 2005, and were included based on chart popularity instead of being voted for by APRA. There’s a lot of diversity in this selection – it would be a rare music fan who liked all 20 songs, but unfortunately compared to the previous series there’s also a lot of rubbish as well.

It’s too simple to say that these newer songs just rip of the style of what was successful overseas. A lot of older NZ stuff that sounds utterly original was heavily based in overseas influences as well – look at how indebted the Dunedin Sound and early Flying Nun bands were to The Velvet Underground, or how hard the Auckland punk bands on AK79 try to sound like the Sex Pistols. There seems to be a certain safeness about the newer stuff though, and nothing to distinguish them from an Australian or American or British band. After six years, Scribe’s ‘Not Many’ sounds particularly anemic.

It’s also too simple to say that the old stuff is better than the new stuff. Distance is a filter, whether it’s time or space. You can slag off NZ music as being inferior to overseas music, but generally speaking by the time it filters down here only the good stuff is left*. The same applies to TV, films and books. The local stuff is unfiltered, and 90% of it is utter crap, but so is the overseas stuff. And for every three-minute NZ gem currently making an expat accounts manager in Hull mist up, there’s hours and hours of unlistenable local stuff from the same period (and same groups!) clogging the sales table in Real Groovy. The same filtering applies to music from the past – for example, look at the NZ Top 10 from 23rd May 1999:

1. Tonight ~True Bliss
2. Georgy Porgy ~Eric Benet
3. No Scrubs ~TLC
4. Hi! My Name Is… ~Eminem
5. That Don’t Impress Me Much ~Shania Twain
6. The Animal Song ~Savage Garden
7. Baby One More Time ~Britney Spears
8. What’s It Gonna Be ~Busta Rhymes feat. Janet
9. We Like To Party ~Vengaboys
10. Thank Abba For The Music ~Billie, B*witched, Steps, Cleopatra

Okay, there’s maybe three pop classics there, and #1 is a Kiwi song. But do we really want to go back to those times? Those simpler, simpler times, when Britney was a virgin and Eminem was actually subversive and Irish girl groups with unnaturally high foreheads roamed the earth?

*Or, at least, the least worst stuff.

Best appreciated from a distance

There have been three big NZ music compilations in the past 20 years, the Kiwi Rock compilation of 1990 which was updated by the comprehensive APRA collection Nature’s Best in 2002, and now The Great NZ Songbook. The songs on these albums represent the best of NZ pop and rock – not always the most innovative or original or New Zealandy tunes this country has produced*, but the most popular. The stuff that expats yearn for, seeing as the proper way to appreciate NZ is from a distance. The three collections only have five songs in common**, but you can probably name them off the top of your head:

Nature ~Fourmylua (1969)
April Sun in Cuba ~Dragon (1978)
Counting the Beat ~The Swingers (1981)
Slice of Heaven ~Dave Dobbyn with Herbs (1986)
For Today ~Netherworld Dancing Toys (1989)

Nothing controversial there, but the selection for The Great NZ Songbook, out for NZ Music Month with a lavishly-produced book, has not been without its detractors. Usually a national songbook is a collection of popular standards that any strong singer could tackle, so the songs can’t be specifically linked to a particular singer. America is particularly good at the concept of differentiating between the song and the singer, which is why the Great American Songbook can been successfully mined by diverse artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Nelson and, er, Rod Stewart.

But, and this is where it’s time to start up those tractors, of the 42 songs on The Great NZ Songbook, only the standard ‘Pokarekare Ana’ and ‘Nature’ has been successfully covered by another band. Most of the rest are sung by pub bands every weekend, but can you really imagine someone else having a hit with ‘Not Many’ or ‘My Delirium’?

So, is it a Kiwi greatest hits instead? Many of the song choices seem to be compromises – obviously there have to be songs by Dobbyn and the Finn brothers, but are those their best songs? Dividing the discs between the 20th and 21st centuries is at least a novel idea, but maybe they should’ve just repackaged the 7-disc Nature’s Best collection, especially when you consider that 20 of the same songs (15 of the 21 songs on the first disc) are repeated.

So, our new national compilation is a combination of classic middle-aged white rock chestnuts from the eighties, a few gems and one-hit-wonders from recent years as the industry got on a sounder commercial footing but creatively went to hell, a few oddities which will soon look as incongruous as Fur Patrol and Darcy Clay on the first Nature’s Best CD, FOUR expat-friendly songs with “Home” in the title, and almost nothing from the alternative scene or the nineties or the Dunedin Sound, that most identifiably New Zealand of our popular music sounds (apart from unthreatening dub). All of them, arguably, great songs***. But best appreciated from a distance.

*Flying Nun? What that?
**Only one of these bands is technically a one-hit wonder… despite appearances!
***Except for the sodding Feelers.

