Month: November 2023

Link-blogging away like it was 2009: What other people are writing

…I’m bogged down in a pre-Christmas pile of actual money for my words work, so content here is a little sparse lately, but that doesn’t mean other people I know aren’t writing away!

Way back in the Paleozoic era of blogging, we used to link to each other all the time. These days, with social media becoming a bigger dumpster era fire than ever, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to cut out the middle man again. Here’s what some friends and colleagues have been doing online lately that floats my boat:

* I’ve beavered away on the edges of music journalism for most of my career, and it’s grim times for it at the moment in New Zealand. My mate Chris Schulz has had a far bigger music writing career than I ever did, and he’s rightfully been on a bit of a crusade lately about how arts journalism is dying in Aotearoa. Case in point, when I moved here 15+ years ago there were still several magazines regularly covering NZ music and reviewing it. That’s all gone now. Can the internet save us, or something else? Schulz spoke to RNZ and others recently trying to draw attention to this problem and has been regularly banging the drum for music journalism on his own Substack – all well worth a read!

* I watched the first Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special on the weekend and it was a delightfully silly romp, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate back for a run after an unfortunately kind of dire period for Who. Jodie Whittaker being the first female Doctor should’ve been a groundbreaking moment, but her performance was swamped by a lot of truly terrible writing, insanely convoluted plots and overacting, to the point where I only watched about half her episodes. (I also never want to hear the phrase “fam” again.) I thought about writing about why even though I didn’t grow up with the Doctor, I’ve grown to dig him ever since wonderfully eccentric Christopher Eccleston came along as Doctor Number Nine in 2005. But I realised one of my best pals is not only the biggest Doctor Who fan I know, but quite possibly the biggest Doctor fan in all of New Zealand. Let friend Bob tell you 101 reasons why Doctor Who still rules after all these years. I’m hoping that the excellent-looking Ncuti Gatwa coming up as the Fifteenth (!) Doctor leads to a bold new era for the good doctor. 

* I’ve worked a bit with Asia Martusia King (NZ journalism is a small place, dontcha know) and just have to point out what an utterly terrific essay she wrote for The Spinoff last weekend about quite possibly the most macabre teenage job I’ve ever heard of. I won’t spoil it, but read the first sentence and tell me you don’t want to dive into the rest: “My first corpse was on a soft and honeysuckle Tuesday, a lovely afternoon to die. I did it for four bucks.”

* So New Zealand had an election about six weeks back, and it’s taken that long for coalition negotiations to settle on the new government, which looks to be the most conservative we’ve had in well over 20 years. You’ll find hot takes, angry takes, gloating takes all over the place about that, but I want to single out Susie Ferguson’s fantastic analysis piece at RNZ that zooms in on one Auckland electorate won by a libertarian/centre right third-party candidate, and why it actually proved that America-style bible-thumping theocratic conservatism has yet to really work in New Zealand (which, IMHO, is a very good thing). Go read: The meaning of Tāmaki – the most fascinating election race

Totally metal: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the riff

Growing up, I would never have called myself a metal fan, but I was surrounded by it, and it turns out years later it seeped into my bloodstream, lurking, coated in hair spray and spandex. 

I’m no metalhead, but music of my youth I once dismissed as crude and tacky I frequently find myself head-banging away to, here in the distant future where what’s cool and uncool seems to matter a lot less than it once did. 

I liked either the most amiable of ‘80s pop – Men At Work, Billy Joel, Howard Jones – or proto-goth cool like Depeche Mode, The Cure and Peter Murphy. But you could not grow up in a high school in the 1980s and not be constantly exposed to the metal* – whether it was MTV, the radio, or all the “stoner” kids with Metallica logos sewn on the back of their jean jackets. 

(*Yeah, there’s a million subsets of “heavy metal” from the opaque drone of sunn O))) to the cheery pop of Van Halen, but when I say “metal” here I’m mostly talking about the mainstream hair metal that dominated the day-glo mid-80s.) 

There was no internet, so the world was smaller and a million skittering sub-subcultures didn’t yet exist. Much of the same culture washed over us all. You knew who Bon Jovi was unless you lived in Amish country. So I knew “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” “Welcome To The Jungle,” “Here I Go Again,” because who didn’t? And yeah, the sexist, ridiculous video for Mötley Crüe’s “Girls Girls Girls” in constant rotation on MTV did kind of make me feel funny inside. 

