What a Great Country This Is / like fuck it is

I note, with some bemusement, the story in the Herald about the failure of the website designed to lure expatriate New Zealanders (of whom I am one), back to the mother country.

It’s not really a surprise is it.

What a silly idea, dreamed up in some boardroom full of overpaid shirts trying to extract a fat fee from the government, and I’m sure it did. The only surprise is that someone was gullible enough to buy it, to think it might work. To think that those who have left might be prodded to return by this, is just silly. Even if one was to read it and take it seriously it fails. It simply tries too hard to convince the reader that something is happening and repeatedly tries to imply that New Zealand has made the jump from mediocrity to exciting. Witness the music and entertainment pages…so try hard…so “look, its all happening here”. And its all so unnecessary and thoroughly insulting to those of us who know that exciting things have always happened in New Zealand, that the only real difference now is the momentary interest the mainstream are now taking in the undercurrent. Musically, I’m still not sure if the recognition is a good thing, if the voluntary quotas achieve much more than a blanding of the centre. Certainly the “New Zealandness” of the music being foisted onto the airwaves, as the record companies direct all their efforts towards commercial radio play, seems to be lost, especially in pop. R’n’b and New Zealand’s hip hop are another matter. Try as it might, many of the urban sounds coming out of NZ do not sound like the massively polished sounds coming out of the US or the UK. It retains a naïve clumsiness about it and more power to that, it’s an individuality that gives it spark. And then there is Fat Freddy’s. I don’t like the music particularly but I love them for the people power it indicates, and the voice it gives to my belief that the tryhard aspect of the failing website is unnecessary. Things are happening in NZ, and they always have been and the lack of this is not the reason many have left.

One of the things that has driven many, myself included, away is intolerance. I was terrified by the failure to criticise and the acceptance by the media of inherent racism in the National Party’s election campaign last year, and the way in which so many of my countrymen rallied to the bigotry. I had hoped we developed beyond that. Any I find myself uncomfortable with the creeping mediocrity and aspiration to mediocrity that I see, and the media celebrates.

I hate the rules, the lists of bylaws that greet you as you arrive at the beach, the fascism of the road rules and the way they are enforced. I know these exist for a reason but it is the layering of these on top each other over and over again, with the myriad of other regulations and rules that neuter the soul. There are things like the mess that New Zealand’s Employment law is, administered by the overpaid, out of touch with reality, buffoons that call themselves the Employment Relations Authority who encourage a whole new industry of parasitic ambulance chasers.

Those are some of the things that drive us away.

And then there is the case of Phillip Sturm. I really should say, before I go on, I know Phillip. Not well, at all, more in passing, and I’ve never had a conversation with him beyond small talk. I should also say that I have not seen the court records and my understanding of this case comes from what I’ve read in the media and, more importantly, from people I know who are privy to the details, some of whom were witness to some of the events surrounding the alleged offending.

To say this stinks is a massive understatement. Nothing I have heard or read indicates that is anything more than good old fashioned gay bashing. Over one hundred years since the British establishment drove Oscar Wilde to an early death, on the other side of the world, in the old Empire we continue the grand tradition. Yes Sturm is guilty, but only of being a promiscuous gay male, and not a particularly pleasant, as those who know him will attest, human being. Neither crime should put him in jail for nine years. But it has in clean green NZ.

The evidence that Sturm drugged and assaulted several men is ludicrous. None of the drugs alleged to have been used by him are capable, as hundreds of thousands of highly respectable New Zealanders know, in the quantities alleged, of the stupefaction required to substantiate the charges, and the original judge was correct to toss that out. That a second trial and the appeal court overruled this indicates that the whole notion of justice is a farce in New Zealand when applied to those who don’t sit in the centre of society, who don’t play the game. I reside in a country now which the world derides for its corruption but this case went down a country which is trying to sell itself as one of the great places to live, a sophisticated, haven of lifestyle.

