Author: nik dirga

I'm an American journalist who has lived in New Zealand for more than a decade now.

Hero worship: A simple twist of Dr. Fate

Some superheroes just grab your attention when you’re young, at the perfect age to be spellbound by flashy capes and cowls. It’s usually all about the look. Maybe you were blown away by Hawkman’s wings, or Batman’s cowl, or Wolverine’s claws. For me, it was the spell cast by Doctor Fate.

I’m cautiously interested in the upcoming Black Adam movie, although it’s not so much for Dwayne Johnson as the titular antihero. Instead, I’m psyched to see what they’ll do with one of my favourite super-teams, the Justice Society, with the spooky Dr. Fate personified by Pierce Brosnan.

My first exposure to Fate was an action figure, part of the Super Powers line of the 1980s. I still own that figure 37 years on. The catchy combination of blue and gold on his costume, perhaps, struck some primal chord for me, or maybe it was that cool helmet. I just knew I liked the way this guy looked. I still do.

Dr. Fate has never quite been a marquee attraction – debuting in 1940 in More Fun Comics, created by Gardner Fox and artist Howard Sherman, he was an original member of the Justice Society. He’s Kent Nelson, who owns the mystic helmet of Nabu giving him immense magical powers – in later interpretations, he’s actually possessed by the spirit of Nabu as Fate. 

Fate’s original early 1940s stories are a dark delight – he’s given no real origin for some time, and is a mysterious, omnipotent figure waging war against evil in the stark, dreamlike fashion of early comics.

Like a lot of Golden Age comics characters, Fate’s hard edges got smoothed off fast – his striking helmet became a rather dorky-looking half-helm, he lost the cape and he started dropping corny quips. 

Dr. Fate is always best when he’s mysterious – popping up to great spooky effect in books like All-Star Squadron and Justice League of America. 

There have been a handful of terrific Dr. Fate solo comics – a memorably strong adventure by Walt Simonson in the 1970s, and a very abstract, emotional miniseries by J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen in the late 1980s I quite liked. His only solo starring series of any real duration was a 41-issue series that started out quite well, with Fate’s identity being shared by a troubled boy and his stepmother (long story) and a welcome sense of humour, before it kind of dissolved into new-age mysticism.

Fate has seen many ups and downs – an utterly awful “extreme” ‘90s reboot, a long parade of other characters than Kent Nelson donning the golden helmet. Kent Nelson himself isn’t a terribly strong character on his own, but somehow Fate still really works best when he’s the man wearing the helmet. Black Adam isn’t even his first live action appearance – he made a cool cameo on an episode of Smallville years back. 

I don’t know if Black Adam will be any good, but what little I’ve seen of Dr. Fate in it is pretty groovy… with one exception. For some reason, they’re depicting the Helmet of Nabu without any eyeholes. It’s … striking, but also weird, like having a Superman without the “S” or Batman without the pointy ears. The all-seeing eyes of Dr. Fate have always been a critical part of his look, and it’s a curious choice. Maybe it’ll look better on screen. 

I could never really pin my Dr. Fate fandom on one particular quality to the character – there are other spooky mystical heroes like Dr. Strange and The Spectre, after all, and like I said, he’s starred in a handful of good comics over the years, but more often, he’s the man in the background, popping up to drop some magical deus ex machina. 

In the end, it all still comes back to that distinctive look by Fox and Sherman more than eight decades ago now – sometimes, that’s all you need to make a character stick in your mind. A look can imprint on you when you’re young, and you might just always be a bit of a fan. Perhaps it’s just Fate. 

Cobra Kai: Get teenage kicks right through the night

The only reason Cobra Kai exists is because of nostalgia, of course. 

And yet, it’s proven over five seasons now to be a campy, fist-pumping time capsule of ‘80s excess, mixing teen pathos that wouldn’t be out of place on Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place with butt-kicking kung-fu frenzies. 

I’ve long gotten rather jaded and tired of the endless revivals, reboots and prequels of my childhood obsessions, but somehow I just can’t get enough of Cobra Kai, the continuation of the long-ago ‘80s Karate Kid franchise starring Ralph Macchio. I inhaled the brand new season 5 over just a few days (which for me, with my dislike of “binging” TV, is damned fast). 

