Inter­view with one of my best buddies.…..

Chad Tay­lor is a New Zealand born nov­el­ist whose most recent novel, The Church of John Coltrane, was pub­lished in France in Jan­u­ary — in French. Tay­lor cur­rently lives and work in Lon­don, where he is work­ing on the final edit of his sev­enth novel. Prima Sto­ria vol­un­teer Jane Robert­son recently caught up with Tay­lor in a café on Brick Lane, in London’s East End, for a can­did chat about gen­re­less­ness, root­less­ness and open endings.

[From A Con­ver­sa­tion with Chad Tay­lor ~ Prima Sto­ria]

See, I know famous people.….Chad’s new novel is out in France now

It always seems like one of those places that man was not meant to spend much time, let alone live. And, yes, it serves its purpose…it’s a place to put the politi­cians when they’re not open­ing things, and, more impor­tantly, it’s a per­fect place for a ferry ter­mi­nal to the very lovely South Island.

But, yes, like most New Zealan­ders, I have mixed feel­ings about Wellington…for those of you not in New Zealand, it’s our cap­i­tal, a city of some 400,000 (although the core is about a third of that) perched rather hope­fully on the lower tip of the North Island, look­ing rather war­ily at the rather rough (and some­times deadly) straight of water between it and the South Island. More to the point..at the often blus­tery weather that blows off that body of water.

My good friend Damian Christie too seems to have mixed feel­ings, so much so that he put fin­ger to key­board and wrote a rather good, and very funny piece about the city from a vis­it­ing resident’s POV.

I sus­pect, with good rea­son hav­ing been on the end of count­less anti Auck­land barbs over the years from res­i­dents of the south­ern town, who seem oddly obsessed with Auck­land, and even more frus­trated by the fact that no-one in Auck­land actu­ally cares about their obses­sion, that Damian will suf­fer end­lessly in com­ing weeks, per­haps years, as these things tend to fes­ter some­what in the cap­i­tal, for this. It’s a place that, unless you want to see count­less vari­a­tions of cock­tail reg­gae bands, you need to look hard to find other diversions.

He’s a lawyer…he can take it.

Indeed Wellington’s entrenched Napoleon Syn­drome far exceeds the odd Syd­ney / Mel­bourne snipe, or Lon­don / Man­ches­ter back and forth…its quite odd, often nasty, and prob­a­bly says far more about Wellie than any­thing else.

How­ever, this post was not about Wellington’s com­plexes, it was intended to plug Damian’s rather cool opin­ion piece in the (July?) Metro. I have to be hon­est, I didn’t buy it, but that’s largely because Metro is, well, tricky to come by here in South East Asia. You can of course get parts of it online, but for some very odd rea­son most of the edi­to­r­ial is not online, at least until some­time after pub­li­ca­tion. By their very nature, in 2007 city mag­a­zines should be online, and, hon­estly, I can’t think of one from any other city any­where that’s not. No, I was lucky enough to be sent it, via email, from a friend who thought I might enjoy it.

I’ve spent many, many hours with Damian over the years and he’s a man who speaks his mind, albeit with a sly grin.

Thus, D takes firm aim and resoundly takes no pris­on­ers, feel­ing as he does, that it’s:

Like a booby trap in an Indi­ana Jones flick, every new per­son you meet rep­re­sents those spike-encrusted walls inch­ing closer. This is life in Wellington.

As said, you can almost feel the heat ris­ing from the Lamp­ton / Court­ney / Cuba nexus, and the protests of we have art and cul­ture, which Simon Wil­son attempts to toss at the North­ern City in an ear­lier Metro piece….but I couldn’t help but feel­ing that Simon could have eas­ily con­densed his hun­dreds of words about the Queen City to the fol­low­ing few: you are too messy and you need more politi­cians to fix it…oh, and you are all philistines. The last bit needs to be chanted over and over. Oh and Simon, nobody in Auck­land actu­ally gets their style from Wendyl Nis­san, its just non-Aucklanders that think we do.

The inevitable claims as to Auckland’s pedes­trian unfriend­li­ness always bemuse me though….Akaroa is pedes­trian friendly…cities almost never are by their very nature. I like Akaroa too…

Damian cov­ers this well too:

The vil­lage men­tal­ity is a double-edged sword for those who attempt to be sin­gle in Welling­ton. It’s easy to meet peo­ple; impos­si­ble to avoid them later.

And:

Unless that is, there’s a southerly blow­ing. A friend down for the week­end remarked on how much we all dis­cuss the wind direc­tion. She couldn’t under­stand why, until it turned southerly. When it’s southerly you hold tightly to the car door as you open it lest you take out a pass­ing cyclist. When it’s southerly you don’t take an umbrella, no mat­ter how hard it’s raining.

Whether Metro is any good or not now, I don’t know. The first War­wick Roger edi­to­r­ial tenure was good, but for much of the rest of its his­tory it’s been both shock­ingly facile and shal­low, and per­haps a con­tribut­ing rea­son for the Welling­ton­ian mis­view of New Zealand’s only real city. It cer­tainly has had lit­tle to do with what actu­ally goes on in the city I’ve lived in much of my life, and Auck­lan­ders, with their wal­lets, indi­cated years ago how irrel­e­vant it was. Peo­ple within the city (but not those with­out) stopped pay­ing atten­tion a long time ago.

But Damian’s thoughts are both good, and very funny, and worth your time and money. My friend Harry in NYC, who’s seen the story too, said it was very John Cooper-Clarke, and so it is, espe­cially this killer:

Wind and weather is to Welling­ton con­ver­sa­tion what the prop­erty lad­der is to Auck­land. Welling­ton weather is, in fact, inde­fen­si­ble. “You can’t beat Welling­ton on a good day” say the absolutely pos­i­tive crowd, but of course you can. You could be some­where good on a good day.

Go Damian….