Everybody’s looking for the sun / people strain their eyes to see/ but I see you and you see me

I should listen to myself. I was well and truly suckered. As recently as last week I railed self-righteously against the overpriced, and sadly very prevalent, pretentious eateries that Auckland is full of. And yet, there I was last Friday night in Soto, just off the top of College Hill. And to make matters worse, I’d sworn two years ago never to visit this place again after a shabby experience which I’d grumbled about way back in the early days of this blog.

To be precise I said it would be a cold day in hell before I ventured there again. Well that day came, although, and I need to scream this from every rooftop, it was not my idea…again…it was not my idea….

Blame my dear friends; in particular Sandy Doll who suggested it then announced she couldn’t make it, leaving another eight of us to suffer grossly overpriced average Japanese food in unimaginative surroundings after a two and a half hour wait.

When the food arrived it was, and lets be generous here, less than average, small, slightly cold and greasy. There was none of the imagination, flair, humour and delicacy that fine Japanese dining demands (and I’m used to at even the cheapest places here in Indonesia). The sushi and sashimi tasted less than fresh, which is the worst thing you can ever say about a Japanese eatery.

The sign on the door announcing its 2005 Metro Restaurant award should’ve been enough of a warning. I long ago learnt never to trust anything in that shabby and pointless rag beyond the odd in-depth piece that accentuates the worthlessness of everything around it. As long as I can recall Metro’s positive food reviews are an indicator as to what is best avoided, with their celebrations of the shallow and plain shitty places of which Soto is a perfect example.

The only diversion in our ruined evening was the large, and offensively loud (they don’t teach manners at Med School obviously), table of drunken Auckland Hospital doctors, one of whom had dropped their phone under the floor. As we watched it rang and flashed blue repeatedly and we could only assume that its sozzled owner was wanted in urgent surgery. Given their state we though it best not to alert them to the call.

But within 48 hours we were sitting on the seafront in Singapore at the, always fantastic, Longbeach Seafood restaurant eating crunchy baby Squid, and it all seemed so far away, thank god. The food was incredible, the service impeccable, both unlike sad old Soto; and the Tiger Beer hit the spot in the 35 degree heat. It was lunch time and we couldn’t see more than twenty metres out to sea courtesy of the Sumatran smoke that hangs over large parts of Asia at this time of the year.

Singapore is a funny place, so absolutely obsessed with making money, technology and being number one. It’s building this brand new underground line at vast cost, both human and financial, to add to its already impressive and comprehensive system. And yet the common wisdom seems to be (and a look at the map confirms it) that they don’t actually need it; they just need to keep on building and proving that they are supreme. Their military is incredibility over the top both in size and in technology. Indeed its air force is so large they need to base bits of it in other countries, beyond normal training requirements. The death notices in the controlled state media (The Straits Times to you…) usually emphasis what a solid employee or a beloved boss the departed was. Even the death of a spouse comes attached to a corporate…”beloved wife of…, trusted employee of Han Yoo Wiring Corp….”.

It can be an unpleasantly Orwellian place despite all the shopping and food.

And yet this, largely soulless, nation, with all its money and technology is powerless to stop a few peasant farmers from covering its little island in great wafts of grey smoke for large slabs of the year. There seems to be some natural justice in that, although obviously the smoke is less than desirable for a variety of reasons.

But that said, the techno hunger in me, loves a place like Funan It, where I can look at all the things I can’t buy in Auckland or Bali. I’m a little sad, I get excited by DSL routers and uber grunty laptops that have more power than I could ever want..maybe…

And then, a few hours later home to Bali, to the land where nothing actually works as it should; where the roads have long ago fallen apart and no-one seems to really care; where we have to explain to a customs officer, with his hand out, that the old Pentium III we’ve bought up for Isabella’s room, is not a new “CPU” with associated “duty” required.

But you realise that there is perhaps something more than a new train line, and even the simplest warung has better service, ambiance and food than a thousand begotten Sotos can aspire to….