The characters in season 5 of Cobra Kai are nowhere near as “realistic” as they felt in Season 1, where you truly empathised with Johnny Lawrence’s downbeat life (the great William Zabka) and rooted for his quixotic struggles. Cobra Kai’s genius was focusing on the bullying “loser” of the first Karate Kid and giving him real emotional depth. There’s something uniquely pathetic about the vain teenage jock brought down to earth, fumbling his way through life, and Cobra Kai’s first seasons were interesting because they also made us question whether Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso was the “good guy” after all in The Karate Kid. 

Over five seasons now, Cobra Kai has far exceeded in runtime the three ‘80s movies it’s based on. It’s widened its cast to include the children of the original stars, various other nerds and bullies and hangers-on in the endless karate battles of the San Fernando Valley, and enough teenage angst to fill the entire CW network. It’s utterly unsubtle, the characters make stupid mistakes and yeah, the roller-coaster of teenage love affairs and constant emotional reversals can get a bit old, but they’re always broken up by another entertainingly silly karate bout before too long. 

As it goes on, Cobra Kai really embraces that ‘80s junk-food aesthetic where a somewhat grounded movie becomes increasingly over-the-top and extreme as the franchise goes on (see also: Rocky, Rambo, Lethal Weapon, etc.) Season 5 of Cobra Kai feels like the Rocky IV of the franchise to date – broad, swaggering and confident in its own ridiculousness. 

Part of the pleasure of the latest series is Thomas Ian Griffith’s scenery-chewing turn as Terry Silver, who struts around sneering and smirking like a Bond villain from a Roger Moore movie. Griffith was the villain in the overwrought Karate Kid Part III, nobody’s favourite KK film, and yet his Gordon Gekko meets Bruce Lee antagonist gives the last few seasons of Cobra Kai a punchy energy. 

The bombastic emotional music and rising stakes (it’s not just a battle for one karate dojo now – it’s a battle for the future of karate in the world!) are pure cheese, but I don’t mind. There’s a lingering pomposity in much of “peak TV” that turns me off at times, and there’s something about Cobra Kai’s economical 30-35 minute episodes and brisk 10-part seasons that aren’t quite as daunting as some shows. 

There is very little Jackie Chan-style elegance or invention in Cobra Kai’s kung fu fighting. It’s blunt and rarely pretty brawling, and despite the gentle teachings of sensei Miyagi (the late Pat Morita) hanging over the series, it’s almost always fighting in anger, with emotion running hot. Despite all their skills, the characters in Cobra Kai are constantly falling short of their lofty ideals.

Perhaps I love Cobra Kai because it’s pitched directly at me, the fumbling teenager who watched the original movie in cinemas and is now a 50-something striver just like Danny LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence. We all want to make something more out of our lives and are vaguely astonished when we get to the midpoint. There’s also something optimistic in how old foes mellow out and become weathered allies – season 5 features the “villains” from Karate Kid 1, 2 and 3 all teaming up to fight the big bad. Gosh darn it if I didn’t almost want to cheer. There’s hope for everybody in the world of Cobra Kai. (Except Terry Silver, boo, hiss.)

I wouldn’t call Cobra Kai the finest show on TV or anything, but somehow its open-hearted eagerness to please and throwback absurdity suits me a lot more than sitting through more games of thrones and lords and their rings. Forget your hobbits and dragons – a good old crane kick will leave me satisfied almost every time. Teenage kicks, they’re hard to beat. 

*And yes, that’s a lyric by the Undertones quoted in this post title, from the late John Peel’s favourite song of all time.

Queen Elizabeth II 1926-2022: My time under the monarchy

Queen Elizabeth II poses for a portrait at home in Buckingham Palace in December 1958.

For almost 16 years now, I’ve been a subject of the Queen. 

It’s kind of weird whenever I think about it — that a kid who was born in Alaska, grew up in the hills of California and went to university and started his career in Mississippi, would end up a subject of the British monarchy. 

But ever since I moved here to New Zealand in 2006, that’s exactly what I’ve been, and since becoming a New Zealand citizen around 10 years back, I even swore allegiance to her majesty.

Although we all knew it was coming, it’s a strange thing indeed to wake up and learn that Queen Elizabeth II is dead.

I’ve always been a bit neutral about the queen, neither a rabid royalist nor a fanatical republican. I guess I’ve mostly just been interested in the workings of a centuries-old system of royal hereditary rulership, having grown up pledging allegiance to a different flag, to myths and legends about George Washington and Abe Lincoln. I liked the novelty of being part of a monarchy when I moved here, of having the Queen on our coins and cash and all the little finicky bits of royal protocol I’ve had to learn in my work as a journalist. 

