Red-Light/Vorortromantik/Architecture/Death

I'm exhibiting new work in a four-man show which opens soon, at One Eye Gallery in Paekakariki. I'd like to extend a warm invitation to y'all to attend the opening on Saturday afternoon from 3 'til 5 pm.

Participating in the show are Jo Russ, Sandra Schmidt, Matt Couper and myself. It promises to be a great show.

If you can't make the opening, please feel free to pop up to Paekak of a sunny afternoon and check out the show for some spiritual and intellectual edification. You can, of course, spend the rest of the day in the fine second-hand bookstore, on the beach or in the pub.

The show runs from Saturday 20 November until Sunday 19 December. Gallery hours are Wednesday - Sunday 11 am 'til 5 pm. You can contact the gallery on 04 292 7044, or check out their site.

Now pray for Yassir Arafat

Yassir "The Moderator" Arafat, probably at the prospect of having to deal with - on top of Ariel Sharon - four more years of the Bush govt's policies of lunacy in the Middle East, has gone into a coma.

Hunter S. Thompson on Arafat:

Yassir has never been well-liked or popular in the Arab League nations. He is ugly and loud, and spittle flies off his lips when he talks. His beard is unclean and his eyes are like bags of dirty water. The starch in his uniforms gets rancid after two or three days of soaking up fatty acids, and even good friends avoid him in private. -13 October 1986 [Generation of Swine, p170]

"There were times when I could Have strangled him
There were times when I could Have murdered him
(But you know, I would hate Anything to happen to him)..."

[or something]

Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-Semitic or even anti-Zionist by any stretch of the imagination. However, as probably the only thing standing in the way of full-on jihad against Israel - and by [almost-]logical extension, nuclear conflict in the Middle-East, Arafat has his uses, so to speak. I hope he pulls through.

EDIT: In the interests of clarity I have slightly reworded some of this post.

Well... piss up a rope... again

Anyone who's ever lived here - Wellington, New Zealand - will know what I mean when I say that yesterday, Wednesday November the 3rd 2004, was a sublime Wellington day. The wind died away mid-morning and we basked in sun from heaven all the rest of the live-long day. God was clearly softening us up for the blow.

Looks like the Top Gun shit did the trick, goddammit.

So the Dorking Labs crew and miscellaneous hangers-on assembled at a pub and - drinking fast and hard - watched the live CNN broadcast of the unfolding results in the US elections a bit like it was a rugby-match. And like most rugby-matches, I lost interest when it became clear at around the 55-minute mark that the result was a given. Then it all got a bit silly for a while - our taunting of the CNN presenters' unwillingness to 'call' this state or that state [obviously wanting to avoid scandalous premature announcements a la 2000] turned surreal as we loudly suggested that they cross live to (the recently deceased) Hunter S. Thompson, a random blogger, the Symbionese Liberation Front, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the exhumed corpse of Jefferey Dahmer, the Una-Bomber and so on, anyone, anyone, and get them to call the result in Delaware or some shit. We also started revising the American electoral system, mooting for example that only Hollywood stars ever be allowed to become the Governor of a state, and that anyone who's ever released a good album be allowed 20 votes - in perpituity - rather than the standard one. Then No Offense, But... bit my hand for reasons that are still a bit unclear - possibly trying to express the collective mood in some sort of regressive act of savagery - if I had a digital camera I'd post a little snap of his teeth-marks some 12 hours later - and after a little while we drifted away into the night.

Today the weather did the only decent thing again, and packed it in.

Everything Is Wrong With Me-guy writes - as per usual - some really funny shit about god, George Bush, and his America.

Elsewhere on this site Blog-In-Mouth presents the unexpurgated version of his 'mourning'-after cartoon. You also gotta check this one, if you haven't seen it yet.

A chocolate fish for the first person that can find me a link to a good blogger who is celebrating the result. Fuck it, I might as well stake a blowjob, it's not gonna happen.

Ex-pat journo in "Flores man" shocker

On Thursday, Australian and Indonesian scientists announced the discovery of the Homo floresiensis, who stood about one metre tall and walked the earth about 13,000 years ago. "Flores man" is thought to be a descendant of Homo erectus, who had a large brain, was full-sized and spread out from Africa to Asia about 2 million years ago. Local folk tales suggest the hominids may have still been living on the Indonesian island of Flores until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s.