And you think you’re so clever and classless and free

Returning to the nest is a funny thing. I haven’t been in Auckland for close to six months and I find it a little confusing to say the least. On the one hand I know it so well. I know every little nook and cranny, every shortcut, the easy way to do or achieve almost anything. I don’t have that knowledge anywhere else.

And like everything I see the good, the bad, and, unfortunately the damn ugly. We flew into Brisbane on the Garuda flight and an a kind of ugly presented itself on that flight. I don’t want to go back to Steve Irwin again, except to mention that many of those in Australia who derided the late Reptile baiter did so because they felt he misrepresented the modern urban Australian, with his swagger and his crikey strine.

Seriously, who in gods name are you trying to kid? The departed Pride of Gympie (or whatever Queensland backwater it was) always struck me as rather sophisticated when put next to the 98% of Australia’s population that hails itself as little Aussie battlers or some other garbage. And he (or rather she, I should say) knew how to manipulate that mass to line their own pockets rather well, as the raft of post-Stingray TV tributes, interviews and the kids on the covers of Women’s mags is indisputable evidence of.

But the to the ugly, well the mass of real ockers that felt that it was alright to travel in sweat infested singlets, or put their feet on the top of the seat in front were mostly generously described by Brigid as gruesome, and so they were. But before anyone accuses me of Ockerism or any such bigotry (you can save that for the post that was meant to go here and may still appear, on the current relationship between the Australian tourist and Bali), let me say that the bunch of New Zealanders who jumped on GA712 for the last leg to Auckland, were little better, and we, as a family shrank into our seats in case our passports should tie us to the Gold Coast massive returning to Hamilton for the holidays.

Forget the harbour, forget the vistas, forget everything else, the really good things about Auckland, are the people I know, or at least most of them. There are so many truly wonderful, truly good and truly….well, you know…people, both friends and the hundreds of loose acquaintances I have here that I both enjoy and miss terribly when I can’t see them that its almost overwhelming when I do. As I have these past few days. I went to the monthly Turnaround gig, with Manuel Bundy and Cian in full effect and saw literally dozens of people I know and have known for years. Not least of them was Roger Perry with whom I djed in the venue, downstairs in Nelson Street twenty years ago, and to he honest, although we’ve had our ups and downs over the years, love like a brother. I sat on a couch with Roger and, later, Manuel for an hour as we talked about which of the walls we painted and which bar we built as though it was last week, and it truly felt like it was. And then Cian played a bit of Mantronix flowing into Ruth Joy and the past and present knitted together.

I have to say, too, the other good, and often underrated aspect of Auckland town is the food. Not the try hard wannabe dumps that I’ll come to later, but the absolutely wonderful cheap and cheerful, or ethnic places that I crave when I’m not here. Places like Little India in Kingsland, which has the best Indian food I’ve had anywhere outside Asia, better than anything in Brick Lane; or Grand Harbour whose Dim Sim was described to Brigid by a Taiwanese friend as the best in the world, and so it may be; or KK Malaysian in Greenlane; or for that matter Mekong Neua, also in Kingsland. I dream of these places sometimes….

Which tidily leads to the bad: the ugly pretensions affected by so many in this city. The ostentatious wealth, often funded by loans and overdrafts, and pretentious verbiage you encounter everywhere. I read the Sunday Herald’s magazines, or Metro, I look at the garbage written about fashion week, I drive down Ponsonby Road and I cringe. Is it the often quoted cultural cringe? I guess it is and I guess I once was a part of the cause, although I hope I’m not anymore. Maybe I am, but this is not about assuaging my guilt.

And I wonder why this quiet pretty city isn’t more proud of what it is. It isn’t a big sophisticated hub, as much as it pretends to be. Its streets are, more often than not, fairly quiet, its leading restaurants and hotels, the likes of Euro or The Hilton, are rather provincial and parochial as are many of their more gossiped about patrons.

I hate that side of Auckland and I’m pleased to be nowhere near it anymore. To be honest, Auckland is probably closer to Taihape than Tokyo. And I quite like that….