New Zealand is my home these days, quite possibly for the rest of my days, and King Charles III is now my head of state. Hearing the words “God save the king” this morning for the first time felt bloody, bloody weird, I’ll tell you that. 

The last couple of years, there’s certainly been a part of me that’s kind of appreciated the kind of cultural stability the Queen’s presence brought, when you look at the chaotic upheaval among flailing political parties in my homeland, where a creeping authoritarian fascism seems to be more and more accepted.

And after 16 years here, I firmly think some parliamentary system of government – where party leaders are more accountable, where minor parties have a larger voice – is essentially superior to the creaky, unfair US system of antiquated electoral colleges and deeply unequal representation, states with 500,000 people having the same Senate spots as states with 50 million. 

Sure, there’s lots of questions to raise about the legacy of the monarchy and its relevance in the future, about the bad things that have happened under kings and queens, the idea of being “born to rule” and the often horrific impacts of colonialism.

But today, I’m just kind of sticking to my number one rule about engaging with the internet in 2022: Don’t be a jerk. 

Ninety-six years, 70 of them in one job, is a good run. The sheer longevity of her reign – she ascended the throne when my 80-something parents were teenagers – is remarkable. She spanned from the age of silent movies and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to streaming TikToks and Prime Minister Liz Truss.

History is happening now, today, and tomorrow. We’ll all go back to arguing about everything in a few hours, I’m sure, but today, I’m watching the great gears of history turn and one era ending, forever.

 

Review: Midnight Oil, Auckland, September 3

Midnight Oil, Auckland, September 3. Photo: Me

There’s a great book about ground-breaking ’80s punk bands called Our Band Could Be Your Life. For me, Midnight Oil is one of those bands.

As the Aussie enviro-rockers shook up a nearly full Spark Arena last night on the Auckland stop of their farewell tour, I thought a lot about how the band has been part of the soundtrack of my life for more than 30 years, and helped shape how I think about the world.

I wrote a review and appreciation of one of my favourite bands as they zipped through town – go read the full piece right now over at Radio New Zealand!

After 204 years, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still haunts us

The thing about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is it’s not the story you think it is.

Mary Shelley was only a teenager when she wrote the book that has led some to call her “the inventor of science fiction.” At the very least, she certainly helped create some foundations for it. However, if you’ve binged on old Boris Karloff movies and are expecting Frankenstein the novel to be the same animal, you’re likely to be a bit befuddled. 

The book has a rather average 3.8-star rating on GoodReads, with critics saying it’s “like watching paint dry” and “tedious.” Published in 1818, it does get off to a somewhat slow start, with a series of nesting first-person narratives from an Arctic ship captain, then Victor Frankenstein, and then finally the monster itself. There’s not a lot of what we jaded 2022 folk would call “action” and a lot of flowery romantic language.  

But once you abandon expectations of a silent Karloff-ian zombie lurking in the shadows and Colin Clive shrieking “It’s alive!”, Frankenstein is still a pretty remarkable book which I return to every few years. It turned 200 years old just a few years back, so keep in mind its voice is almost closer to the era of Shakespeare than it is 2022. It is a novel of ideas and debate, rather than straight horror, although god knows plenty of horrible things happen to Victor Frankenstein and his creation. 

The first time I “read” Frankenstein was in one of those adapted great works of literature children’s books, which stripped the story down to the essentials and ran some evocative illustrations to go with it. These days, my go-to version of Frankenstein is one with utterly gorgeous macabre drawings by the late, great Bernie Wrightson to go with Shelley’s text. More than some classic novels, I’ve always felt like Frankenstein cries out for a little art to complement the wordy text. 

Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s another classic horror book that is quite different in tone than its many adaptations. So much of our image of what “Frankenstein” is comes from James Whale’s 1931 film – which I utterly adore, don’t get me wrong. Even the idea that the monster itself is somehow actually called “Frankenstein” emerged from those old Universal films. (In the books, he refers to himself as Adam at least once.)