Exclusive

But in a Drinks-After-Work exclusive, we can reveal that "Flores man" is alive and well and getting on rather well with the locals. The little fellas, locally known as "Flossies", are said to be the life and soul of the party, have a predilection for expensive cocktails and like to have their heads scratched. They also love to ride around on humans and can get quite amorous, as our reporter Chris Holm demonstrates in a recent photograph from the jungles of Flores. While they don't speak English, or any of the local dialects, it's reported that they have no difficulty understanding and communicating in the international "language of love".

R.I.P. John Peel OBE

John Peel is dead, so I spent some hours in the middle of the night listening to all the Peel Session LPs I could lay me hands on - distressingly only the Damned and the Syd Barret were able to be located - and the CD reissue of the Siren albums on Peel's label Dandelion.

I've already read several carelessly-hurried obituaries wailing "how will we ever replace him". Fer chrissakes the man's barely cold... what kinduva half-witted thing to say is that? I think I'm gonna start issuing contracts for hits on the offenders...

Peel's motto regarding the music he presented on his legendary radio show was "A balance between things that you know people will like and things that you think people will like". Reading it now it may seem a little obvious but it's a hard balance to find; it's also one I've always strived for in my modest efforts on the radio.

Courtesy of the BBC:

• John Peel's bullet point biog.
• If you would like to remember John, or to offer your words of condolence click here.
• For advice on how to cope with bereavement go to One Life's help pages.

Jen-Smacked-Face met the man - more than once - and she stole his taxi. Here she eulogises eloquently about him.

3PM Edit: Lord-only knows why I put "Sir Robert Peel" in the title of this entry. Please accept humble apologies. It was the middle of the night - perhaps I was google-fatigued. Title adjusted accordingly.

He takes my breath away

So-called "President" Bush is on the campaign trail in Florida, and helicopter-hopping all over the state. In Fort Myers on Saturday morning, he emerged from his chopper Marine One to the Top Gun theme blaring from the stadium PA. After the rally he presumably left to have a fist-fight with Iceman, a dog-fight with a few Russki Migs, and sex with Kelly McGillis. Or something.

I was intending to cook up some devastatingly witty and/or sarcastic appraisal of this blatantly ridiculous conceit, combine it with some fantastically thoughtful insight, and retire, satisfied in a job well done. It'd be a blogger's duty at the very least. But I really only want to cuss his stoopid chimp-faced hick ass all the way back to the stump out from under which he crawled and... etc. etc.

Has Been..

William Shatner has a new album out; Has Been, the long-awaited follow-up to 1968's The Transformed Man has just been released. Actually if he'd waited 18 months or so, he'd probably hold the title for Most Delayed Follow-Up Album in History of Rock. [I believe Brian Wilson would currently take that honour for Smile, released last month.] But that's not what I want to talk about.

John Russell reviewed Shatner's new album in Sunday's Herald. It wasn't a bad review, all things considered, but one thing made my hair stand on end. In his review, Russell alerts us to the fact that Mr. Shatner apparently prefers to be known as The Shat.

This is beyond comprehension. The only - and this is stretching it - reason I can think of to explain why Shatner would like us to affectionately refer to him - in the past participle of to shit - as recently excreted feculence, is that he's the dom. in some sort of S+M relationship with a coprophagiast.

Some googling later, and it would appear that Shatner has been colloquially known as The Shat for some time. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that, I guess, but if a bunch of people started calling me 'piss-o' or something similar I'm pretty sure that rather than resign myself to it, I would draw some sort of line in the sand and tell them to fuck off. [Darling aquaintances, this isn't an invitation to test my resolve. Cunts].

John Russell's review isn't available online; here's one at, somewhat appropriately, Crud Magazine. [Happily, Crud Magazine is worksafe!].

