As I walk away from you / as I walk away from you

I can’t leave Auckland behind without commenting on what is an increasingly bizarre and irrational political situation. On my not infrequent trips back to New Zealand I’m always hit with how overwhelmingly wealthy the place seems to have become. Not stinkingly, offensively wealthy with extremes next to grinding poverty as you find in much of the world, across Europe, Asia and much of the Americas. No, there is no real wealth in global terms in New Zealand despite some having aspirations, but neither is there much real poverty as found elsewhere. Poor but not no drinking water poverty.

No, what always hits me, from Ponsonby to Mangere is a rough equity, across a range of course. New Zealand, especially when you consider its lack of natural resources al la Australia, and lack of population, has done rather well for itself in recent years. The populace is well fed, largely healthy, well educated, and has, with obvious exceptions, an economic stability it’s never seen before, at least in my lifetime. It’s as close to a real democracy with all the freedoms that requires as any society has ever been in history. It’s a happy, largely peaceful, clean country with an excellent infrastructure. The economy has boomed over the past decade and everyone who wants a job has one, and one which pays, despite the banging-on about trans Tasman inequity, as well if not better in real quality of life terms than virtually everywhere else on this planet. People take pleasure in whinging about all those things but seriously, get on a plane, look, get a life for god’s sake.

It’s a very different place to what it was ten years back.

Which brings me to the bizarre. Everybody, seemingly, wants to change all that. You rarely hear a good word about either Helen Clark or the Labour government, and the word seems to be its time to go.

And no-one really, if you ask, seems to know why.

From my perspective, quite some miles away, but still very interested, the glaringly obvious question seems to be are you all barking mad? Forget the policy vacuum that John Key seems to be…oh that’s right you’ll get small “tax cuts”, and despite National’s shocking historical track record, they are ‘business friendly’…forget any personal feelings that you may have towards the current PM (although whenever one mentions NZ in this part of the world the listener inevitably says, with thumb up, “Helen Clark”..she’s given the country an aura of respect it didn’t have before in Asia)…forget everything else and think back.

I know that a large part of the electorate is too young to really remember but it is worth reminding them and everyone else what it used to be like under a National government. The grey, divided, depressed and depressing place that Labour inherited in 1999.

And what it would have been like under a National government just a few years back when National shadow ministers were urging NZ to follow, without question, the US into Iraq.

But think further back to what National governments meant to NZ. Under National governments we had dawn raids; Bastion Point; Springbok tours, with hugely divisive and violent riots up and down the country; troops dying in Vietnam; crippling think big projects that NZ paid for, for decades, with no real gain; team policing units that rampaged through inner city Auckland batoning and beating all and sundry with little provocation (I saw it many times); gross economic mismanagement that was handled, ludicrously, by artificial price and wage freezes and Stalinistic controls; the IRD was told to take the gloves off by minister Bill Birch which led to suicides and ruthless bankrupting regardless of the human cost and viability of the business attacked; a tax system that taxed top earners at 66%; an arts sector that was grossly underfunded; and slashes in benefits that threw many onto the dust heap and has caused social problems to this day. Couple all that with an unnecessary and quite depilating national torpor and I certainly have no desire to go back to those dank old days.

How soon we forget….

Technorati Tags: New Zealand,politics

I wanna be in Auckland toniiiighht........

Two weeks in Auckland town..thoughts from an expat….

1. "I find it hard to say, because when I was there it seemed to be shut."