The bones of Shelley’s story still stick with me years later. When I first read it, I was obsessed by the image of Frankenstein chasing his monster across the Arctic wastes that frames Shelley’s story, the idea of monster and creator pursuing each other into the frozen wastelands throughout eternity. I love Shelley’s questing monologues for the Creature, who is the polar opposite of Karloff’s silent, mournful monster. The Creature is violently angry at the world that scorned him but also gorgeously descriptive about his cursed place in it: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” 

One of the most notable things about reading Frankenstein the novel is how all the scientific explanations for the monster’s creation we are so used to don’t appear at all. There’s no Igor, no labs filled with lightning, only a hint of grave-robbing. Shelley is almost coy about how the monster came to be, dismissing the technical details within a sentence or two. She is more interested in the question of duality – are monsters made, or are they created by the world’s reaction to them? The spark her book lit has fuelled a thousand other interpretations and expansions of her dark tragedy. 

Hollywood has taken many, many swings at the Frankenstein story in the past century but never quite captures the book. Kenneth Branagh’s overwrought 1994 film has its moments of fidelity, but still piles on laboratories sparking and its campy excess misses the book’s haunted, spartan tone. 

But I’m happy with that. There’s many great Frankenstein movies out there, but the novel that birthed all these monsters is very much its own animal, two centuries old now and still filled with wonder and horror and mystery about the world around us. 

When it comes to Spider-Man, I’m all about the Romitas

Spider-Man hits his big 60th birthday this year, and he’s still swinging along as strongly as ever. Dozens and dozens of great artists have drawn his adventures since 1962, but when I picture Spidey in my head, it’s always a Romita Spidey.

The father-son duo of John Romita Sr and John Romita Jr are inextricably linked in my head when I think of Peter Parker. For 56 of Spidey’s 60 years, they’ve been involved in drawing him. To me, they are Spider-Man. 

Co-creator Steve Ditko’s wiry, nerdy Spider-Man set the standard for the character, don’t get me wrong. I love Ditko and he set the template all others have followed. Ross Andru, Gil Kane and Mark Bagley were all indebted to the Romita and Ditko template. Todd McFarlane’s antic, spidery look for the character launched an entire comics movement in the 1990s, while Ron Frenz combined the best of Ditko and the Romitas for a punchy ‘80s incarnation of Spidey.

But still, I’m all about the Romitas. Romita Sr was the first artist to take on Spider-Man after Ditko left, starting with Amazing Spider-Man #39 way back in 1966. His style was bolder, more confident than Ditko, his Peter Parker a handsome everyman instead of Ditko’s exhausted loser. His women were gorgeous – he’s the one who first drew Mary Jane Watson. He was also more “mainstream” – there’s a reason that Romita’s images of Marvel characters set the company standard in the 1970s, appearing on merchandising galore. Romita was never quite as flashy as Ditko or McFarlane, but he was always dependably powerful. Long retired, Romita Sr is still with us at 92.

And then there’s the son, who has actually gone on to surpass the father. John Romita Jr has been drawing issues of Amazing Spider-Man on and off now for an astounding FORTY years, which has to be close to some kind of record. His first issue was Amazing Spider-Man #208 from 1980; his latest is Amazing Spider-Man #902 (*also known as Amazing Spider-Man, 2022 series #8, because they can’t stop friggin’ relaunching these series every year or two lately).

I’m racking my brain to think of another artist who drew the same character intermittently over a nearly 700-issue span, but coming up blank – I don’t think even Superman’s legendary artist Curt Swan quite achieved that. 

Romita Jr, 66, is now a senior citizen himself which is kind of stunning, as I still mentally think of him as the pumped young apprentice taking up his father’s drawing board decades ago. The issues where young Romita Jr first caught my eye was a two-part story in Amazing Spider-Man #229 and #230, where Spidey fought the Juggernaut, a Hulk-level behemoth way out of his league. That was in the middle of a fantastic run by writer Roger Stern and Romita widely judged to be one of the best Spidey periods of all time.

In these two issues, Romita Jr captured both the massive, unstoppable Juggernaut and the wily, indefatigable Spider-Man perfectly – each panel clearly lays out the impossible odds and stakes of the battle. Spider-Man is strong and determined and yet refreshingly human in scale. 

Both Romitas excel at giving Spider-Man weight on the printed page, which might seem a strange requirement for a character who’s always hopping and swinging about. They’re also both experts at clear storytelling, a style which went out of vogue in the McFarlane-dominated years but has come back into fashion. I think Spider-Man needs a degree of realism to keep the character grounded, and when artists get too abstract and distorted drawing him, it never quite works for me. 

