Night and dark

Another Guy Fawkes Night has passed, and tomorrow I'll be off to work in the morning, kicking spent fireworks on the street as I walk to the bus.

Guy Fawkes Night is our national guity secret. We have no claim to it, and little good ever came of it, save the delights of children in wicked firelight and bangs and cracks loud enough to wake the Devil.

Trooping the Guys, Oamaru, November 1936.
Photo courtesy: Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19361118-49-4

As a child, particularly in the Seventies, I loved Bonfire Night and the excitement of fireworks, took part in enjoying the casual availability of firecrackers and rockets once pocket money became a factor and have plenty of good memories from years of marking the event: genuine actual rural community bonfire nights in Morven, an hour up the road from our home town where real Guys were wheeled around before their ritual immolation for various charitable ventures. I remember Tom Thumbs, Po-Has, Golden Rain (stop sniggering back there) and Roman Candles (but not Doublehappies), and my Dad nearly burning a hole through his new wooden fence with a shonkily-nailed Catherine Wheel, and I remember school friends who'd work their way through toy plastic soldiers and a pack of smaller crackers, doing what schoolboys have done to toy soldiers since time immeasurable. My memories aren't unusual, and do count for something, but I'm happy to have them in the past when the present means that public displays (especially in the bigger cities) are much more spectacular, better run, safer and free, and I haven't bought a firework (sparklers included) in nigh over twenty years.

But the whole thing is an absurdity placed where it is, and when it is to this day: during Daylight Saving at a seasonally dry time of the year in a past colony when even Australia don't observe the festival. It's a throwback.

You know where I'm going with this. Every bloody year, newspaper editorials about grass fires, damage to property, cruelty to pets, and worse in the past (skyrocket fights between the towers of Otago University's Unicol hall, for example)Yes, I think, as I mentioned earlier, we need to move fireworks to another time of the year in the Southern Hemisphere. Remove the barbaric Jesuit Plotter observance - it is literally meaningless in New Zealand, serving only as an excuse for jokers to bring out the perennial gag concerning Fawkes being "the only person to enter Parliament with honourable intentions" (ho ho), move any actual fireworks to a winter month like, say, July, and stop the public sale of fireworks altogether.

of course, this is exacly what the Wellington City Council did this year, observing matariki as a true winter festival of light, and while the night was cold, the publc still came, braving a waterfront chill to be assured of a good show (slightly delayed due to an errant whale in the harbour, of course) at a child-friendly time.

Fireworks AND Parliament. Matariki 2018

So there - proof of concept, and we'd have the unending thanks of emergency services, the SPCA and parents of very young children the country over.

Red Pique

So then, we have a contender for a new flag for New Zealand, though many of us did not ask for one, and many of us who would like a new one did not pick this particular choice. Still, that's STV voting for you, and as Cardinal Borusa said, there is only truth in numbers (and Jamas breaks down the whole fatal exercise with statistological swagger here!)


NZ Herald's Rod Emmerson provides his take on the process.

For what it was worth, I was a Red Peak man. Aaron Dustin's Red Peak, or 'First To the Light' to give it its formal title, completely passed me by in the top forty line-up, and like a few others I'd say, it completely won me over during its social media campaign to at first get on the ballet at the eleventh hour, then into the running for the final vote. Ah, but we Peakers lost and the tea towel / clip art / T20 cricket uniform one of Kyle Lockwood's two submissions (TWO! Two colour options of the same flag account for fifty per cent of the final four? I'm still astounded at this) was the winner on the day.

Boo.

A popular image, flipped for continuity's sake. 

The final vote, it seemed, was always going to be about the fern - that problematic emblem that the Prime Minister repeatedly said he preferred, featured on all of the original four finalists, apparently immediately identifies us and makes other countries think we like feathers. Oh, honestly, don't get me started. I had a favourite for the first time, and it lost. I may take some time to get over it.

But when Red Peak emerged via a concerted social media campaign, it seemed at the time that the closest thing to a public nomination from the forty finalists as opposed to the Panel's four picks) had materialised - and when I read its story, I pretty much fell in love with the whole thing. But one mans treasure is another man's 'Lefty anti-Key rag' or similar, and it seemed that amidst the criticism of the final four, even a new pretender couldn't get a break. The lesson here, as a sage on Twitter remarked, is that social media is no replacement for mass engagement.