This is a city that treats Nicky Watson as a celebrity and titters excitedly when some second level American actor comes to town. It’s quaint.

Not that I, for a moment, would live anywhere else in the country. I’d go nuts. And all the things I’ve just complained about in AK are magnified tenfold in Wellington, coupled with an offensive and smug self satisfaction.

So, to the ugly.

Well, it has to be the violence. The damning violence which plagues this country. I don’t know if its driven by alcohol or, as I said a long time back, by the contact ball sports, or the P epidemic that is a vicious plague everywhere I look but aggression and intolerance that I see on every street, from the abuse to the road rage, and the way it spills over into the random violence that fill the newspaper front pages daily, terrifies me. Yes I know I live in Indonesia, a country which has had terror related bombings and suffers government travel warnings but Indonesia, or at least Bali, doesn’t have the day to day senseless murders, assaults and attacks that are so much a part of New Zealand life. We have no road rage and Asian drivers must shake at the verbal assaults received daily simply because they drive with a little less aggression than their locally born compatriots. Not that birth helps, my fourth generation NZ born Chinese former neighbour receives daily taunts of “fucking chink” and the like on the road.

Oh, we are so sophisticated….

I’ve been to Saturn / I sat on the rings

Sitting under a Sanur sunset, with the odd smell of a cremation wafting past me as I write, coming from the large ceremony a road away from here, a few thoughts came to mind, a few things that may or may not need to be said but I will anyway.

Firstly, and most importantly, Brigid and I watched the complete sixth season of The Sopranos this week in three rather intense sittings (four actually but one of those was trying to get the Thai DVDs to work). And loved it I did. I’m a fan and thought that the strange mixture of dark humour, and unease for the reality of what they are actually doing, worked better than it has for a long time. My unease was accentuated by the violent homophobia portrayed by many of the characters and by the way the bigotry played out. Whilst the situation is vastly different, the sentiment implied by Ian Wishart in his attacks on Peter Davis, the completely innocent husband of Helen Clark, is not. Whether or not Mr Davis (who I know vaguely but my wife and her family know well) is gay or not is largely beside the point. It is my belief that he is not, but that is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that Wishart saw fit to use the man’s sexuality as a valid way to attack him, and via him, his wife. And that the media, from this distance at least, seems not to have called into question such a tactic, beyond simple distaste.

Now correct me if I am wrong, but some years back, New Zealand passed a law legalizing homosexual behaviour, and more than that, made it illegal to discriminate against someone on the grounds of their sexuality. To then use this as way to attack a person seems to me not only morally indefensible but technically illegal.

But barely a murmur from the righteous defenders of the nation’s morals and the likes of the NZ Herald and TVNZ, unless I’ve missed it. The RNZ interview I heard skirted around the issue, in the assumption that if Wishart had any proof then he had some right to pursue this story. But regardless of whether he did or did not have any evidence the real issue here is that this is implied queer bashing. Sadly however institutionalised homophobia, as illustrated by the Christchurch Crèche and Phillip Sturm cases is an unquestioned part of the NZ landscape in the 21^st Century.

And the line between what Wishart is doing and what happened to Vito in The Sopranos is a very thin one. I for one am ashamed to carry the same passport as the man.

On a completely different tack, in Thailand I bought a bunch of jazz CDs, I’m on a blue key spin right now and decided that I needed some of my old favourites, which I have on vinyl in Auckland, with me now. So I did the correct thing, rather than download or buy the multitude of pirated copies available, I went into one of Bangkok’s quite incredible specialist stores and bought them. Lovely annotated re-issues they are two. All that Coltrane and Getz…..

