Fuck the KKK

Finally, David Clark comes up with the goods. The KKK don't own Marlboro. Or, I suppose, Philip Morris, who does. It's an urban legend. Thanks, Dave. You win a link to your band Dragstrip's site.

           
Boston punks The Unseen have a good song called Fuck the KKK. They really do have quite a line in uncomplicated sentiment and entertaining song titles; another track, which I haven't heard, is called Piss Off, You Worthless Lying Fuck. And maverick American painter Philip Guston painted a number of beautifully satirical works which portrayed hooded figures of the KKK in mundane situations; my favourite is probably City Limits. [Note: this site seems to have disappeared, so I've uploaded a nice image of City Limits while it is offline]

One late-night drunken conversation later and I discover that my love for Philip Guston is shared by several of New Zealand's young contemporary painters. Good. On Saturday Night I was utterly dismayed by the disappointing painting in the Telecom Prospect 2004 exhibition; perhaps sometime soon there'll be some painters receiving this kind of amazing exposure and putting work on the wall that enthralls and exhilarates like I know the good stuff can.

Adding to my grumpiness was the general atmosphere at the extremely-crowded opening ceremony, analogous to my imaginings of the aftermath of a sarin nerve-gas in the Tokyo underground, in slow motion; except that this was more like an attack of dumb-ass wide-eyed art-wank schlop at the Naenae railway station subway just after school gets out on a Thursday afternoon.

POSTSCRIPT: KKK tabs and Body Count

Apparently there's proof in the Marlboro coat-of-arms [see right] and motto "Vene Vidi Vici" [Julius Caeser: I came, I saw, I conquered, in case you didnae ken]. I still don't reckon it. Whatever, the quest for answers continues.

Body Count [the bizarro 90's hard-core rap-metal band with Ice-T on the mic, yeah, that guy from those TV cop shows such as Special Victims Unit] sang a song about the Ku Klux Klan on their eponymous album from 1992. It's called KKK Bitch [it's specifically about the daughter of a KKK Grand Wizard]. I'm not going to reproduce the lyrics in this forum but you can find 'em here.

NP: Mission of Burma Vs.

Bypass 's got me on the run

I'm being evicted by Transit New Zealand. I have to be out of my studio at the end of July. I'm trying to stay outwardly calm whilst quietly panicking that my creative-haven of nigh-on 3 years - hell, my neighbourhood, my spiritual home of nigh-on 10 - is soon to be bulldozed by road-builders, and I'll have to find somewhere new.

In addition, this week is the last week of phase-one of the life of my local, Lie-Low; on Saturday night they're closing and moving on. The building they're in will presently be dust. Frankly I'm petrified at the thought that rather than having to perambulate 100 metres home after downing two Long-Island Iced Teas and a bunch of Headless Mexicans, I'll have to make my way across town.

I'm scared and more than a little angry. Speechless. I expect to have plenty more to say shortly, but for a start I thought I'd republish an article I printed in Looking for a fish-drying plant #1 in 2002, under the title Let's Build a Road.

There's already been a lot said about the proposed "bypass" across Te Aro in central Wellington. (The quotation marks used to indicate the propagandist linguistics of describing the project as a bypass. It's a motorway extension for fack's sake). There's been a lot of noise in favour of the road and a lot against it. All concerned have heard and presented the arguments over and over again and I'm not concerned with regurgitating them here.

So is Te Aro worth saving? "Hell yes", the people say... or do they? Actually a lot of them are probably saying "Hell no - that's where all the artists and junkies and the hookers and students and the bands and hippies live" (a veritable catalogue of the dregs of our polite society) ... "bulldose the lot and we'll be rid of those freaks and leeches once and f'rall and... 'One day a real rain's gonna fall, gonna wash these scum off the street'"...

We've got a real problem with perception. I know someone who's drawn a mental line along Ghuznee Street (the "Buller-Taranaki line") and will not venture any further south on foot, for fear of... something. I know people who still hold on to the opinion they formed of the area in the early 1970's, when Holloway Road was the "red-light district" and full of sailors and maniacs and commie spies; they sniffily avoid the area at all cost. To these people, and to the others out there who think like them, where's the problem? We'll just sweep up all this mess and filth and put up some nice townhouses and apartment complexes instead. And, presumably, fill them with nice respectable people who'll work hard and wear nice clothes.