The whole case is an evil nonsense, and confirms the notion, that the earlier witch trial of Peter Ellis made many of us believe, that New Zealand is not necessarily a place we want to live.

And no one says a word….

It’s just an opinion, ok

1. A window into a society or a culture, it seems to me, is indicated by the way they ride their bicycles. A silly statement, perhaps, made after countless hours avoiding the very many slow, happy, meandering cyclists here on the streets on Bali. Australians tend to ride their cycles aggressively as if they are more important than they are; New Zealanders, with their silly hats (yes I know why they have them) don’t seem able to work out whether they are riding a cycle or aspiring to a motorcycle; Germans ride clean bicycles on designated pathways and park them tidily in the correct place; and Americans always have more gadgets on the bike than they need to do the job. The Indonesian ride is best done at a pace which somehow defies the natural pull of gravity to pull them over at that speed, and involves a glazed, content look. Tidak Apa Apa…it doesn’t matter.
2. Dear Ms Caro….NZ Film directors seem to have this infuriating habit of making a wonderful, groundbreaking, and moving movie and then, almost without hesitation rolling over for the Hollywood dollar and the house in Malibu. Witness Lee Tamahori (or perhaps not). Once Were Warriors, still, after all these years, fucks with my mind. The first time I saw it in a theatre, the whole place left after in complete silence. Now, I’ve seen it half a dozen times and every time, despite the familiarity, it chills me, and I crave that alternative happy resolution that we all know will never come. But, Lee’s work post Warriors is relentlessly nothing…not good or bad but simply Yankee nothing. Roger Donaldson is another (although his No Way Back may be the highpoint of Kevin Costner’s career but, really that’s not saying a lot), and he has, last year, finally done something worthy of his talent. But how many years did that take. I want to wave the flag and go yeah..look, a Kiwi, but when it’s the likes of Cocktail, its hard. So….. If I’d wanted to watch Erin Brocavich, or whatever it was called, again, I’ve would’ve watched it, not made the mistake of spending two hours on a lame poor cousin of it called North Country. And how bad was the bloody courtroom scene. Whale Rider was not Warriors, or even Quiet Earth or Smash Palace, all of which I regard as NZ masterpieces, but it was still a fine, fine film and something to be proud of and work from, so what happened? Was the lure of the big house too much or is it, I hope, a clever foot in the door, and better is to come. I know we don’t own you or have a right to expect anything, it’s just that we do…regards, disappointed of Sanur.
3. I wonder if any mainstream politician in America has the balls, the dang gumption, to actually stand up and tell the truth about Iraq to the US constituency. To date, none have. Both Democrats and, more so, Republicans, still cloud their rhetoric in a façade, in a myth, the right with the something called “freedom and democracy”, with “winning”; and the left with the “bring the troops home” bullshit. No hint of liability or responsibility for destroying a people, for the deaths of god knows how many…
4. I don’t get Mariah Carey. I really don’t. She is gruesomely ugly (I’m not usually one to make judgements like that, and I don’t feel that comfortable doing so but she insists on popping out all over my screen and it’s not pleasant. She made the choice to put herself up on show); she can’t sing…well she can but it’s a mediocre caterwaul at best; her materiel is generously best described as sub mediocre; oh, and she can’t act. And she’s not even doing the Watuzi on the boardroom table with Tommy Mottola anymore. At least when she was on Sony, her success made logical sense. But now, I don’t understand. And I really don’t want to. Not that she cares…
5. I wasn’t born to co-exist with snakes. I’ve known a couple over the years but I mean the ones that exist in the wild (and in our garden) here in Bali. Brigid almost stood on a brown thing a few weeks back, on the front steps. We (well, not actually me) cornered it in a hole before Gustu, the gardener, filled the thing in with fast dry cement, so I guess it remains there. Yesterday, a barking dog, the dachshund, caught the household’s attention and Brigid found it head to head with a raised, flared Cobra in the garden. Pulling the dog away by its tail, the, now experienced reptile-er, Gustu, dispatched it with a stick and put it outside in the sampah, the rubbish, only for the guy over the road in the motorcycle repair place to come over, bite its head off, and eat it raw. This is not Ponsonby…..

