A month and bit away, you forget….

• at the office today the power on the second floor, which just happens to be my one, all went down
• even when it’s on it’s such a low wattage that we continually blow it all the time by just plugging in something like a fan
• we paid some guy US$800 as an unofficial ‘fee’ in May to upgrade it in ‘a few days’. He now won’t take our calls but the guys who work for him said, when they turned up to repair it, some six hours after they said they’d arrive, that it was now ‘sata minggu saja sampai listrik siap’ (one more week). Sure.
• then the internet, which was running on go slow, which is saying something where 50kbs is ‘broadband’, simply stopped. The ever reliable internet company (as in ever reliably, unreliable) sent someone who said that it was because we had turned the router off. We had not and it magically began to work without his assistance although we had to sign a bit of paper to say it was our doing. As soon as he left it died again. I rang the company, whose help desk seems vaguely literate, and they said it was a repeater issue all along, down the road. That I’d signed a bit of paper taking full responsibility seemed to be neither here nor there. Whatever. It came back on shortly after but was even slower.
• the power guys fixed the power on my floor and said it was a dodgy thingy in the power box and it would be fine now. Ten minutes after they left it blew again. I gave up and decide to read the Jakarta Post online, using an extension lead up the the stairs. The story that most intrigued me was the one about the new tax guy in Indonesia, who seems, sadly, to be as tainted as the rest of them. I guess after winning the election, albeit with some controversy , SBY has taken the firm decision to take a breather in the fight against the corruption that eats Indonesia alive, and it’s business as usual for the boys.
• then I came home and saw that the cellphone bill was $30 this month…it was so high this month as we’d used roaming extensively.

Big hat tip to Stuart Page, Johnny (who knew him well), does Elvis:

And Elvis does Johnny:

Brigid says that arriving at Auckland’s airport always feels like arriving at the farm after any time spent overseas. Of course that’s rather unfair but it did make me laugh at the time, and mostly it’s defined by the cheery folks from MAF, in their overtight walkshorts, or the Waikato families waiting for cousin Reena or Aunt Mini.

And to be clear this ain’t a criticism or a snide way of saying that New Zealanders are not sophisticated or are overly parochial. It would be both untrue, and for reasons of personal safety, very unwise to suggest such a thing. But it would also be absolutely untrue to suggest that you can’t spot a New Zealander in crowd without hearing a word or an accent, regardless of how sophisticated they may or may not see themselves to be.

A few weeks back I received, via an email link, a promotional video for Auckland. It was, I’m told, made for other New Zealanders to see, to entice them to come to the big smoke, and wasn’t aimed at we expats at all, but despite that, and having not been told that, I was sent the link by an expat site that added me (without asking me, mind) to their mailing list.

I liked it, and said quite nice things about the way it made me feel. It warmed me, made me feel a bit fuzzy and, yes, homesick. Not because it was particularly good or great, although it was pretty well executed, but mainly because it looked like nowhere else on the planet. I’ve mentioned that to a few folks in NZ and mostly they’re bemused. One friend said something to the effect that ‘but Auckland has grown up a lot in the past few years’, which was pretty much what people said to me when I came back in to NZ in the 1980s after a few years away.

We’re a defensive bunch, are we not?

You get the same sort of reaction when you dare to opine that, an hour or so a day, and only if you are on the wrong bit of road, Auckland doesn’t really have any major traffic issues. In fact, when put next to just about any city in Asia, the roads are pretty much empty day or night. But instead of being rather glad about that, such an observation is usually met with a rather clear ‘but you don’t drive over the bridge or to Manukau’.

Well yes, but I have many times and I’m still of the opinion that it’s rather light. And, just to cap the offense off, you’re all, with the odd exception, rather polite and generous drivers. I like driving in Auckland, although the roads outside the city are another matter altogether and I found my trip a couple of weeks back to middle of the North Island a bit harrowing.

I’m rather unsure what people mean by ‘growing up’? Are we talking about the much touted Gucci store in Queen Street. If so, I gotta say I don’t think that hi-end Postie Plus, as found in every two bit suburban mall in Asia really counts as ‘growing up’. Maybe it’s the food..yep, big range, wonderful wine at incredible prices, and lotsa places to eat, some very adventurous, but Auckland has been punching high in an epicurean sense for years, once you leave the fine dining end which is mostly dull, as sadly are the high end attempts at Asian (like the awful Soto‘s sad overpriced Japanese…yes I know it wins awards). But other cities the world over also have great things to eat (and I write this having just arrived from Singapore, one the great places to indulge in most things).

The thing is, I don’t want Auckland city to grow up, or feel the need to grown up, whatever that is. I just want it to be Auckland. It’s wonderful: wonderful people live there, you hear wonderful things everywhere, smell wonderful smells and roll over wonderful lush hills to wonderful and quite extraordinarily vistas, wonderful things happen there every bloody minute of every day and I rather like it as it is, even with it’s shitty architecture and rather clumsy attempts at being Sydney or LA, and it’s garish try-hard moneyed set. And it has the most beautiful harbour in the world….EOS.

I love Auckland and I love the way that I could look at that three minute promo thing and ten seconds in, know I was looking at no other city in the world.

And it’s not always particularly sophisticated, although it’s easily the most urban precinct in NZ and our only real city, or quite as cosmopolitan as it’s inhabitants may think but neither is it the rustic backwater that Australians, for example, or many New Zealanders offshore like to imply. It sits quite comfortably in a vague space between the two descriptions.