Predictably, I think Te Aro is worth saving. I live there, as do many of my friends. Bands live and practice there; many local artists, including myself, have studio space there. After dark we go there to drink. For a lot of people who want to, or need to, be located in the hub of the local culture it's the only place they can afford to live. For others it's simply the only place to be. But most of these locations will just disappear, these homes will be destroyed, and those that aren't will have a multi-lane arterial road laid right outside their bedroom windows.

Cyclic arguments ensue when someone points out that it is only due to the proposed motorway extension that the area has been able to exist and thrive in the manner that it has. Transit holds the leases, sets the low rentals, and patiently waits to fire up the heavy machinery.

And so as we meander inexorably on towards a decision of some sort... the only thing I've left to say to those who would uproot a community and replace it with a bandwidth-inducing pipeline ostensibly in order to enable suburbanites to criss-cross us marginally more quickly is.........
f o o l s! d a m n f o o l s! Have you been to Auckland lately?

[Tips for beating and defeating road-mongers? Email me]

~The Stumps~ are Happy!

~The Stumps~ are playing live at Happy on Friday night, May 28.

We're supporting Pumice on his nationwide tour to launch his new CD, Raft. Also appearing will be The Mysterious Tapeman, New Zealand, and Mongol Horde.

~The Stumps~ feature James Kirk on drums and ionosphere-guitar, Antony Milton on guitar and ethnomusicological field-recordings, and moi, Stephen, on bass and vintage synthesizer.

Here's what some people said about ~The Stumps~ earlier:

1] like a miniture Fushitsusha. Kinda pocket-sized, might and swagger. -- Campbell Kneale, Birchville Cat Motel and Celebrate/Psi/Phenomenon czar.
2] what great gtr-ing, yes. i saw them live the other night & they were way more tense & noise rock than on their cd, i can hardly believe this is the same band, on the cd they are so relaxed & groovy. -- clayton no-one, CJA/Armpit and Root Don Lonie rajah.
3] shambling blissed out huge spacey rock swell and sprawl - deep space exploration . -- Antony Milton, PseudoArcana potentate.
4] three new zealanders indulge in some echoing/dark rock improv. reminds me of the more krautrock inspired Savage Republic, & there's a bit of moody drone-y stuff, a Tago Mago type-thing, space synths & more abstracts swirls. great roadtrip music. -- Glenn Donaldson, Jewelled Antler Collective and Pink Skulls label plutocrat.
5] ..."sounds bit like that Japanese band Acid Mothers Temple" -- Mark Williams, local rock legend and musical archivist.

Will you please come along?

Love from ~The Stumps~

KKK

If anyone can provide me with evidence that Marlboro cigarettes are inextricably linked with the business interests of the Ku Klux Klan, I'll stop smoking them. I mean it. Email me with your proofs.

NP: Dizzee Rascal and Bubba Sparxx.

Give me back my guitar

I am an unreserved admirer of Mestar. Their records are sublime and live they never fail to please - they played last weekend at the Cross here in Wellington and I was in heaven. No other band I know can hit ya with those power-pop sucker-punches again and again and again and you get back to your feet grinning and clamouring for another smack. No one else has ever even come close to being able to consistently lay-on such twee little bundles of gift-basket whimsy without provoking any kind of gag reflex. No other band I can think of can time and time again wrap up a song by the bottom of the third minute and you know everything that was ever there to be said has been said and so shut up end-of-discussion. No other band I can think of can play a long set where every song sounds the same but not in any bad sense... in the sense that the band's sound and essence is so refined and assured and the moves they make are so within their own self-defined parameters that they leave you peering with magnifying lens at the songs for the minutae of detail that act as beacons along the way. No other band I know can string together a sequence of tracks on an LP like Mestar has on Porcupine, their most recent album - Distant Star, Jitter, Ovientar and so on - each of which just effortlessly falls into the lap of the next and you're sitting listening with a huge grin on your face wondering at the glorious beauty of it all and you can't sit still 'cos you really want to be singing and pogoing with your head up amongst the light fittings... well to be honest the first side of the Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady is comparable but that's a compilation, dig, a whole diff'rent story...