Yet I imagined myself a broody intellectual and I’d never lose face by saying I was a fan of Guns ’N’ Roses or anything like that. I would pretend that I didn’t actually think that first chugging guitar line in Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name” was kind of cool. 

Metal scared me, slightly, because I was told it was scary. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, hulking and slathered in makeup, smashing down the door and yelling “We’re Not Gonna Take It”; Quiet Riot showing a man wrapped in a straitjacket and horrifying mask on the cover of the .45 single for “Cum On Feel The Noize.”

I remember someone smuggling a copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon album into a church youth group, of all places, and woo boy it was terrifying looking, Ozzy all kitted out like an Oliver Reed werewolf and demonic light surrounding him. 

The kids who really, really liked Def Leppard and Poison and Anthrax were the jocks or the stoners, the outcasts or the bullies, and I was somewhere in-between hiding in the shadows with the theatre kids. 

Fast-forward 30+ years or so, though, and I appreciate the glittery excess of all that uncool ‘80s metal more than I ever thought I would. It’s comic-book soundtrack music, with zero self-consciousness. In the recent strange years of pandemics and fascism and the internet imploding, a guy with a bit of makeup and poofy hair yelling about Satan is actually kind of comforting, a familiar old frenemy rather than the apocalypse in leather boots. It’s a chance to exhale and escape, from a real world that’s way madder than any satanic panic. 

So I sometimes crank up Ozzy’s “Crazy Train,” GnR’s “Paradise City,” the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” and I feel the years slip away and get what all the fuss was about. It’s not deep – it doesn’t get the same woozy feelings in me that the same era’s New Order’s “Age Of Consent” or Erasure’s “Victim Of Love” do, but it slices into some little primal part of my ears and makes me smile, a little. I was afraid of these guys? They’re just having a laugh with their guitars and their poses, eh? 

While I’ll always love my Depeche and Coltrane and Bob Dylan and Flying Nun and all the other music I’ve fallen in love with over the years, I get now why you might wear a Metallica logo on your jean jacket. 

The Beatles: ‘Now And Then’ and in the end, the love you make

The other day I woke up, fell out of bed, and listened to a new Beatles song. 

“Now And Then” is being billed as the “last Beatles song,” and with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr now well into their 80s, it probably is the final time we can say that. Resurrected from John Lennon’s demos circa 1977 and mixed with some George Harrison 1990s guitar thanks to some very fancy technology, here we have all four Beatles, two long gone, together again in a Frankenstein miracle of technology and persistence.

But is it any good? We live in a world of boundless hype and unnecessary reboots, constantly perched on the edge of expected disappointment, and yet, “Now And Then” is a beautiful, fragile thing that I can’t quite get out of my head. 

Of course, it’s the Beatles, so the song has been swamped with an avalanche of merchandise, fiery hot takes and analyses just like this one. All the to-do threatens to overwhelm what is at its heart a delicate, sweet little song. 

Like two other Lennon demos “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love” that were revived for the 1995 Beatles Anthology series, it’s Lennon during his domestic hiatus, writing simple, basic lyrics about home and happiness with none of the surrealist whimsy or angry edge that marked his top Beatles works. So it’s flimsy, sure.

And yet, and yet, I can’t listen to it without feeling a swell of emotion. The Beatles ultimately have always made me happy whether it’s the spunky energy of “Love Me Do” or the psychedelic swirl of “I Am The Walrus.” A Beatles song makes me glad to be here in this world, whether it’s a pop song, a sad song or an awfully sappy song (sorry, “Let It Be.”) 

The lonesome piano chords that kick off “Now And Then” give the song an elegiac feel, and Lennon’s ghostly voice is mournfully hushed. It could be a dirge, and I’m sure some folks see it that way, but I look at it as a fond farewell. 

To hear Paul’s 81-year-old voice kicking in to harmonise with Lennon, dead now for more years than he was alive, is to feel the endless pull of time itself. 

Sir Peter Jackson’s video for the song is faintly ridiculous at first, with macabre mixing of young John and George into footage of aged Paul and Ringo, old and young Beatles capering about, but it’s also a little charming and silly, as Beatlemania always was.