Belated thoughts on the late Christopher Reeve

After I saw Chris Reeve's post-accident remake of Hitchcock's Rear Window, starring himself playing the wheelchair-bound voyeuer-guy, I held some hope that the intrepid dude'd be able to forge a whole new career for himself... a second-wind, if you like, as the most utterly perfectly-awfully typecast actor of his generation, y'know...

also starring Christopher Reeve as the guy in the wheelchair...

Or if not, at least the actor appearing the most in god-awful remakes of reasonably-daft-but-classic movies. [Cf. Village of the Damned.] [Also, if you follow the link to IMDB for the Rear-Window remake, check the Trivia entry... "The scene where Jason's breathing tube comes loose and he has to chatter his teeth to get the nurse's attention really happened to Christopher Reeve shortly after his accident". Uh, for fuck's sake!]

Everything Is Wrong With Me riffs pretty-amusingly on Reeve's demise... gotta say right-on about the fucking NY Post and that Metropolis bullshit, too.

I can't believe it's not butter...

Umm, I can. Perhaps a more accurate product name might be I Can't Believe It Causes Cell Damage!.

Some notes about smoking-in-bars...

[Weird.. TV3 news is b'casting live from Fashion Week and the show is over for the night and Dimmer's Crystalator is blaring out, being used as room-clearing music...]


...Anyway... an Irishman walked into a pub... and had a beer with me. Really. With reference to the impending ban on smoking in bars in NZ, here's some snippets of things he told me about the aftermath of similar legislation coming into effect in Ireland.

• Attendance or custom or whatever went down by 70%
• Result of this drop was that the breweries and the bars drop [oh the heavenly punning] the price of beer, conceivably to entice the punters back
• One bar spent over a million quid building a rooftop outdoors area where people could drink and smoke
• Said bar cleaned up, attracting smoking punters away from other bars from miles around [this apparently no mean feat, in the legendarily-parochial Irish pub scene]
• Another bar has built a guillotine-style contraption on its outer wall where a punter can stick his head out into the street and smoke a ciggy. Queues ensued.

The only thing I really had to contribute is that I know that one reasonably well-established bar here in Wellington is building a secret "smoke-easy" beneath its regular bar.

Go Prohibition-styles... Elliot Ness... Al Capone... Untouchables. etc.

Bad dream or...

I just awoke from a nightmare. I was an All Black, and we had just lost the 2003 Rugby World Cup Semi-Final to Australia. George Gregan was there, except his face looked like Kerry Prendergast. He/she was very excited, getting right up in our faces, yelling "Three more years, boys, three more years". Smug bitch. Eventually he to be restrained and hauled away by some of his team-mates, who may or may not have looked like Rex Nicholls and Alick Shaw.

I'm not really sure what happened next but shortly later a microphone was lowered from the roof of the stadium to where Brian Tamaki was waiting in a pink spandex jumpsuit to sing a medley of WHAM hits.

Gone postal

It's not all bad news. I will be appeased - somewhat, but not utterly - if after special votes are counted, we get to wave ta-ta to that bastard Alick Shaw. The turncoat Shaw, former Labour candidate for Wellington Central [before being trounced by Richard Prebble in '96], latterly Deputy lap-dog for Kerry Prendergast, hangs on to his seat on council by the very slim margin of 260 votes; coming quickly up his rear is Green Party candidate [and anti-Bypass group Campaign for a Better City stalwart] Iona Pannet. My sources tell me there are about 1200 special votes to count.

It's already been rather pleasing to have witnessed the ditching of Prendergast 'lieutenants' Ngaire Best, Sue Piper, Ian Hutchings, Judy Siers, and David Zwartz from council. If Shaw exits stage-left after specials are processed, her already-waning support takes another major body-blow. [Though in a cruel twist Hutchings will likely wrench the Northern Ward back from 18-year old newcomer Hayley Wain.] And, rather pleasantly, Bryan Pepperell, Jack Ruben and Helene Ritchie remain to kick Prendergast's ass around, as well as Mr. Ray Ahipene-Mercer who not only can set up my guitar any day, but is not averse to a bit of idiot ass-kicking himself.