Much as I love Spider-Man I tend to dip in and out of regular comics-buying depending on how good the current creative team is. The dismal clone saga of the late 1990s broke the habit for me and I don’t need to be a completist forever. But Romita Jr’s latest Amazing Spider-Man run with writer Zeb Wells is refreshingly fun, back to basics comic storytelling – and his art is a big part of the dynamic feel. His villains like Tombstone and the Vulture are hulking, ominous and grotesque, while his Spider-Man is, as always, strong yet a bit fragile. 

Romita Jr hasn’t stayed on Spidey that entire 40 years, of course – he’s come and gone many times – but like Spider-Man himself, he always bounces back. His style has changed a lot – become more blocky and angular, with big, bold panels – and not everyone likes that. It doesn’t always work in quieter scenes, where his humans can look a little baroque, but in the action scenes, Romita Jr still delivers. His storytelling is still among the top of the field. Fight scenes from recent issues are crisply delineated, with bold figures moving powerfully.

Decades after they first wowed me, the Romitas have still got it.  

Movies I Have Never Seen #19: Megaforce (1982)

What is it: Forty years ago, children around the world lined up to celebrate the greatest cinematic experience of their time. They played with the toys, they read the storybooks, they dove into the rich fictional world. Unfortunately for the creators of the 1982 flop Megaforce, it wasn’t their world, but that of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The strange, toy-etic action flick Megaforce was part of a weird wave of would-be early ‘80s sci-fi franchises that were blatantly ripping off elements of Star Wars and Mad Max. Somewhere, a world exists where movies like this and its kinfolk Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn and Krull received multiple sequels. It isn’t this one. 

The plot of Megaforce, such as it is, is about a futuristic UN-esque peacekeeping agency who ride around on motorbikes and dune buggies and fight a vaguely stereotypical foreign gang. Our star is none other than a wild-eyed Barry Bostwick of Rocky Horror and Spin City fame, perhaps the last actor on earth you’d cast as your leading man in a post-apocalyptic action flick. With a headband harnessing grand flowing locks of ‘80s hair and beard and a skintight shiny uniform that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, Bostwick’s awesomely named Ace Hunter is indeed a sight to behold. And that doesn’t even get into the flying motorbike scene featured at Megaforce’s climax, perhaps the film’s finest moment of sheer kitsch.

Why I never saw it: Wait, was it ever even in theatres? Or home video? Megaforce kind of sank from the world, the only evidence it existed comic-book ads, an Atari videogame and a line of tie-in vehicle toys that were mostly forgotten the moment they were released. It made less than $6 million worldwide and vanished. I might not have even clocked Megaforce’s existence if it weren’t for an onslaught of comic book ads for it in 1982. I’ve already written about how 1982 was my year of comics awakening, and you couldn’t pick up an issue of Star Wars or Marvel Team-Up without seeing Megaforce’s cheery manly ad on the back cover with a pumped-up Bostwick and the slogan “Deeds, Not Words” staring at you. Why, you could even get a Megaforce Membership Kit for a mere $1.00! Years later, I finally set out to find out what the fuss was all about.

Does it measure up to its rep? It had talent, in theory – director Hal Needham was behind Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run, so he knew how to make movies about loud cars and broad characters. But Megaforce is on the more dismal end of non-starter sci-fi cheapies of the early ‘80s (I’ve got a soft spot for Krull, I admit). Most of the movie is about explaining what Megaforce is, leading up to and training for the underwhelming battles, and enjoying Barry Bostwick’s luxurious hair. Bostwick brings a jovial energy to the movie that the story never rises to meet. Co-star Persis Khambatta (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) makes Bostwick look like Laurence Olivier and the rest of the cast are generic action stereotypes. The motorcycle battles – endless – get boring very quickly and nothing much really happens in Megaforce. There’s no stakes, no emotion, no sense of the wider world, just a few glimmers of the cheesy masterpiece it could’ve been if Ace Hunter had been allowed to really cut loose.

Worth seeing? To be honest… no, unless you’re in a very particular sort of mood and crave a particular sort of guilty pleasure. Maybe it’s just finally catching up 40 years later to seeing what that omnipresent comic book ad was all about. Even for a bomb, Megaforce doesn’t maintain the kitsch heights of The Room or Battlefield Earth. But … despite the slapdash storytelling, the long stretches where nothing much happens, the unforgettable sight of Barry’s Bostwick in too-tight tan spandex … there’s something I find kind of adorable about Megaforce and its willingness to fail big. Deeds, not words, indeed. 