As they Pulled Me Out of the Oxygen Tent ………..

This is really a post without a home, a series of, to quote myself, unrelated thoughts about nothing in particular.

I’ve spent the past two days crawling around unventilated sawdust and grime filled factories in central Java, in temperatures about the mid forties, chalk in hand, inspecting furniture.

And my wonderful Brigid is still there.

And I miss her tonight.

Last night I was in a bar in Jogja, about ten feet from the President of Singapore, a Mr Nathan, who was on his way to meet the Sultan, I’m told. Most taxi drivers in Singapore will tell you he is little more than a puppet, a façade for the real king boss, the omni-present Mr Lee, who now has “retired” but rules through his son, the Prime Minister. Taxi drivers allegedly reflect the pulse of public opinion globally but, really, tend, I think, to talk rather more than listen and are a little less reliable than their reputation would have you believe. Still, scratch the surface in Singapore and the democratic glean is replaced by a good old fashioned self preserving autocratic first family, of immense and growing wealth. All the talk in Singapore seems to be what happens when the old man and Mrs Lee pass on, and it can’t be long. All bets, it seems, are off…apart from the certainty that Lee Jr will be looking for employment fairly quickly as he gets jostled out by the next generation of real players. Spend any time in Singapore and you’ll know there are plenty of those.

Friendly, polished dictators have always been popular with American politicians of all shades. I stood reasonably close to another a few weeks back as he exited, with help from a selection of unamused goons, from his car. I rushed into the hotel, saying loudly to Brigid….”Suharto is here”, then, after a glare from the concierge, thought better of it.

It’s not everyday you stand next to a military dictator, a man allegedly responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of half a million or more. We didn’t get to chat….

He was quite short..at least age had shrunk him. Impressive he was not.

I had a quick squizz today around the editorials in the US media. Not the big stuff but the little newspapers, which I always find more fascinating and less pretentiously clever than many of the NYT or WaPo’s rather self important columnists. I swing through these from time to time and the drift of opinion is always interesting. Post the damage control speeches this week from the obscene buffoon in the White House two things are evident. Firstly, right now, Bush is fucked, about as fucked as a politician can be, although I don’t underestimate the inane ability of the US public to swing back; secondly, it’s for the wrong reasons. There is no guilt over the needless deaths of unnamed and uncounted tens, perhaps over a hundred, thousand Iraqis. No sense of communal responsibility for rushing gung ho, with overwhelming joy into this, for re-electing the man who, by the time of the 2004 election had so obviously manipulated and knowingly created a war with a lie. Instead, they don’t like him because he doesn’t have an “exit plan” to save the asses of the good old boys out there fighting for “freedom”. Until they find it in themselves to admit the fault I doubt they will ever find it possible to work towards an “exit plan” which provides justice for those they have wronged, not merely a safe return for “our troops”. The United States owes Iraq that and they are a long long way from it right now. The editorials still muse about “victory” and there is a delusion that such a thing is possible, a failure to realize that even if Iraq mutates overnight into a grand and peaceful democracy, the United States has long lost this war in so many ways.