Actually it's a bit rich claiming to be such a huge fan since I only own Porcupine but this is a situation I am in the process of remedying. I also have the John White (Mestar's enigmatic frontman) solo CD Balloon Adventure. It's definitely the same guy - the same delightfully wide-eyed irony-free fairy-tales and fables - but the production is pared back and there's a big ol' ambient-orchestral-electonics drift track on the end which is just the ticket when you've put the CD on to go to sleep by. Big news is there's a new John White solo CD on the way... watch this space, huh?

The Mestar site is here; click on the big porcupine and you're in.

Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted

We have to rely on the circumstantial, anecdotal evidence. We have no other choice. Aside from the circumstantial evidence, there's no Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Iraqi bandits decapitate an American captive live on worldwide satellite. American MP's commit bizarre acts of cruelty designed ostensibly to subjugate Iraqi prisoners-of-war. We know, because we saw the pictures. We have no reason at this point to suspect that we are being lied to by the world's media. In his film on the aftermath of the first Bush vs. Saddam shooting match, Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog documents extensive war-crimes committed by Iraqi troops against large numbers of men, women and children in Kuwait. We know, because we saw the pictures. We have no reason to suspect that Werner Herzog and the documentary's producers are deceiving us.

Tit for tat. So we are - if not so much being lied to - being bullshitted; by the accusers, by the accusee's, by the media circus, et al.

American jailors [possibly in the process of publishing the inaugral issue of new Middle-East edition of Bawdy A5-photocopy grub-'zine] humiliate their charges in an astounding display of finely-tuned depravity. Cue eruption of indignant outrage in the West. Cue anguished brow-beating across America.. "This couldn't happen" etc.

Heard the one about the New Zealand forces in the World War II? Conventional colloquy has it that the most brutal captors, the ones responsible for far more deaths of prisoners-of-wars than any other Allied group, often in a variety of brutish and callous means, were the Kiwi boys. Somewhere up next to the Japanese, supposedly, in their cruel and inhumane ways. But devotees of any religion - soldiers - are always steeped in the mythology of the sufferings of their martyrs. I suspect that Mohammed, in the holy wisdom of his writings, offers his disciples many exhortations on ways to counter the slings and arrows, possibly sticks'n'stones, possibly purty lacy knickers, of the infidel.

It's beside the point. Let's not pretend this is new, or that there's not actually a war being fought. This shit always goes on in the wings while two groups of people are rushing around trying to kill each other. The technology has improved a bit - who knows what delightful snaps Ghenghis Khan would have put up on his website if he had been armed with a digital camera.

If they's going to be fighting, let's let both sides get on with it - and if they're going to do it they might as well do it properly. 'To the victors the spoils' and all that, articles of the Geneva Convention relating to treatment of prisoners-of-war or no; mandate to be there in the first place or not. These liberal displays of liberal angst are boring, and a convenient distraction from the more pertinent point of whether the US and it's mates should be there at all.

And so let's also take bets on how long it will take for that little album of 8x10 colour glossies currently doing the rounds in the Washington old-boys clubs to be 'leaked' onto the web somehow.

Never again

Forgeddabout mixing the grape and the grain; on Saturday night I was merrily mixing every goddamn drink known to man in a superlative performance which saw me spend most of Sunday alternating between sleeping, and lying in a pool of sweat vomiting up the lining of my stomach into a beautifully and conveniently transparent Natalia Kucija bag. Eventually I arose and that's when I noticed the little clusters of burst blood vessels ringing my eyes making me look like I'd been in a fist-fight with a midget. I'd actually woken up thinking I was in pretty good form all-things-considered, but as soon as the first drop of morning-after water slid down my esophagus I knew I was in big trouble; I fed my breakfast of porridge to the kitten and went back to bed.

Amongst a variety of material, the Port Silver Arts website FAQ has an interesting suggestion on how to prevent a Projectile Vomit Hangover [see Q: What's the best way to prevent a hangover?] which I shall certainly try the next time I find myself in this particular predicament ["Never again? Hah!"]. However they don't specify a common name for one of the ingredients, iodopropynyl butylcarbamate [IBPC], so I was forced to consult the information-box where the Cosmetics Unmasked Ingredients list identified it as a synthetic preservative and stuck the international chemical hazard symbol next to it [see right]. None of which is going to help me find out which aisle in the supermarket to look in.