Essentially I liked Red Peak for many of the same reasons other did. It didn't opt for lazy Kiwiana symbols, it didn't kowtow to cringing concerns about identity or history, and it actually is a great design that sufficiently fulfils the criteria set by the Flag Review Panel: it was simple, versatile, timeless, had elements of symmetry, reduced well, looked great at rest and flying, and unlike the Lockwood flags, it didn't look like a make-do collision between the past and the future. I short, it looked like it had actually been thought through and designed afresh (Lockwood's is ten years old in its three iterations), and - yes, it tells a story. The creation story woven into (but not intrinsic to) Red Peak evokes Rangi and Papa, and may not be to everyone's tastes, but I like it. Maybe now we can have the flag for Paparangi?

Moving on, the final vote, between Lockwood's fern flag and the existing ensign takes place in March. I'm dreading it as a believer in public engagement, someone who is at best ambivalent about the existing design, a fan of a losing flag, and a detractor of the new alternative. I think I'll hold my nose either way, and fear I'll vote for the existing standard out of equal parts spite and good design.

Let's try this again in 25 years, for the bicentennial, shall we?

New Plymouth

November is a month for new places - New Plymouth!

New work gets me out an about a bit more these days, so here are some pictures of New Plymouth. 

I really like this place, having never seen it or touched it before having to go there for work. The locals are friendly, hard-working, and ever so cynical about the beauty of their surroundings, from the black oily coastline with its tumbling surf, shoot-green lowlands, and the spectacular maunga Taranaki - ancestor, adopted name of the region and its people. There's money and dealing done here, mainly in energy and farming. The local beauty is just a side hustle.

The city is also arty - home of the Govett Brewster and rippling-chrome Len Lye galleries, and whalebone/tree fern Te Rewa Rewa Bridge. It's rather photogenic; don't think I've used my camera phone so much in one day

And like smaller places it has quirks. Intriguing second-hand shops, old architecture, and curios. I haven't even mentioned the Bowl of Brookland (because of work I haven't had the time to visit it!)

I will return - soon, of course, for work. But hopefully not too long before I can bring the family.

All the Jackals and the Undead

"All the jackals and the undead just can't wait to wipe the last of us out
First there were others like us, then there were none."

I didn't intend to blog about this again, so apologies, but this has been on my mind for the whole week.

The Fantastic Four is crashing globally in cinemas, the latest in a long series of battles it has had to fight since day one. Why? Lots of reasons: director hassles, studio hassles, reboot hassles, fan anxiety - that last one for me is the clincher. Logically The Fantastic Four property should not have a large and influential fan base - its last movie was in 2007, and Marvel cancelled its comic line last year, pointedly killing off likenesses of Fox's forthcoming movie in strip form (real classy, guys). And yet I think fan activity, and in particular fan vitriol has played a large part in the negative pre-publicity of this movie. And it seems I'm not alone, here's award-winning writer Peter David's view.

Look, films are hugely difficult things to make, and lots of films - sometimes incredible films  are borne of terrible shoots. Marvel' Studios' movies have not been immune, with directors leaving films during or pre-production (Thor 2, Ant Man), and even some of its most celebrated creators seemingly swearing off the whole game (stand up, Joss Whedon.) But it makes big, successful movies, and it has a very large and very vocal army of fans who apparently resent any studio who has 'their' heroes. Two years ago it was Sony's Amazing Spider-Man, this year it's The Fantastic Four. This fan resentment, fan entitlement is expressed online on websites like Comicbookmovie, where fan made 'editorials' are the by-word for the site's existence. The bad mouthing turns into a partisan headline, and this bleeds through to modern news media which, under-resourced and fighting for relevance in an ocean of free competition, jumps at clickbait articles for its own hits - and with that imprimatur fan opinion becomes reported as fact.

Of course I'm over-simplifying, and of course FF's troubles are many. But bad press sticks, and I still think this film has been unfairly maligned by... 'enthusiasts' with questionable loyalties. And poor judgement. You kids want a Fantastic Four movie series, and you think the way to do this is to sabotage the box office of the current movie - and that the average movie-goer will notice the difference when it switches studios and turn out in droves? You're crazy. And you deserve your stereotype.