That’s how Sir Clement Freud saw Auckland rather famously some thirty years back. In the interim Aucklanders love to feel their city has grown up somewhat. And indeed it has in many ways. There is nothing as breathtaking as sitting in a café in one of the city’s many beach side cafes looking out on the world’s most glorious harbour (Sydney eat yer heart out..you don’t even come close) on a sunny day. Although that breath may be somewhat tempered by a) the inflated price one is charged for the privilege; and, b) the fact that the food served is more likely than not, shocking in places that have such views, or sit in other exulted inner city eating suburbs. To be honest, in my experience, good food is increasingly very hard to find in Auckland (four thumbnail sized, very chewy prawn cakes at Magnum for $10 anyone?) however the quality of the wine on offer rather tends to dull that disappointment, albeit once again at a silly price. And yet with all that, when Auckland does do eating well, it does it exceptionally well. Like Il Buco’s pizza in Ponsonby Road, or the lovely Richmond Road Café. Or the wealth of hole in wall places a long way from the harbour or Ponsonby that get my preferred custom.

Or the music and parties like Turnaround.

Yep, much has changed but in 2008 sad to say there is a lot that hasn’t. Auckland is still closed. One tends to forget when you’ve been away for a while how much New Zealand is still at the end of the world..indeed, at the end of the known universe. That’s nailed home by the rotating DHL world map in Kuala Lumpur’s Airport which omits New Zealand. Or by the glaring absence of the swathes of luxury brand stores, the Amanis and the Guccis and the like, which fill the malls around the world, for better or worse. Or their mid priced equivalents like Top Shop. None have bothered. NZ gets Postie Plus instead. Or perhaps it’s because Auckland is still, three decades on, more or less, shut. I went shopping a couple of days after I arrived..looking for less tropical wear than I’d bought, and it took a moment or two before it hit me..everything was shuttered up. It was 6.30 on a Wednesday evening..a glorious one at that..and everything in Auckland was shut for the day. I’d forgotten, I really had, that in this wee country at the bottom of the world, everything shuts at 5.30 on the dot. So much so that I was told it was closing time and I had to leave a few days later as I browsed for a magazine. Sorry….

In any city of a similar size, or aspiringly cosmopolitan as AK, anywhere else on this earth, a shopping precinct like Newmarket or Ponsonby or Parnell would be happily open to 9 or 10, seven days a week. But not in Auckland….nope, as you finish work, we close! And then we have the multimillion dollar upgrade to Queen Street, which despite the whinging, is a clear and much needed improvement. But what the hell is the point if the place is closed. Queen Street should be open until 9 every night. The tourists must walk up and down there in absolute bemusement. Unless you want a plastic tiki, its shut.

2. Someone needs to tell the good men folk of inner city Auckland that facial hair, aside from a well groomed goatee, is never ever cool. The whole ‘mo-vember’ thing was a worthy thing but that’s all it was. Can we please say goodbye to the upper lip fuzz now. Mos are not and never have been attractive.

3. I’m continually amazed at how few Aucklanders, and I guess it’s even more pronounced once you leave the travelling big smoke (s) as their idea of OE is usually getting drunk in Earls Court and a bus trip around Europe, have any real knowledge of the world past Sydney or the Gold Coast, and even less of Asia. Seriously when the worldly TV channel owner asked me if life was good in Thailand….ahh, I live in Bali…isn’t that in Thailand?....are you over the tsunami yet..and so on, I’d had enough. And such was repeated over and over again over the past two weeks.

4. Both Brigid and I reeled from the dramas. How can such a little town have so many personal dramas, and, to be frank, totally messed up people..people who should, and have known better. It’s terrifying. At every turn you find people, often old friends, at each other, and others staggering from drama to drama, or worse, completely fried. And, overwhelmingly fucked up or recovering from being fucked up from excessive drug use (both legal and illegal…it’s not just the scourge of meth, the booze imbibed daily is both shocking and appalling and we both found ourselves slipping into it again). Once again, you have a false sense of nostalgia, soon shattered, and you forget, you really do, when you are away. The consumption gives the world a dark grey sheen that many seem to live under. Maybe its my age.

I leave Auckland this time really quite scared for a lot of people I care a lot for.

 

And just to, perhaps, lighten things a little again....found in KL

          

We thought that we had the answers / It was the questions we had wrong

Am I the only person who can see the blatant hypocrisy in Paul McGuiness ‘ Cannes comments, as I look at the U2 flavoured iPod, and recall those omnipresent TVCs. I guess not…

What exactly did he think was going to go on to those, as he puts it “burglary kits”??