Perhaps I need to lighten up a little. My current reading doesn’t help. Having finished Martin Short’s biography of Mao, feeling so completely insignificant and struggling to balance his evil with his genius, I’ve now plunged into William Taubman’s intriguing biography of Nikita Khrushchev, a man, whom all reason tells me, should never have been more than a sycophantic cog in the Soviet machine but ended up bringing the planet closer to Armageddon than any man before or after; and, the massive tome from one of the hard right’s great bogey men, Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization. I looked at this for weeks, fondled it in Singapore but resisted due to size and price. However I need to read this. My respect for Fisk is immense. Of all the commentators he was and is there and has been for a very long time. His detractors sit, mostly, in Eastern US cities sporting forth bile, and I can’t for a moment imagine the likes of Kristol and Novak actually removing themselves from their comfortable worlds, and fat column fees, long enough to experience what gives Fisk the substance and credibility they lack. That coupled with the fact that virtually every prediction he made before and after March 2003 has come to be. And he has as little time for brutes like Saddam and he has for Bush who is no better. So, when Amazon offered a deal on it….it may take me weeks to come up for air, but I’m hoping to be all the better for the commitment.

I want to understand you see….

I’ve been listening to Elvis Costello’s live My Flame Burns Blue and I don’t know what to make of it, whether I like it or feel it’s another string to those who decry the mans decline. The ego of Costello irks me somewhat these days, his opinion of himself is clearly increasingly inflated and I think, perhaps he should leave the jazz-lite to his wife, although his take here of his Almost Blue is vastly superior to Diana’s. Its all in the voice and Costello has that over her. I hate Diana Krall’s voice with an irrational passion.

Maybe because I’m such a big fan, and a completist…I buy, or con from record companies, everything, although not in every format as I used to…I’ve listened to this quite a bit in recent days and there are moments, and it grows here and there but only just. And to be honest, with the possible exception of God Gives Me Strength, the originals of all his own tracks herein are vastly superior. I guess he has every right to make this record, I’ll give him that, and I’m not demanding a return to 1980, but it feels mostly like pointless bar, albeit a big bar with an Orchestra, fluff sadly. I’m far more excited by the prospect of the forthcoming collaboration with Allen Toussaint, due in the next couple of months they say.

Uh....Perrrrrfect………………………….(almost)

They are a phenomena of our times I guess, compilations I mean. Well, not compilations per se but intelligent compilations. There have, of course, always been compilations...well since the early seventies when they were first visited en mass as a marketing concept.

In New Zealand we were plagued with dozens of Solid Gold Hits and Platinum Plus type collections and the normal K Tel nonsense. These generally had the tracks “abridged” by some record company twerp in the studio “in the interests of giving you as much music as possible”. They were, relentlessly, complete shit - badly mastered and pressed on the cheapest vinyl with appallingly designed and realised sleeves. They were without exception, complete crap without any vestige of virtue beyond increasing the members of RIANZ (the old boys club that serves the interests of the record companies) annual turnover, not that there is anything wrong with that, that’s their job for gods sake….it often bemuses me how record companies come under so much criticism for doing exactly what they are intended to do.

The irony of all those compilations is that they have now become vaguely collectable and cool, which just goes to show that one generations complete crap becomes the next ones gold. Odd….

Of course there were the odd great collections but they were few and far between, so much so, that they often exerted an influence beyond their few tracks. I’m thinking of the Motown Chafrtbusters Series, or the very cool Hard Up Heroes collection of obscure Decca beat groups that I thrashed daily for god knows how long.

Punk and the rise of the indie label changed it all somewhat but these tended to reflect contemporary music and were not intelligent, annotated thematic compilations of the sort I’m talking about now.

The last few years have seen so many fantastic compilations, it really is very hard to keep up. Sometimes, for me, I already own half the bloody thing but the theme works so well, or the liner notes are so damned readable, or the there is a track or two I need beyond rationale, that I have to own it.

I find myself playing and exploring these quite a lot. I tend to ignore the ones where they are a) mixed, as I want the tracks, the songs without something bumping over the top when I least want it; or, b) full of re-edits by the compiler. Dave Lee and Dimitri are especially bad at this, providing pointless ego-driven re-edits of some classic that didn’t need it. That said, when Dave Lee gets it right, he really does. I’m currently thrashing the Destination: Boogie collection on his Z label, a bunch of fairly obscure, to me at least, and I was buying and listening to a fair amount of black music of this ilk around that period, and this really takes me back to those dirty London clubs I was hanging out in around then.