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Fandom makes me uncomfortable most of the time. I've made the best friends I have ever had through fandom, and yet I take to social fandom like I take to dancing - under duress, with great awkwardness, and best left after a few drinks. It's not a club to which I readily subscribe; I just get a bit lost amongst it, Organised fandom can be a toxic thing, but it can be a wonderful and supportive thing as well - and some fan communities can be lovely, bonkers collectives of mutual enthusiasm.

And when a group shares the love with its fans, neat things can happen - like this, the official video for The Darkness' title track off their latest album. Ostensibly a song based on the character of Crow from Hawk the Slayer, more than a few reviewers have taken its defiant tone as the voice of a dying music form: pure, fun rock and roll. Fittingly then, a fan army provides the backing chorus in the track, and some appear in the video - a shambles of awkward, excited enthusiasts, bouncing, dancing, singing and just enjoying themselves. And that one particular fan - what a mover! Well played, sir. Well played.

Who's made an Exhibition of himself?

Whups - this was supposed to synch with Jamas' post, but nevertomind...

In our on-going adventure into local exhibitions Jamas and I checked out an add-on to last month's Symphonic Spectacular, a temporary exhibition of Doctor Who at Capital E. Now, we very nearly walked right past this on the day due to Capital E having been temporarily relocated post-tremors last year for earthquake re-rstrengthening (alarmingly, Al and I still use the Land Sea bridge which roofs the original site on a regular basis for our walks). The nwe site is in the TSB Arena, next to the main doors, local folks, and you should check it out. It's free for one, and it'll take five to ten minutes of your time.

Handles!

What's there? A smattering of props and replicas from nearly every era of televised Who. Naturally the TV Movie Doctor played by Paul McGann has no props to speak of*, having been auctioned off or junked years ago, or are otherwise in A-Merkin hands, but just go with it. I did.

You'll see a Dalek (classic series), a Cyberman (new series), a TARDIS (new series, 90% scale but still noisy and lovely to stand next to), and a couple of masks, replica props and costumes. I believe my cultural companion was amusingly faked out by thinking he'd encountered a Matt Smith ensemble on display, but wouldn't you know it - it was the Dream Lord all along. Still, the mood seemed right for him to indulge in this particular show of horseplay, and punters being as low as they are, nobody seemed inclined to kick us out, despite CLEAR NOTICES SAYING DO NOT TOUCH BEING BREACHED IN THE ACT.

Like a lot of Who stuff for public consumption in this enlightened Eccleston Tennant Smith Capaldi era, there's more than a hint of exposition about the display, with monitors looping key scenes from each Doctor - even the Eighth (but pity the poor Capital E staff trapped there with nothing but the same footage in their ear all day!), and a chronological wall chart which maps the series and more key moments over the past fifty years. Fifty years is a lot to chart in a room as small as this one, but it's well organised and mostly harmless. In all, a fine little diversion.

 *okay, maybe some Eighth Doctor stuff in that there's some knitting.

The Aztecs: Conquest and Glory

Last week Jamas and I checked out the last week of Te Papa's exhibition of the above name; and you can read his thoughts here! Good stuff - we started by getting in on concessions (a quiet midweek day, school holidays all but over, working in our favour)and I had approximately an hour to dash round the exhibits before my own personal Cortez arrived in the form of the end of my lunch break.

Aztec culture interests me, albeit from the distance of too little learning - I haven't even seen the Doctor Who story in question. Most of its appeal to me is simply visual - I can't get my brain around some of the gods' names, let alone my tongue, and on the whole I find their culture equally fascinating and baffling. But their visual aesthetic is simply remarkable, from their codices and their literal version of sequential narrative (almost a comic strip with blank speech balloons) to their carved linear, geometric motifs combining animal and human forms to realise their beliefs in highly un-naturalised mirrors of nature.