I guess I’m homesick.

Going thru old cuttings I found this (abridged) review of the Screaming Blamatics Roadshow written by a Tim Brown for Salient:

When one considers that he was writing about Blam Blam Blam, The Newmatics, and The Screaming Meemees at their prime, and the songs he was dismissing include such iconic titles as There Is No Depression In NZ, Marsha, See Me Go and Riot Squad, one wonders if Mr. Brown has yet crawled out from under the rock marked embarrassing cultural missteps.

Revenge is a dish best served etc……

*yes I know I’ve misquoted

Received today:

From the Desk of John Freeborn Chambers
56 Elizabeth Avenue se10 0dx
London, United Kingdom.
Email: barr.johnfreeborn@gmail.com
Tel : +447023035974

Attn Friend,

I am Barr. John Freeborn Liburne, one of the solicitor to late Micheal Jackson and i am based in the united kingdom. I want to use this opportunity to tell you about Micheal Jackson. Jackson is my client who died recently due to an acute sickness and am sure you have heard about it because it has been in the news and the internet. Before he passed away, he has assets worth $25,000,000.00 (twenty five million U.S Dollar) which needs to be claimed by next of kin. Fortunately, the next of kin does not need to be a blood relations according to the agreement i signed with late king of pop.

As Jackson solicitor, i have concluded to transfer the sum of $25 millions, which late Micheal Jackson left in my custody before he died. Am contacting you independently and no one is informed of this communication. I am prepared to simply nominate you as the next of kin and have the banks release the deposit to you after due Verification. I have every data and how the fund were deposited. I would have gone ahead to ask for fund to be released to me, but that would have drawn a straight line to me and my involvement in claiming the deposit.

I am aware of the consequences of this proposal. I ask that if you find no interest in this proposal, you should discard this mail. I ask that you not be destructive or vindictive. If my offer is of no appeal to you, delete this message and forget i ever contacted you. do no destroy my career because you do not approve my proposal. I promise to also furnish you with every information you may need concerning the proposal.

I am not a criminal and what i do, i do not find against good conscience. This maybe hard for you to understand, but the dynamic of my work indicates that i make this move. Such opportunity only comes one in life time. I cannot let this chance pass me bye. I have found myself in total control of my destiny. I ask that you do not hinder my chance. If you will not work with me,let me know and let me contact someone else who will want to make it in life.

There is a reward for this project and it is a task well worth taking. I have evaluated the risks and the only risk here is you refusing to work with me. I am the only one who knows of this situation. I think good fortune has blessed you with a name that has planted you into the center of relevance in my life.

If you find yourself able to work with me, let share this blessing. I send you this mail not without a measure of fear as to what the consequences, but i know within me that nothing ventured is nothing gained and that success and riches never come easy or on a platter of gold. If you give me a positive response, i will initiate this process towards conclusion. Do no betray my confidence. If we can be of one accord, we should plan to meet soon. I await your kind response soon.

Most respectfully,
Barr. John Freeborn Liburne
John Freeborn Chambers

The joys of rummaging around:

As far as I know this is the only shot of Freebass playing at Cause Celebre, or for that matter anywhere.

The Take Me Back gig has forced me to dig around a few old boxes of bits and pieces and I’ve found all sorts of stuff that I’d either forgotten or thought I’d lost. One of which was the one-off Karen Walker Box jacket whcih I wore last Saturday night and could’ve sold a dozen times or more. I mused about Trade Me-ing it but wiser voices told me to think better of it, so I’ll hang on to it.

But this photo really jogged my ongoing paranoia that we are, in New Zealand at least, slowly losing so much of our musical heritage, even relatively recent stuff like the Freebass album I profiled a few weeks back here.

The disappearance of the the Flying Nun catalogue is one thing. It’s mostly no longer available in any format, physical or digital but the reality is that it likely will appear again at some stage, once Roger’s purchase of FN becomes a fact, or somehow someone knuckles down to sort it.

It has that sort of cultural momentum.

That’s great, but history has largely rewritten, or been rewritten to exclude the other 95% of New Zealand audio releases from the pre-digital era which is a huge crime.

Just looking at the era I’m rather involved with, from about 1977 through to the the current day, although narrowing that down to the pre-1995 part of that span, there was a vast body of NZ music recorded for labels that were not Flying Nun, and it’s not unfair to say that after about 1987 FN was rather conservative in it’s outlook and that many acts moved mountains to distance themselves from the “Flying Nun Band” tag. In the North Island at least the most innovative music from that era, and most needing preservation in 2009, or in danger of forever disappearing into the abyss appeared on labels like Pagan, Deep Grooves, Southside or on a raft of smaller indies and artist owned labels.

Sure large slabs of popular music are being archived in places like the Sound Archive in Christchurch, but unlike Australia, Canada, the UK, or just about any developed country, where efforts are successfully made to keep much of what has been recorded available to the public via reissues, digital and so on, much of what was released in New Zealand, no make that most, looks likely to disappear into the abyss in the not too distant future. And the Sound Archive is focused primarily on radio and Maori archiving, rather than the history of our recorded music, thus they don’t always know what things are, or what they need to prioritize. An attempt to initiate a focused recordings and master tape archive was rather ruthlessly shot down by the last Labour Government.

It rather feels like time is running out for a lot of stuff, and there is much which has already gone from the pre-77 era, which, given the disbursement and passing of many of those involved, it probably is, so I guess a large part of our musical heritage in NZ will quietly slip into the past forever in the years to come.