And in other news, there were also encouraging signs after votes were counted for the Regional council. Fran Wilde, Chris Laidlaw and Margaret Shields, all former Labour MPs in Wellington or outlying districts [Kapiti], and generally bloody top blokes, are all now Regional councillors. Wilde, who of course had a decent hand in the Homosexual Law Reform Bill in the mid-80's and was also Mayor of Wellington for one term in the 90's, has her sights set on transport issues; said issues would surely have to include the looming inner-city bypass.

Watch this space, as they say.

Well... piss up a rope

As the provisional results began to point overwhelmingly to Kerry Prendergast having been returned for a second term as Mayor of Wellington, the weather did the decent thing and packed it in. In fact, as any sensible-thinking person spent today in mourning for Wellington's well-being, it's continued to comprehensively piss down.

Unfortunately, technical difficulties have apparently prevented other important information from coming to the fore at this point, including the make-up of the City and Regional councils. But we do know that voter turn-out was appallingly low, the lowest for many a year. Big ups apathy and indifference.

O well, at least I probably don't feel as bad as the supporters of the Australian Labour Party. Wow. John Howard. Again?

There's something wrong with my robot

Mailbag time. Jen-Smacked-Face wrote:

Patels Superette!! How long has it been since I last heard those words? (Seven years exactly, since you ask.)

Far be it from me to ruin someone's nostaglic reverie, but Patel's Superette is the same in name only, I'm afraid. In them good old days, the staff/owners were your friend, and weird dissaffected young whiteys worked out the back [I bought some CDs off one of them at some point]. Plus they had Lotto. About 3 years ago, they changed hands and that was the end of the golden weather, as they say. These days it's owned and staffed by a strange breed of extremely brusque folk, who speak another language, watch TV a lot and don't always look at you, even when taking your money. O, and no more Lotto. Sorry.

Kellie Wilson, Sales Administrator, Hutchinsons (NZ) Limited, writes:

Thank you for your letter informing us of the problem you had with our Chopped Italian tomatoes with chilli and garlic 400g. We pride ourselves on marketing quality products and were very concerned when we received your comments.

The processing equipment used is very effective and the problem you have experienced is thank fully [sic] very rare. We have however informed our supplier and requested to discuss the incident with Quality Control and the Production Team.

Please find enclosed a $10 grocery voucher for you to use how you wish, we are deeply sorry or [sic] any inconvenience this may have caused you and hope that you will be able to resume your relationship!

Why shucks, thanks Kellie. I'm a bit disappointed though - I was rather hoping that you'd demand the instant resignation of the entire Quality Control and Production Team, and send me a million bucks. I'll guess I'll have to settle for the voucher, then. Maybe next time I'll have to find a black fat-tailed scorpion instead. Thanks for the mandate to use the voucher how I wish though - if I remember I'll send you a photo of me and the lady hoovering drugs with it.

Muffy writes:

Steve, your literary shenanigans never fail to amuse... Heaps of hot lovings, muffy

Muffy, are you my mother? No, just kidding. But I've got a strange, nagging feeling I know you. Did we meet at the first Lord of the Rings wrap-party? Or was that you up amongst the pine trees on school sports day, 1990. You've got my interest, now, you enigma, you. Wanna leave me a clue?

Roger Kerr to Deborah Coddington

... Would you like to *hrmpph* come up to my *hrmpph* apartment and *hrmpph*... look at my *hrmpph* bond certificates? *hrmpph* *fst fst fst fst Tweet* I can assure you my uhh *hrmpph* intentions are honourable *fst fst*... I've got a big *fst* round *hrmpph* table, don't you know...

The Untold Stories

Erotic Novella I Haven't Found Time To Write, Yet #2: Me, John Banks and the Giant Sausage Roll from Patel's Superette.

Also, must get around to finishing off #1 How I Lost My Anal Virginity To Pastor Brian Tamaki... I want to work his hair oil into it, somehow.

A funny thing happened on the way here tonight...