Pop culture would have us believe that the Aztecs were a sophisticated society who almost revered death to the point of savagery, usually involving bloody sacrifice to one or more of their pantheon. The exhibition did little to dispel that notion, although to its credit places ritualised death in a reasonably natural context; that is to say, it stresses enough that beyond the spectacle (and boy was there spectacle in those sacrifices) the ritual was 'normalised' to meet a specific, regular calendar of harvest and god appeasement. Yes, having one's heart torn beating from out from under your ribcage is brutal, but this took place within an ordered society extremely close to nature, where wild animals, disease, famine and enemies could provide as awful an end, and without the questionable lead-in of a year's adoration by your butchers and heavy drugging on the day. Were the Romans any better in the days of the gladiatorial arena? We've come a long way in the west from such concerns, and such a degree of contextualising - death has become more abstract, more personalised, less a community reality; and sacrifice is something we reserve for the heroic, and those who might choose it for themselves, not those preordained by a deity. In short, it made me think a lot about death in ways I hadn't appreciated.

I wasn't expecting to see so much of an emphasis on death, though. Astonishing to see masks made from bone, a replica temple to Mictlantecuhtli, the actual sacrificial stones which topped their great pyramids. Having said that, though, my perusing companion was keen to point out Te Papa's own models of an Aztec community market and farm - and they were indeed lovely models, and served to balance things out pretty well.

Of course we know the end, or can piece it together among the fragments and the stories. Cortez, the fall of Moctezuma, and real slaughter, senseless sacrifice, and the erasing of a culture out of greed and conquest. I prefer an exhibition that flows chronologically, but there's no getting around the very final full stop that the appearance of Conquistador armour, with its crow helmet and interlocking metal plates, swift and merciless sword and, later, the transformation of offering bowl to cross-emblazoned baptismal font signifies. Death might have been at the heart of Aztec society which desensitised and normalised it, but the godless death those invading swords brought must have been beyond understanding to the mind of those people. Skirmishes between villages with equivalent weaponry - not to dismiss those ruthless looking obsidian blades, is one thing, but Cortez brought a war machine, with weapons and swift beasts (horses not being evident in Aztec culture) to mow down whole villages in a day.

In short, a really interesting, and thought-provoking exhibition. Glad I went.

1985: Ich bin ein Britischer

I am 15 and my world is expanding.

This isn't going to be a Video Affects post, nor a Manic Street Preachers one, although the video below is useful for more than just illustration. In my mid-teens my musical tastes went Northward, to the United Kingdom. Obviously, thanks to the Summer of Pop and the early Eighties British Pop Invasion the presence of a wide range of popular music from the Mother Country on New Zealand radios would have led to a lot of young teens such as myself building a music collection which had a particular geographical bias. Thanks to that, and after a brief dalliance with West Coast US rock, through an even briefer interest in NWOBHM, I settled on following British music almost exclusively - Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran, The Police and Sting, U2, and eventually The Skids, The Clash, and The Smiths. For a while I could see no point to the sunshine and sweetness of American pop, and resisted the likes of Madonna and Prince to follow acts which I thought, in my tender years, spoke to me more about how the world really was. Goodbye California Girls, hello Eton Rifles.

Quite silly, of course, and by the time I'd left home a good few months of university life fixed such notions and I was adding The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth to a palette that even at high school couldn't quite manage resisting College-radio era REM. But enough listmaking, it's making me feel all weird and old.

The thing about following British culture, as I did in my teens, was that half a world away it seemed to require an additional investment in background cultural accumulation. Reading comics (Eagle, 2000AD) that over ten years would move from nodding at contemporary novelty newspaper headlines and TV ads through to actually quoting Morrissey lyrics; following TV series (The Young Ones, Spitting Image, Black Adder, any number of Comic Strip specials, New Statesman, Red Dwarf) that were the product of a new wave of politicised young comedians - all of this demanded some sort of context to it, and working out the relevance of terms like Special Patrol Group, or names like Scargill, Tebbit, Lawson... Thatcher.