Co-complied, and wonderfully annotated by the ever dependable Sean P (and I wonder just how much of these albums Sean actually does and Joey puts his name to, to sell records y’know…), I love this early-to-mid eighties electro funk period. It’s come into its own again in recent years but I’ve never stopped listening. Check the rather fantastic Long Enough from some variation of The Last Poets or Colors’ Am I Gonna Be The One, pure throbbing electro-bass synth bliss, complete with the obligatory me-or-her talking bit. My only real complaint is the lack of production, songwriting or licensing credits (which may have something to do with the lack of, ummm, licensing, on this album)…if you are going to release a collection for the trainspotters, you have to give it all to us…

Souljazz are the kings at this sort of thing and I tend to buy many of their collections simply because they are so damn good. There have been a couple of duds (I think the Studio One thing is being dragged out a little, but only now) but, mostly they hit the proverbial nail. I love the second New York Noise album more than the first, which had a few too many tunes I knew too well, but this sort of fucked up, drug phased raw, often simply wrong, funk is timeless. Their prototype hip hop collection, Big Apple Rappin', is a loveable and timely replacement for my much played vinyl collection, Back to The Old School (complied by Dave Lee many years back for his Republic label) but the two, while they cross over, really are going to complement each other. I love rough, passion driven, under-produced noise and this is just that, pushed along by the grime on the street as much as anything. Wicked….

And I’m gagging for the forthcoming Tom Moulton comp. In a similar vein, Salsoul’s Mixed With Love, their collection of mixes from the legendary and crazy Walter Gibbons is both captivating and frustrating. Captivating in that the first 2 CDs show one of the greatest master craftsmen of his era at the height of his powers, his rework of Loleatta Holloway’s Hit’n’Run still, after all these decades, causes me to shiver in awe just a little; and frustrating because, firstly, most of CD 3 is pretty awful and that is sad, as his eccentricity overwhelmed his music, but, secondly, and even more so, because CD 3 did not need to be so decidedly average. What the world really needed was a cross label anthology so we would get the likes of the percussive and very special (as in, you’ve never heard so much space in a disco record) I’ve Been Searching by Arts and Crafts, or the mind-blowing Treehouse / School Bell, a remix of an Arthur Russell journey, or the two versions of Set It Off on Gibbon’s own Jus Born label.

So with that in mind, maybe someone will do cross label compilations of Larry Levan, or eighties Francois K, Shep Pettibone, Jellybean or Arthur Baker (before the coke kicked in and he started doing Bruce Springsteen mixes etc, for the cash). They’d sell at least one of each to me….

Oh, and I also like the Arctic Monkey’s album a lot…does that make me a fashion victim….

How can you lie back and think of England / When you Don’t Even Know who’s in the Team

The flight from Bali to Singapore this week, Garuda 840 to be precise, was easily one of the more bizarre I’ve taken. Not the actual flying bit, mind you, but the vista presented on board the plane itself.

Somehow we ended up in Little Odessa.

Large groups of Russians in Bali on holiday are not unusual at all and you often see a chartered Tu-154 or whatever it is, parked at the end of the tarmac waiting for its passengers to finish their tropical respite and Bintangs before heading back to their dreary (I assume..I’ve not been there) northern winter again. There are also plentiful stories of high level Russian businessmen and politicians flying whole plane loads of working girls in for their holiday entertainment, which may explain why there always seems to be two Russian aircraft on the tarmac at any given time.

I’ve walked into restaurants to find the whole place reserved under various Slavic names, and I’m told that the hotels find Russian guests to be well paying, polite and generally agreeable. And the working girls contribute to the poolside somewhat. They add to the colour and flavour of this island I guess.