The art of adaptation: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman

I first read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic beginning with #8, more than 30 years ago now. It was pitched as an introductory issue for new readers, a catching of breath after a hectic opening storyline for the series, and simply featured the godlike Dream, the lord of the night, catching up with his sister, Death, as she goes about her duties. It’s also one of the best things Gaiman’s ever written, humane and heartbreaking. 

It’s exactly the sort of story I’d worry about seeing turned into Netflix “content” in this age of comics being adapted for everything.

I shouldn’t have worried. 

Episode 6 of the new Gaiman-endorsed Sandman series, “The Sound of Her Wings,” which adapts that eighth issue and another classic story, is one of the best bits of TV this year and greatest feats of comics adaptation I’ve seen. (I’m not alone in this slightly hyperbolic verdict.)  

“The Sound of Her Wings” walks the tricky line between rote recitation and making the story come to life. Pairing it with a take on Sandman #13, a stand-alone story of a man who’s granted immortality by Death and his once-a-century meetings with Dream, is a masterstroke. “The Sound of Her Wings” episode becomes a sweeping meditation on what gives life and death meaning, even if you’re an immortal being, on the little triumphs and failures that make up the time we get. 

Even though I’ve read these two comics so many times I practically had them memorised, the gorgeous adaptations still left me a choked-up sentimental fool at the end. 

Adaptations are funny things in comics. I still remember the giddy thrill of simply seeing Batman fight the Joker on the big screen in 1989, or of watching Spider-Man swing past actual skyscrapers. Us comics nerds were famished for any recognition in those long-ago pre-extended universe times, for any hint of seeing characters come to life. (This is probably why I actually saw the Howard The Duck movie in cinemas.) These days, dozens and dozens of comics are being adapted to different mediums, and novelty alone isn’t enough. 

But not every adaptation works. The 2009 Watchmen movie felt spot-on in a few ways, yet strangely hollow in others. It felt a bit like a cover version of the graphic novel, never quite capturing what makes Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ story soar. 

Often you’ll get a mix-and-match of great comic book stories into film – Avengers: Infinity War takes elements from Jim Starlin’s Infinity Gauntlet miniseries, and weaves a different tale around them. The Winter Soldier took a lot from Ed Brubaker’s excellent Captain America comics, but was a fairly loose actual adaptation of them. 

We’re starting to see more and more comics movies and films going beyond superheroes – which can only be a good thing. Some of them swing and miss – that Preacher series didn’t do a thing for me – but we still get gems like Sandman, Paper Girls, Resident Alien and Sweet Tooth. 

“The Sound of Her Wings” immediately had me running back to re-read the comics for the 500th time or so. In the end, I feel like an adaptation should be a guide, a pointer towards the source, rather than seen as an attempt to improve on it. 

I’d never say Sandman the series supersedes the comics it faithfully adapts, but it certainly complements them in ways I’d never … well, dreamed. 

Vanished world: The immortal journalism of Joseph Mitchell

Life comes at you fast. Somehow, I’ve been a working, paid journalist for 30 years now, and the industry is almost an entirely different animal than it was back in 1992 when I started getting my first bylines in the college newspaper. 

I came in just as the digital world started to change everything. The town newspaper I first worked at professionally in small-town Mississippi still had dusty trays of hot type slugs tucked under the composing table. While chunky early Macs were being used to lay out the pages by then, the final layouts were still painstakingly pasted up from print-outs before being walked over to the press room. These days, much of my journalism work is in mediums I wouldn’t have even quite comprehended in 1992. 

The appeal of journalism for many newcomers is a fundamentally romantic one. The big scoop! The breaking news! It’s never exactly as you imagined it, of course, and there’s plenty of dull moments, like there are in any job. In recent months, I’ve been revisiting the work of one of the patron saints of long-form journalism to spark inspiration and to remember that at its heart, before counting clicks and hot takes and fighting misinformation, it’s all about telling a story.

Few people told a story better than Joseph Mitchell, who walked the streets of New York for a variety of long-gone papers nearly a century ago, before going on to become one of the best-loved New Yorker writers of all time.  

Mitchell was the bard of cheap dives and eccentrics, finding stories to tell far away from the ivory towers. “I believe the most interesting human beings, as far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender,” he’d write.

His most famous work, Joe Gould’s Secret, memorably explored a bohemian “blithe and emaciated man” who claimed to be writing the longest book in history – or maybe he wasn’t. 