Curse Borders!

Curse Borders! How can you hate a bookstore which has six different editions of Ulysses? Admittedly they’re all more expensive than the copies in Whitcoulls and Unity, especially the annotated student edition which is twice the price and has pretty much the same content as my Oxford paperback. I’d hate to tackle it without notes, though. The standard edition just stops after 700 pages, without even a picture of a nice soothing cup of tea.

Photographing babies

I spent much of today with my sister, mother and nephew in Te Papa taking photos of my sister in her graduation gear. Obviously the best way to take photographs of babies is in many short bursts, then edit them for cuteness. My nephew is at the stage (about 8 months) when he’ll crawl over to me, grab both my hands and confidently hoist himself onto his feet. And then expect me to walk him around. He’s also at the stage where he’ll grab at one of his toys and become frustrated when he can’t shift it – because he’s sitting on it.

One of the best things about babies is the openness of their expressions. What shows on their face is exactly what they’re feeling. As I’ve mentioned before, we all have “street” faces, carefully neutral public expressions that only change when we see someone we know. The best way to melt a woman’s street face is to show them an adorable baby. The best way to melt a guy’s street face is to hit him in the crotch with a brick.

Not good weather for them if they’re brass

I e-mailed Capital Times with congratulations for putting a teeny-tiny pair of monkey bollocks on the front cover of this week’s issue. They asked if they could put it on the letters page – I declined, as I don’t want to be known as the sort of person who notices those things.

Te Ara, the online Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, wants to use one of my Jitterati cartoons for their entry on inner city living. Hooray for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

The Knox Bonnet

I went to my sister’s graduation, which I think is the fourth Vic graduation I’ve been to. She’s a Dr. now, so they made her wear a Knox Bonnet (I kid you not) and sit at the back with the rest of the staff of Hogwarts Victoria. My nephew was very good, he only gurgled loudly during a few of the pauses in the speeches at the numerous women making soppy faces at him and my heroically embarrassed brother-in-law.

Part of the entertainment was an a capella group from Tawa College which was (and I don’t mean this in a mean way) simultaneously the whitest and the gayest thing I have ever seen. They sang very nicely, but I didn’t realise a certain amount of choreography would also be involved – so kudos to the director who persuaded forty teenage boys to shimmy like Al Green. They even crouched deeply on the low notes, but unfortunately this reminded me of the more excretively-inclined passages I’ve been reading in Ulysses. Historically Tawa has not cherished the friends of Dorothy, so this group is a brave anomaly and I hope they don’t get beaten up in the playground.

Afterwards I managed to enrich our evening with Pippa and the supermarket. Someone at the food company Pams obviously has a fondness for the Seventies – the redesigned packaging for their cereal range is Toaster Avacado green and BMX Pedal purple. I keep expecting to see that horrible orange resurge, but maybe some things are too terrible even for Australians.

You know what’s unfair? Apart from world hunger and stuff like that, obviously. It’s 7° in my room – I’m typing this wearing gloves. The last power bill we had was $400 (we had an electrician in today to discover why). And the four big power companies have just been snapped gouging $4 billion from 2000 to 2007. The ‘Biggest Corporate Asshole’ crown has now been passed, to the relief of the bankers. And Telecom. We don’t want Zoe Bell – we want First World broadband.

NZ music pop quiz

Quick, can you name a song which either mentions a specific New Zealand location, or evokes a New Zealandy sense of place? So far I have:

There Is No Depression In New Zealand ~Blam Blam Blam
Hopetown Bridge & Madeleine Avenue ~Dave Dobbyn
Rock ‘n’ Roll Ponsonby ~Dragon
Christchurch (In Cashel St, I Wait) ~The Exponents
Parihaka ~Tim Finn with Herbs
Paradise (Wherever You Are) ~The Finn Brothers
Tomorrow Night ~The Front Lawn
Dominion Road & Wellington ~Mutton Birds
Cuba Street ~Polka Dot Dot Dot
In the Neighbourhood ~Sisters Underground
Darling Town & Waihi Country ~The Six Volts

Some of the NZ references above are fairly oblique… and this may be due to my music collection and/or globalisation, but it’s hard to find any NZ song from the past ten years that specifically references this country.

Oh no! Dymocks is closing! It was an unusually intelligent store which made Whitcoulls look positively half-arsed and finally forced it to lift its game. It’s sad when you consider that although books – physical objects you buy from a store – aren’t under the same threat of extinction from downloading as CDs and DVDs, bookstores are still closing for a number of depressing societal reasons. I can take it or leave it as to whether I own a physical disc, but I still like owning books.

Dymocks appears to have been poleaxed by Borders, which is galling when you consider that the first action of most savvy Wellington book-buyers when they find a book they want in Borders is to pop down the road to Dymocks to get it for $5 cheaper.