Product / Quality Manager
Hutchinsons (NZ) Ltd.
Level 4, ASB Building
136 Broadway
Newmarket
Auckland

Dear Sir / Madam:

RE: Trident Chopped Italian tomatoes with chilli and garlic 400g

Please find enclosed the debris I discovered [it shall henceforth be known as 'It'] in a can of the abovementioned product. I had purchased the can [from Patels Superette in Aro Street, Te Aro, Wellington] in order to cook a lovely romantic Italian meal for the lady I am wooing. Somehow It managed to remain undetected throughout the entire process of cooking the meal. However, you can imagine the hilarity [mine, short-lived] that ensued when, upon serving the meal, It appeared on the top of the food on my date's plate, looking so much like some sort of large weird green spider. She, predictably, shrieked and made for the hinterland [well, the bathroom] from which it took some coaxing to entice her. Sadly and needless to say, dinner was a write-off.

I have an assurance from the lady in question that, after an appropriate period, she will consider returning for another meal. Unfortunately she has suggested that we see other people in the interim. Apparently it's for the best.

I hope this story of woe brings you some light-relief.

Best wishes,

Stephen Clover.

...

Postscript: If you needed to know, It was a not-insubstantial fleshy eight-fingered tomato stalk. My date's reaction was not unreasonable, either; according to the London Mail a green-grocer recently found a black fat-tailed scorpion in a shipment of bananas and mangoes from Pakistan. The man mistook the creature, said to be the third most deadly animal on Earth, to be a tomato stalk before realising what it was. He proceeded promptly to terrorise several passing children with it, before losing it on the No. 7 bus.

If anyone can help with comprehension as to why a pet-store is selling black fat-tailed scorpions on-line and providing breeding, propogation and care instructions for them, please do not hesitate to contact me.

...

UPDATE: reply here.

The Datsuns came to town...

While I'm on a The Datsuns tip, they played here in Wellington last Friday night at Vic Student Union. Here's the review I wrote of the show for The Package:

The Datsuns are touring their new album and in the two years since I seen 'em they've gotten even greater. The new material is more mature - more melodic, more dynamically complex. The old songs sound even somewhat souped-up. Their honed-lean stage show is utterly convincing - in the hour-or-so set they don't miss one carefully orchestrated cue or one visual rock-cliche or one chance at an audience-participation gag. They rocked and we bounced; drunkards violently flailed and wind-milled and teenagers were violently ill and the unruly were violently ejected, dragged off by their lug-'oles by packs of snarling security-thugs.

But what to write about The Datsuns when so much type s'been expended already? Here's what... The Datsuns don't just play rock'n'roll - they ARE rock'n'roll. They's white and they's skinny and they got hair in abundance. They live their rock'n'shuffle and their heroic anthems with all them insanely-inane sing-along catchy choruses. They smack us down with their hard-rock-boogie and we hit the floor and snap back for more and more. Us? We're drunk little girls and air-guitar-wielding bogans and shaggy torn-shirted under-grads gasping for air and water and Dolf plays us like the ho's we are for his sweaty bug-eyed lovin'.

The show climaxes in a chaotic epic finale involving simultaneous crowd-surfing by both guitarists and the still-singing Dolf while, weirdly, a Dolf-doppelganger appears and takes over on bass. That was worth stickin' aroun' for. The Datsuns're the best fucken rock'n'roll band since Bon Scott died. End of story.

[Apologies to The Accelerants and the other support act [erm... who where they again?]; I missed both of 'em. How rock'n'roll is THAT?]

This is one of two reviews I wrote of the show; inspired to a not-insignificant degree by the enthusings of Matt Hunt, who attended the gig with me, I decided to run with the plaudits first. I'll post the other one soon.

Ongoing memoirs of a crate-digger

Or, how the Datsuns saved my life in Hamilton

It's a cool early-November Saturday afternoon, 2001... I'm in the main street of Hamilton waiting to meet a guy called "Spud". I play bass in a Wgtn avant-pop band and we're touring with a psych-post-rock duo from Dunedin. Tonight's the last gig and our manager has organised a live interview on "Hamilton's Rock Alternative!" The Generator FM.

Spud lets us into the studio. It's plain he doesn't want anything to do with this. He's never heard of either band and can't be fucked talking to a bunch of pussies from the city. Partway through I start to wonder if we're even going to get out alive.