Amongst the bunch were two on Blue Note (read EMI), Thelonious Monk’s timeless Genius of Modern Music Vol.1, a collection of old 78s released almost sixty years back; and a Sonny Rollins collection of fifties masters. So, innocently, I put the Monk in the laptop, and waited. Nothing, not even the recognition of a piece of laser read plastic. No disc it said. Damn, I thought, faulty disc. So I tossed the Rollins in. And the same thing. I followed it with a Coltrane on Impulse which read and copied to my iTunes without any issue, then two others that had no problem at all either. And it dawned on me…I’d been suckered by EMI, bless them, and their customer friendly copy protection system. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I’d been screwed; I’d been ripped off by this monolith in their efforts to prevent me, or someone else ripping them off. And this on fifty year old recordings which may or may not still be subject to copyright. And they wonder why it is all turning to shit. Since this happened a year or so ago with the live Kraftwerk album, I’d made it a policy not to buy anything on EMI, but in the Thai heat and with the sheer joy and anticipation at hearing these again, I forgot. Fortunately I found both albums on the net and downloaded the things immediately, as I will now do as a matter of policy with anything EMI releases, rather than paying money for something I don’t receive.

So, yes, Thailand, well Bangkok actually…. we went there last week for five days. I don’t know enough about the country to make a fair comment on the coup, except that the King’s blessing on all this seems to be enough to give it some popular legitimacy in the eyes of many of the nation’s people. It’s hard for many of us outside Thailand (or Japan) to understand the authority and place the monarch holds.

But why is it that everyone I mention Bangkok to comes back with a rousing chorus of Murray Head’s awful tune from Chess, or makes sly ping-pong ball references. I didn’t see Murray Head there or spend much time in Patpong (although I did go there but the highlight was finding a 24 hour supermarket to buy some drinks for the hotel…god I’m dull). It was more a routine of the shops, the markets, the shops, food, the shops and more food. I’m a terrible tourist. We went to the royal place but got within a hundred metres of the gate, fighting off relentless touts and con artists with fake IDs and a thousand convincing stories before we decided to go…shopping….

So, all good apart from making one shitty mistake….trusting the Rough Guide to Bangkok. We live in Bali so we should know better. I know that the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guides to anything to do with food, accommodation, in fact virtually anything beyond which road is which and what area is what, are to be absolutely ignored. That mistake, put us in the worst Dim Sim house in Bangkok, and nothing in the place matched the glowing guide description.

But, yes, more shopping and more markets, and it felt good to be in place where in infrastructure vaguely works, and the rubbish was at controllable levels. Where the traffic lights go as they are meant…and I think if I had to live anywhere else in the future that would perhaps be it.

But not right now…

Anyway my old buddy Norman Jay, MBE, is coming to Bali this weekend, so that's a reason to be excited

Songs for the sunset:

The Clash…Armagideon Time…the live version from the wonderful From Here to Eternity that lazily lopes and skanks along with less tension or anger than the studio take, and makes me miss Joe Strummer all over again

Fetus Productions…What’s Going On…I came very close to releasing an earlier version of this some years back, recorded at Harlequin Studios about 1979 with Simon Alexander and Jed Town’s massed overdubbed 12 string guitars under Jed’s wonderfully plaintiff and fragile voice. It was a work of sheer beauty and I don’t know why it didn’t come out. Maybe one day, but in the mean time, this later version will do just fine..

Fuckpony…Freaky Stories of Earth…band name of the year and a killer few minutes of Lil Louis inspired sensual deep house off their album, easily my most listened to record in the last couple of months. Gorgeous, and, dare I say it, timeless..

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane….In a Sentimental Mood…about as conservative as the ‘trane ever got, his album with Ellington ain’t no blistering Live at The Village Vanguard (the first heavy metal record) but it has it’s moments and is perfect for a languid Balinese afternoon (even if the smoke from the dearly departed is in the air). And the Duke’s solo half way through is quite something in a quiet way…

Look at the graceful way she dances / one foot speaks / the other one answers

And then just when you wonder how stupid a major record company can possibly be, along comes another to prove that they are not all as boneheaded as Universal. That WMI can work out a deal with YouTube shows that not all the dinosaurs are without a clue. Of course this raises a whole bunch more questions, the most important being: where does the money come from, as YouTube doesn’t, as far as I can see, have any reasonable income stream, and will have a very hard time surviving with a subscription.