And to say, as he does…

Those were the days when iTunes was being talked about as penicillin for the recorded music industry.

In 2004? When talk of Mp3 piracy was as rampant as it is now…seriously Paul, are you that ignorant or simply willfully trying to cover your arse.

How are those $200 ticket sales for U2 going? Or that remastered CD set of a twenty year old album for US$30 list price…?

And a question Paul...if we say no to your ideas, will Bono go away.......

Technorati Tags: iPod,Paul McGuiness

Get Yourself Another Fool

Back in NZ, It does feel like the land of the rip off at times. Leaving aside the price of gasoline (and that fact that the local oil companies seem to be the only major commercial organisations in the world that have never heard of currency hedging) and consumer electronics (why is an iPod about thirty percent more on the street in New Zealand than anywhere else I’ve been, or for that matter any Apple product; or a cellphone at Vodafone or Telecom’s on-account “subsidized” price way higher than someone in any High Street offshore can obtain).

No, I’m going to leave those to one side but instead whinge about a couple of corporate cons that have rather pissed me off personally in recent weeks.

Vodafone raise their head again firstly, in particular their roaming charges. In NZ we accept that our cellular charges are some of the highest in the world. But these are dwarfed by the cellular charges when reversed from some countries. I have two cellphone accounts, one, with Vodafone in New Zealand, and one with Telkomsel in Indonesia. And have had the opportunity to use both to send SMS messages to NZ. Telkomsel, as with all local Indonesian cellphone companies charge about NZ8c a text to send such a message. However, if you use a NZ account, via an Indonesian network the honest souls at Vodafone charge you 80c for the same privilege, and, assuming that they can buy the time off the Indo cellular networks for the same price that a customer there can, are raking in a 700% profit. They’re certainly loyal to their customers. What great guys.

Then we have the fine folks at DHL NZ. We’ve had the opportunity to send two one page letters from Bali to this part of the world via DHL in recent weeks. The first was sent via our account at DHL NZ, and we assumed, as long standing customers we’d get a preferential rate. The invoice arrived and it came in at an astounding $102. Rather taken aback we went and paid cash for the second. It was available to me, as a person walking in off the street, for under $33. In other words, as a customer I was paying three times as much as a random joe-blow. In the interim we’d also had a street quote from DHL Indonesia to send a parcel to Hawaii. It was $250. Thinking our account would give us an advantage we’d used that, and were billed $392.00 as a reward for our loyalty.

We’d been royally screwed both times.

Vodafone NZ and DHL NZ…what bloody great people. They deserve your business because they really look after their customers.

As you were….

Technorati Tags: Vodafone,DHL,Rip Offs

And in the end / you have to play the game

Over at Allmusic.com, professional critic (of which I’m always rather suspect) Richie Unterberger seems to take some great pleasure in pointing out how derivative the classic NZ bands of the sixties were. He, of course, always tames it with a comment about how fine the odd track was.

He’s largely right of course but he misses the urgent passion that NZ’s isolation produced. Even a pure pop band like The Hi-Revvin Tongues had a raw something about them, and the best of the era, like the HRT, from the catalogue of Eldred Stebbing’s Zodiac label, and others like it, exuded something that would not have been out of place on any of the Nuggets albums. They all made acceptable noise in isolation.

That was all forty years ago plus. New Zealand is no longer, or least should not be, musically isolated. And in the decades an awful lot has happened to the loose genre now tagged as “kiwi music” (as much as I hate the phrase, it does get used and carries something with it, no?).

So some forty years after The Underdogs’ seminal Sittin’ In the Rain, one of the greatest New Zealand singles of any era was released, comes a report card..well two actually..in the form of the two CD Kiwi Hit Discs #100, from NZ on Air.