The interview is appalling but we battle through and Spud finally winds up, asking us if we like any bands from Hamilton. The guys are looking at each other blankly... you can sense panic as they desperately rack their minds for a name, any name, anything with which to appease Spud and his hordes of slobbering Cro-Magnon listeners... meanwhile I'm wanting to claim "Hitler's Kock" [Bryce Galloway's old art-punk outfit] but play it safe... "I quite like The Datsuns". Spud regards me sceptically. "Cool... what's your favourite song, dude?" [read: "Bullshit, dude"] Me: "Uh, Fink for the Man, on the b-side of the Transistor seven-inch. It's the fucken best rock'n'roll I've heard since Bon Scott died".

It was like just then the sun rose in Spud's eyes. He's a changed man. As he wraps up the interview, he hypes our gig twice, and plays something from our CD which he manages to segue nicely into a track from the latest Korn album.

Of course it was all for nothing; no slobbering Cro-Mags came to the gig and no shouted requests for Slipknot songs were received. [Actually, that makes it sound like it was all worth-while!] It was a really good gig though. You can see pictures by reknowned H-town rock-groupie Petra Jane here.

I am not an animal! I am a human being! I...am...a man!

I've made it my business lately to see The Elephant Men, a new-ish Wgtn rock trio, as often as possible. Predictably my inner-sloth caused me to miss them at their biggest gig, supporting Trinity Roots at the Town Hall last month, but let's not dwell on that...

Of course the Elephant Man was John Merrick, a 19th-century Englishman afflicted with a disfiguring congenital disease - Proteous Syndrome - who with the help of a certain kindly Dr. Frederick Treves, was able to regain the dignity he lost after years spent as a catastrophically deformed side-show freak. David Lynch, that notorious arbiter of the aberrant, made a movie called The Elephant Man in 1980, starring the very great John Hurt as the E-man. The similarly great David Bowie starred as the Elephant Man in the 1980 stage production of the story. A silent movie called Her Elephant Man was also made in 1920 by Scott R. Dunlap but this is actually a love story about a man who looks after elephants. A documentary called Curse of the Elephant Man was made in 2003 in which 'a distinguished cast of experts from three continents try to solve the mystery of his disease and answer two intriguing questions: what was the awful affliction, and could it happen again?'

The band features Chris Palmer on guitar, Craig Taylor on bass and Rick Cranson on drums. None of them are particularly disfigured but it's encouraging to see these poor creatures able to take a much more active part in today's progressive society. All have been seen in other outfits too, demonstrating again the truly eclectic nature of so many of these local talents.

This is a short piece on the band that I wrote for Secret City - a monthly broadsheet put out jointly by Enjoy Public Art Gallery and Happy...

The Elephant Men are no ordinary band. They out there in the hinterland... lurking roun' the fringes of rock and jazz; and they def'nittly gone a bit feral. They're hairy but they're top musicians; they can play the shit outta their axes and they got no shortage of chops. But don't be afraid - this ain't no lame fusion thing. These boys play with all the fire of post-rock's extreme-noise-terror, the angular sonic ebullience of the greatest New-York-1978 No Wave outfits, and the funk of a broke-ass steamroller... and to this melange add the vocals of Chris Palmer, who sings like a fallen angel half the way through a bottle of tequila. But crucially, they's doin' it with the improvising grace of three guys talkin' their very peculiar language. If you gonna start me namecheckin' then I gotta say equal parts Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Jeff Buckley or sommat or even Tim Buckley and then some freakish No Wave ensemble like DNA or the first Golden Palominos LP. For my pick this is easily the best live band around at the moment and you don't want to pass up a chance to see them hollerin' live... I did and I'm still cursing my lazy ass about it.

Postscript: The Fingers, another band with Chris Palmer on guitar and ostensibly featuring journeyman percussionist Chris O'Conner on drums, performed on Thursday night at Happy as part of the line-up of Meatwaters'04. Kieren Monaghan filled in on the night for the stranded-in-Christchurch O'Connor. I'm not sure if the band-name is a reference to any films about infamous side-show-freak attractions or not - possibly the Beast with Five Fingers ["It walks like a spider... it stalks like a cobra!"]? They were frenetic, entirely improvised and more abrasive than The Elephant Men and really, really, good as well...