Suggestions for finding IBPC? Surefire hangover cures? Email me...

Player-haters

I was going to make a crack about Helen Clark's remark to the effect that the organisers of the Foreshore and Seabed Protest Hikoi were "haters and wreckers" [paraphrased] but Patrick Crewdson from Fighting Talk did it so much better. So whyncha go there and read it ["Clark to hikoi: why you buggin'?"]. I have no theories at this point why these words - straight from contemporary hip-hop parlance - are coming out of her mouth. Perhaps one of her media advisors is setting her up something chronic. *Ahem*.

Flash Poll: What's H-to-da-C's favourite old-skool rap LP? [My bet: Boo Ya Tribe's New Funky Nation 'cos it's mine too. Actually that's not much of a reason, is it.]

Hikoi of serious mana, Billy TK and the Smiths

Yesterday morning by complete coincedence [or perhaps providence] I found myself in lower Willis St. as the Foreshore and Seabed Legislation Protest Hikoi marchers moved down towards Parliament. It was an overwhelming and utterly moving experience to witness this. Hundreds and hundreds of young Maori men in full warrior get-up with long hair flying and tattoos everywhere and, in a lot of cases, no underpants, expertly wielding their patu and taiha in synchronised haka challenges, chanting and spitting and scaring the shit out of me. Tall men tooted on those big shells adding to the atmosphere with their high soft keening wails. Then followed countless thousands of New Zealanders - well, someone did count them, there were more than 15,000 apparently - and there were all-sorts a-walking, not just Maori - whose voices rattled around the streets and soared up amongst the tower-blocks as they sang in unison, shuffling past the Star Mart. Young women lined up along the streets wept as they joined them in song and I felt a crushing mix of ignorance, pride, cultural insignificance, and complete solidarity with their cause [the latter despite my self-admitted limited awareness of the issue at hand].

I am compelled to respond to Steve InlandScenic's comments about Billy TK. I can't answer for the earnest young sensitive liberal white guys givin' the brown guy props for playing 'the blues', but I always go see him when I can because [a] he blew my mind with his guitar contributions to the Human Instinct and Powerhouse bands before I was even born; [b] he can often play it quite safe, but if you go and yarn to him during the break and get your copy of Stoned Guitar signed... and blow his mind that "the young people are still listening to these old albums" [paraphrased] [I didn't have the heart to ask him if he was aware of how many thousand dollars original copies of those albums sell for these days] and request of him very nicely, he gets back up for the second set and launches into an excoriating rendition of Midnight Sun which takes the top of your head off and messes wit'your brain a bit [and yes, the band can keep up] and then dedicates it to you when he's done; and [c] on occasion he lets a drunken Emma Paki get up and do her best [and famous] broke'up Etta James routine on the mic'. Hey, he's the Maori Jimi Hendrix, right? ['Swhat they used to call him circa 1968] So when's the gig, Steve?

And when when I was 13 or 14 and doing the paper-round after school back in Tawa, my co-employees [slaves: we got about $2.50 a day] would lend me tapes for my walkman. Matt, the older brother of a friend of my brother, and what we would think of today as an "indie-kid", lent me the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Smiths [specifically Darklands and Meat is Murder]. Pete, our older-still stoner drop-out hair-to-his-waist mentor, would bring Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Led Zep along. Les, the hooligan son of the owners of the dairy at the bottom of the hill where we waited for the paper-lady, stalked around in crimson 14-hole Docs, turned-up jeans and a "ghetto"-blaster playing the Clash and the UK Subs. A motley crew, sure, but it goes to show that the musical subculture of my adolescence was just a shade different to that of Steve's and there was probably more Smiths going around than he thinks.

Anyway isn't nostalgia, authentic or not, just the privileged conceit of the bourgeoisie?

By way of introduction

This is me... I'm 30, and it's almost winter again here in Wellington City. I'm new to this business of being old, and I'm having the time of my life. From time to time I'm going to feel like sharing something wit'yall and I guess here's where I'll be doin' it. [Photo by the talented and gorgeous Bex P].