The first disc, in a nicely embossed digipak, celebrates what it claims are the key tracks from the era of the Kiwi Hit Disc. The second is the normal round up of 15 or so current tracks aimed at radio programmers.

And over 100 discs, which is quite an achievement, nobody can really say that Brendan Smyth and his varied crew have not achieved what they set out to do, which was to get a lot more music made by New Zealanders on the radio. End of story.

Others disagree with the way it was done, and what was presented to radio and I do too, but I don’t go as far as to criticise Brendan etc…their target was clear and it was not to make qualitative assessments. My disagreement is that the brief should have been tighter, but it was not. Please don’t blame Mr Smyth, the messenger, who has done his defined job superbly, with pressure from every angle.

However with all that in mind, taking a broader view of things, it ain’t healthy out there, it really isn’t. Mainstream radio in NZ is, putting it bluntly, playing fuck all NZ music. Especially if one takes a couple of radio fodder friendly acts out of the mix, like Brooke Fraser (who is perfectly radio friendly in every way but is so vacantly soulless she makes Leonard Cohen look like a sexpot). Check out the airplay charts at Radioscope…the number 16 NZ track does not make the Airplay Top 100, and the bulk of the Top NZ Top 15 sit in the overall airplay chart under number 30 with a bunch of songs I bet you’ve never heard on the radio.

All of the celebratory disc that comes with KHD100 consists of tracks which have had massive radio (and popular) success over the past decade and a half and are mostly ingrained in the NZ psyche. Like em or hate em, they are our songs, as per the slogan. Songs like Lydia by Fur Patrol….but the terrifying thing about the disc is that is all they are. With the solitary exception of How Bizarre (oh, and Supergroove whom I hear everywhere in Asia, but they really predated this system), not one of these tracks has had any success beyond New Zealand’s shores. Bic Runga may well have had some critical success and a nice picture with Jimmy Page in Mojo, but that’s about it. And that is an appalling statistic. And a failure of the NZ on Air system (but not a failure of those who targeted NZ airplay) which has allocated large sums of money towards foreign success, beyond Australasia, without any result whatsoever in original contemporary music, despite what the media tells you.

And that brings me over to the other disc. If the first was the report card, this is like the fifty lines on the blackboard for failure.

Listening through this, three times, I understand why. In a year that produced astounding music internationally, is this the best we can do, seriously? Almost every end of year round-up I’ve seen included names like Burial, LCD Soundsystem, Radiohead, Justice and dozens more. Innovative bands and artists one and all, and each record perfectly crafted and of their time. Put anything on the Hit Disc next to any of those acts, or to Amy Winehouse, the Robert Plant / Alison Krauss album , the noisy Arctic Monkeys and they are seriously wanting..and that is very generous.

Everything therein simply sounds resoundingly, and glaringly old fashioned. Admittedly some, like the first track from the Electric Confectionaires, sounds like fashionably retro sixties. But the problem is that that that fashion came and went about five years ago. Now it just sounds dated, shoddily produced, and, yes, flat (even if the vocals are not flat...they sound it). And the song needs to be edited. I put it on two days ago and someone, without knowing who it was called out “my god, that is awful”. They are right. And that’s the best track on there. Well, almost, track 11, by The Little Bushman is rather good.

How can you compete when you are not even looking the right direction.

Where are the standards that all this radio play was supposed to bring, the honing of the art, the songwriting. Where are the songs you might hear in LA and feel a twinge of pride? Sadly missing, on available evidence. There is not one track on KHD 100 that doesn’t sound dated, poorly recorded and derivative. Nothing that would leave a demo disc in much of the world. Sad but true. Where is the innovation and edge that is going to ensure that KHD 200’s Celebratory disc does not speak the volumes that number 100 does.

So where is it….well thousands of NZers could tell you it is out there. This used to be land of musical innovation, and guess what, it still is. It just ain’t getting through. 

Technorati Tags: New Zealand Music