At least the last name needed little introduction. Margaret Thatcher's political career spanned many more years than my teens, but her eleven years as British PM overlapped them neatly enough, and culturally she was everywhere, perhaps more than any other Prime Minister since Churchill. Looking back it seemed the political landscape of Cold War Eighties was dominated by these huge and polarising world leaders - Thatcher, Reagan, a succession of doomed Soviet Presidents culminating in Gorbachev, the formidable Bob Hawke, and here the outwardly sharp-witted David Lange, an orator king who'd thrust our defining foreign policy riposte into international waters - out Anti-Nuclear stance. This seemed like a brilliant burst of desperate hope compared to the grim picture painted by the songs, programmes and stories I'd read and watch and listen to. Polarising leaders inspire entire cultural movements in revolt, and so my music collection also acquired tones of political protest - The Specials, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and The Proclaimers. Only  my following all of this seems now more than a little disingenuous - a combination of good tunes and unfocused adolescent fervour. A far cry from those early Eagle magazines and their Falklands-themed pull-out posters of Harrier jump jets and MIG Foxbats. Culturally as well as politically the Thatcher years as I experienced them as a teenager still resonate in the movements and phases that followed - angry small press-inspired comic titles like Deadline and Revolver, Britpop's courtship and rejection of Tony Blair's New Labour, the stories of Ian Banks and Irvine Welsh, and even the shape of modern Doctor Who. Thatcher's death this week is a strange thing for me to mark then, her past career seemingly forming the bedrock of an artistic reaction that I could only really experience vicariously. It all seems so distant, geographically and chronologically; and as I type this with Tramp the Dirt Down playing in the background I feel I'm no closer now to the heart of it than I was at fifteen, seventeen or twenty.

My Rainbow Connection

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a fact that quite frankly blows my mind just a little.

We had a Spectrum, my brother and I, after months of attending the local Computer Club and watching the slow transition of those in the group from the modest but limited ZX81 through to models that were a little more ambitious in memory and performance - including the Speccy. Money was saved, cases were argued (including the old chestnut that it would improve our education) and, eventually, as a family we made the trip down to Dunedin to pick up the new addition, all 16 kilobytes, peripherals, manuals and polystyrene packaging of it. It was a big moment in my adolescent life. I was thirteen and this looked for all the world like the future in our spare room. We loved our ZX Spectrum, lavishing it with hours of our developing lives and crafting it a fuzzy blue workstation of its very own, with holes for its coaxial cables and a shelf for its cassette player. Within a year or so we made a further plunge and with the help of a school friend, upgraded our little beauty to a more impressive 48k.

Let other blogs and sites tell of games and cheats and fledgling forays into BASIC and COBOL; my Spectrum experience was forged in site of these. I was no programmer, although my early attempts at computer graphics started with our home machine; nor was I a gamer, my lot in digital life seemingly ever to be terminated (with extreme prejudice) around the end of level three of every game I've ever played. My Spectrum experience was however an immersive one: lured by glossy ads and the promise that my comic heroes (Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, Dan Dare) would be realised in interactive, noisy 8 bit form. I became savvy to the Spectrum phenomena of marketing and fan culture - the slick advertising that promised so much (even if it delivered slightly less), the cheat-sheets and playground negotiations of these and bootleg game cassettes, the specialist magazines with their infinite lives pokes and codes. Every day trip to Dunedin had to involve two shop visits: to London Bookshops for White Dwarf magazine, and to David Reid Electronics, who'd sold us the computer and had many more cheap games and cassettes to copy others on to.


Somewhere amidst travelling with Bilbo Baggins, collecting Chuckie's Eggs and Jet-Setting with Willy I grew up. I learned the shrewdness of brand recognition (Melbourne House games were often literary based - The Hobbit, Sherlock Holmes, earnest but very well put together, Ultimate games - Sabre Wulf, Atic Atac, were punchy, dynamic, imaginative and innovative) and brand loyalty (I spit on you, Amstrad! et cetera). I learned my limitations as a programmer and gamer. But I communicated wit other kids about our shared interest in the computer, I made friends, and by god I actually got more out of it than I put into it. That's a rare thing in life right there. In time the world moved on: my friends upgraded to C64s or Amigas, and our school BBC Micros became robust, cuboid early Apple Macs. Ten years on from our ZX Spectrum I was eventually writing university essays on a word processor, then using email, Telnet, and eventually the World Wide Web. Technology, as George Lucas would modestly put it, had caught up with me. But my first love, for ever and always, will be a slim, black box with rubber keys and a non-threatening 80s-sharp rainbow flash on the corner.