Still it’s interesting to see at least two of the majors, Warner Music and EMI, trying to come to grips with the future, whilst Universal and SonyBMG flounder around trying to resurrect the past. It reminds me of a time a few years back when the head of one record company said I wish this dance phase would pass so we could get back to signing proper artists.

Not that I think all this matters one iota in the long run…the two words, writing and wall are still valid. The record industry as we have known it for the past seventy years is over, it’s just a matter of how long the death rattles take to subside.

Talking of Warner Music, I scratch my head with bemusement at the forthcoming 25^Th Anniversary of Flying Nun Records. Uh…ok….

The current owner of the name Flying Nun is celebrating the quarter century of the brand. Twenty Five years since my old friend Roger Shepherd rang me and said he was thinking of starting a label in Christchurch. I, in my misguided wisdom, and in the midst of dealing with the inevitable mish mash of artist babysitting and financial stress that is indie labelism, told him not to be so silly.

Roger was at that time, and still is, a good friend, but I am damned pleased he didn’t take my advice. What Roger created, not only in its recorded legacy, but, more so, in its ethos, was without question the singly most important and defining label and community in the short history of New Zealand popular music. Over the next 15 years he, and a handful of crucial allies, the likes of Chris Knox, Gary Cope (his original partner), Doug Hood, Lesley Paris, Paul McKessar, and others, played a massive part in inventing the landscape that is contemporary NZ Music. They released hundreds of records, the bulk of which were screamingly uncommercial, but that is why it was what it was. The one off 7”s, the bands that were fantastic but would never cover costs, the playing cards (they must be worth something now, no?), the totality of it all, was what made Flying Nun, Flying Nun.

But that was then and this is now. Flying Nun…the thing that really was FN that is…ceased to exist in any real terms about 2000. It had long been owned, partially at first, by Rupert Murdoch and / or Michael Gudinski, who were bought into the picture some years earlier by Simon Baeyertz from FMR to provide a much needed financial lifeline. The relationship worked well initially. Mushroom was a silent partner in NZ, but provided funding and international support, and as a result of that the Headless Chooks, Chills and Straightjacket Fits all made headway outside New Zealand. And Mushroom Publishing got their hands on the FN publishing catalogue which was a potential goldmine.

After Roger left the label was helmed successfully by Paul and Lesley from the dusty Queen Street offices with the same ethic, until about the turn of the century, in a corporate (the hand of Murdoch cannot forever stay hidden) cost cutting measure, the whole thing was uncomfortably squeezed into FMR’s tiny offices in Scanlan Street in Grey Lynn.

And that, despite records coming out on the label, and signings to the “Flying Nun” label being announced, was when the label started by Roger out of a notion that these undoable things could be done, back in 1981, effectively ceased to exist. There was a winding down process over the next years but a massive full stop was clearly placed at the FN story when its benevolent parent was closed down last year.

Very good, inventive and smart, people have worked with and on “Flying Nun” acts since 2001 but it’s a brand, a logo, and that’s all it is. And even more so now that it’s a desk in Warner Music International. That’s not Flying Nun, and never could be. I know things change but owning a name doesn’t mean the legacy automatically comes with it, and in this case the thing that was is no longer, and hasn’t been for some years.

That said, the ethic that was Flying Nun lives and breathes in New Zealand. There are a dozen examples I could point to, but Loop fits the bill as well as any. Or check out the list of labels here. If anyone should be celebrating the 25^th Anniversary of the founding of FN, its labels like these that couldn’t exist without Roger and his crew.

An after note: the iTunes shuffle bought up Toy Love’s live (at The Cook) version of Positively 4th Street segued into Yummy Yummy Yummy as I finished this post. I guess there is an odd coincidental irony in that…

more more more / how do you like it Having been wandering around Bangkok for a while, I've not been posting recently but will shortly. In the interim, peruse this piece on Idolator, wherein Universal CEO Doug Morris illustrates so perfectly the twisted thought patterns that have put the major record companies in such shit...there is little I could add beyond the phrase unbelievable. Out of touch, out of time, but I guess he's got good stock options so what does he care...