But Mitchell wasn’t just about the oddballs – his “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is a gorgeous, sensitive look at an elderly Black man at the end of his days, while “Up In The Old Hotel” is a captivating read about mysteries hidden in Manhattan’s old buildings. “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon” evokes every beer stain and cigar stub at the oldest Irish bar in New York and its impossibly stern manager, who served only one kind of ale and would close up if the bar got too crowded with “too much confounded trade.” 

Mitchell is all meat, no fat in his writing, and many of us journalists today could learn from his economic, indelible descriptions – a man whose “profanity was so vigorous I expected it to leave cavities in his teeth,” or former President Herbert Hoover, who had “the face of a fat baby troubled by gas pains.” But clarity is the guiding light – he’d note, “A newspaper can have no bigger nuisance than a reporter who is always trying to write literature.”

“The best talk is artless,” Mitchell would write. “The talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.” 

Decades after his death, it’s worth mentioning there is some controversy over how Mitchell may have blurred the line between fact and fiction in some of his later work. It’s a fuzzy line that probably shouldn’t have been crossed, although times were different then, and the essential core of his storytelling remains based on fact. 

Leaving the desk and hitting the streets to find your story has gotten less and less common as journalism has changed, as stories are put together via scraping social media posts or quick emails to the same talking heads over and over. I’m as guilty as anyone else of this tactic, but have to admit that over my 30 years now in the industry the stories I remember most are the ones where I went out and talked to another human being face to face, listening to their ‘artless talk’ and their stories. Mitchell’s world is long gone, but his writing remains a touchstone for me. 

Joe Mitchell’s best is collected in the essential collections Up In The Old Hotel and My Ears Are Bent. Decades after he scribbled his bylines, it’s all still mandatory reading for anyone who wonders what journalism and telling people’s stories should be about. 

Back on the big screen: New Zealand International Film Festival

Life isn’t entirely normal yet, and may not be for a while, but at least I can go to film festivals again.

During the strictest of New Zealand’s lockdowns, cinemas were all shut down, and one big casualty the last few Covid-addled years has been the New Zealand International Film Festival, which suffered from cancellations, postponements and management problems in 2020 and 2021.

Ever since I moved here in 2006, NZIFF has been a highlight of the calendar year, a time when Auckland gets to pretend it’s the centre of the cinematic universe for a week or so and enjoy the buzziest hits from Cannes, amazing revival classics and hidden gems that change your brain. I’ve watched dozens and dozens of NZIFF movies over the last 16 years, and I missed it dearly in these Covid days. 

This year’s festival isn’t quite up to full speed compared with the before times – it is shorter and smaller – but I still managed to catch several great films this week mostly at Auckland’s legendarily awesome Civic Theatre, the best place in New Zealand to watch a movie. 

I love my Marvel cinematic universe and all that jazz, but a well-curated film fest is a whole different vibe, one that engages new parts of the brain. It celebrates the communal joys of art, too – at a time when doing anything as a community feels a bit fraught, it’s good to be reminded there are benefits to it. 

I would’ve liked to fit more in my schedule, but only four movies made the cut for me this year. I watched an intimate and witty documentary on the late great author, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time; South Korean icon Park Chan-Wook’s exquisitely crafted twisty romantic detective thriller Decision To Leave; the harrowing and weirdly life-affirming documentary about two married volcanologists Fire Of Love, and this year’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner, the scabrously funny, filthy Swedish satire Triangle of Sadness. 

Triangle of Sadness is a divisive movie among the critics but in a packed gorgeous old cinema, this barbed attack on influencer culture and the privilege of the wealthy felt like a perfect film festival experience. A story of two young and vapid gorgeous people who end up on a cruise ship that turns into a Lord of the Flies-esque fiasco complete with plentiful vomiting and even worse, it’s not subtle. It’s not a deep satire, and it might be a little long. Yet its outraged, shouty and impotent tone somehow seems to mirror the weirdness that is life in 2022. It’s the movie for the moment, as we’re all a little bit stuck in our own personal cruise ship voyages from hell. In the end, you have to laugh about how absurd everything is, don’t you?

Without a film festival to gather up all the visions of the world, from South Korean noir to Swedish ennui, it’d be a bit harder to see these things, these perspectives. To be in a crowded cinema (mostly mask-wearing, thankfully) and laughing and gasping over the world together seems a bit naughty, a bit daring these days.

I missed that vibe, and even if the crises roiling the world are hardly over, it feels good to laugh together, for a moment, at a film festival.