I’m generally fairly nonchalant about flying; I’ve done so much in recent years. Get on, read, listen to music (this time Billy Bragg did the trick mostly), decline the food, get off. Its all pretty much habit and I tend to rather ignore most other people on the aircraft. However, as a rule, I don’t expect swarms of low level Russian gangsters on the plane, with their young trophy wives and little Boris and Ivana in tow. I’ve usually flown Singapore Air on this route and this is the first time on the Indonesian national carrier so maybe it’s the routine here but, whatever, it provided a bit of a humorous distraction to the flight.

Heavy, cheap, leather jackets are rather unusual in Bali anytime of the year and don’t exactly blend but even more so during the steaming intense humidity of the tail end of the rainy season. I imagined we must’ve been witnessing the return leg of a package tour for a Muscovite “social” club or something similar. My favourite was the largish guy, in his mid forties with a worn, somewhat grizzled face, pudding bowl haircut, cheap pinstripe suit, and black shirt with white braces and a wide white leather tie. Mrs Whitetielov was about 23, in a very brief black mini dress, very low-cut with a push up bra; high, clear, porn-star shoes and a two year old on arm. They handed each and every flight attendant a copy of their personal calendar complete with a picture of junior, dressed in a Santa outfit standing beside a Jeroboam of some sort of unknown “champagne”.

I guess you had to be there. I’m glad I was.

Singapore was, as Singapore is. I have a love / hate thing with the city, having been there some 12 times in the past 18 months for god’s sake. Generally the love thing lasts a few days before ebbing and the ebb is propelled by the appalling service virtually everywhere, the humourlessness and soullessness of the place and the commercially driven facelessness of so much of it, and probably a few more ..lessnesses I can’t think of right now. The positives, well, I’ve mentioned the technology and the food before. Oh yes, the food…its worth another mention, it really is. In New Zealand we have the ingredients but we do so little with them. Food, outside the interesting little ethnic places, is, throughout New Zealand, dull and overpriced almost without exception when you put it next to the food almost anywhere in Asia. Then again, it could be worse….you could be in London.

But, as Brigid said, there is something missing. I’m hoping to be in Jakarta next week which is a city I really love. There is something very much the same about the two cities but, as Brigid said so well, Satan would find something to smile about in Jakarta, but not Singapore. I know which I prefer.

And talking of small nations punching above their weight, this whole Dubai ports thing absolutely perplexes me. There is a story here but it’s about the cronyism and corruption of the Bush regime; about the Carlyse Group and the Bush family links to the traditional Middle Eastern power structures; about Halliburton looking like they will get the contract to administer this in the US. It’s not about the security of the United States or alleged holes in such from the sale of their ports to an Arab consortium, a theory so wrought with holes I can’t take it seriously.

What perplexes me most is the exhibited xenophobia on the part of, not only the US right, from whom you would expect this, but the self proclaimed Liberals who are also screaming security threat loudly. Whilst it’s an obvious way to get at Bush, and anything that knocks another ding in the armour of that prick has its merits, this time I have to want to say stop (not that anyone will listen of course).

Sadly this has more to do with the fact that this company is Arab and Muslim owned than any real threat to anything. If this company were taking over similar ports in the UK, or Europe, where the threat from terror is as real there would be none of this nonsense. I hate to use the word racist because I don’t know where xenophobia, driven by 9/11 and endless TV broadcasts of suicide bombers in Iraq and Palestine, ends, and the R word starts. But simply put this is an irrational fear of all things Arab. Forget about the fact that the term Arab applies to a vast swathe of people across thousands of miles; forget about the fact that the US is probably less at threat from a country like Dubai than any other country in the world; forget about the fact that these business people, hugely successful that they are, are hardly, in any rational terms, allow their multi billion dollar company to be used and potentially destroyed to further a terror attack on the USA.

No, the only fact that seems to matter is the racial grouping of the owners of the company.

If there is any further indication of how far Osama has affected the psyche of America and played upon the global naiveté of its people, then this is it. He must be, wherever or whoever he is, rubbing his hands together in glee at the US response to this.