 “And if I make it through,” John sings, and you know, in the end, we all hope for that, don’t we? We keep the people that leave us with us, as long as we’re here. Paul has made a love letter to the past, out of the fragments of his dead friends’ leavings, and sure, it’s big business and all, but it’s also the Beatles. I cannot surrender my love of the Beatles to the binary “like/dislike” button and algorithm. I’m simply grateful for whatever we get. 

At the end of Jackson’s video we see those young, gorgeous Beatles on stage taking a bow, then slowly fading from the scene. You’ve got to have a hard heart not to feel something then. One day far too soon for any of us, there will be no more Beatles.

“Now And Then” is raw sentiment and lacking the mad fire of invention that made the Beatles change the world, true, but I kind of love it all the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

Over in the bustling world of freelance journalism, I’ve got two new pieces out there this week!

At Radio New Zealand, I dug into the hip world of used book fairs like this past week’s GABBS 24 Hour Fair, where hundreds of folks pack stadiums in search of everything from Lee Child to Shakespeare at bargain prices. Finally, I have weaponised my own addiction to buying books into freelance material!

You can read the full story here: Why New Zealand is still in love with used book fairs

Meanwhile, over at the New Zealand Listener magazine, my latest book review published there in this week’s Nov. 11-17 issue is a scary thing indeed – a look at a fascinating study of fear, Fear: An Alternate History of the World by Robert Peckham.

You can read it in the issue on newsstands now throughout the great land of New Zealand, if you’re lucky enough to be here, or it can be found online right here (Paywall).

Keeping It Short Week, Day 7: The impeccable heartbreak of Douglas Sirk

It’s the grand conclusion of Keeping It Short Week, 250 words per post no matter what!

Melodrama is fundamentally uncool. When you think of the word, you think of overwrought tears, exaggerated gesture, implausible goings-on and a story that attempts to throttle your feelings. 

Yet sometimes, we all want to get swept away a bit. Sometimes we just want to feel. And when I crave a bit of melodrama, I’ll skip your soap operas and Jane Austen and go right for the straight stuff – the Sirk. 

Douglas Sirk is here to wring your emotions out like a wet dishcloth. His handful of shimmering colour movies are glittering gems of 1950s restraint, heartbreak and bombast. If you can overlook their more dated aspects, you’ll find some smart, subtle criticisms of privilege, power and wealth that don’t seem all that out of place in 2023. 

Watching gems like All That Heaven Allows or Written On The Wind is like viewing a lush painting coming to life. His frequent star and muse Rock Hudson, a closeted gay man, brings a lot of hefty subtext to his presence in Sirkland. It’s impossible to say how this much colours our impression of him in these movies, but in them he combines the chiseled handsomeness of a Cary Grant with a slightly fragile, insecure veneer. In Sirkland, his characters are all taut with suppressed emotion, and through their fumblings, we learn a little something about our own. 

Oh, and Sirk apparently liked to call his movies “dramas of swollen emotion”, which is way better than melodramas. 

Thanks for reading along this “short” week of posts, I hope we’ve all had life changing lessons as a result. Normal long-winded posting will resume next week!

Keeping It Short Week, Day 6: Still can’t figure out if I love or hate The Doors

Hey, groovy cats, we’re still in Keeping it Short Week, each post 250 words or your money back:

Everyone has bands they love, but what about the ones you kind of love and don’t love? The Doors and Jim Morrison hold a very singular place in my tastes.

I’ve owned their albums and CDs multiple times and then gone through a phase of being so over the Doors that they went… well, out the door. I felt sometimes like being a Doors fan over the age of 21 was embarrassing. The anguished “Mother/Father” oedipal stuff in “The End” is a prime example of how the Doors could swing from ominous to awful in the space of a few lines. 

Morrison was, by all reports, a fairly reprehensible human being in a lot of ways, and his sexist stoned messiah complex wears thin fast. How we feel about an artist as a person can affect how you view their work, and that’s not cancel culture, it’s just being a human. 

And yet, I still find myself humming along to the Doors. They were pompous, overwrought, exciting and ridiculous all at the same time. A broody epic like “Riders on the Storm” still gets me, while trippy psych-rock like “Light My Fire” and “People Are Strange” are both timeless and time capsules of what we think the ‘60s meant. 

Maybe I overthink The Doors, and in the end they were just a solid rock band with a tendency towards bad poetry. But for a band I sometimes hate, I sure end up going back to them an awful lot.