Public Address - Island Life (Home)

Drinking is easy, comedy is hard. | Apr 24, 2008 10:10

I have chosen a new drink for the comedy festival. Because I am trying to lose 10 kilos, the beer is off the list. Wine's okay, but I have a habit of drinking too much of it, falling asleep and being roused awake afterwards by the star of the show and sent home in a cab. I have even once fallen asleep watching the comedian I was about to interview. You can click here to hear what I sound like when I have been woken up in a bar to do such a thing.

It should be apparent that I am only a few days into the 2008 comedy festival and I have already drunk deeply of the spirit of frank, candid, intimate confession.

The drink that goes well with this, I find, is scotch on the rocks. I like a good single malt as much as the next snob, but when I sit down in a bar to watch someone sing the blues or wail in the Hank Williams style or make everyone laugh, any old whisky strained through clinking ice cubes is just fine for me.

Guy walks into a comedy club to see Ben Hurley, asks for a scotch on the rocks. Which one?, the bartender asks. As rough as you like I say. Grants? she asks. Perfect. Ben Hurley is playing all this week upstairs at the Classic Studio. His audience banter is showing the benefit of his recent years in the UK. He hears every fine detail his audience gives him, and before your eyes spins it into a fine golden thread of wit.

The Festival began with the Gala, and Juha may not forgive me for this but I'll say it anyway: it also began in fine farce traditions when my host for the night left his tickets in the taxi cab and we had to stand outside the Civic as the bells rang, waiting for the driver to return from Herne Bay. It was worth the effort. The theatre was on fire and the acts were almost all, to my taste, terrific. Only one or two left me cold. That still leaves a feast to choose from. I especially liked Arj Barker, and Jason Cook.

I can also recommend the Lady Bunch (Transmission Room until Saturday) where I was slugging my Scotch on the rocks last night. Irene Pink likes to use her ample frame to freak out the snooty women who decide whether you are worthy of trying on their Zambezi range. Justine Smith has some excellent advice on the connection between your choice of footwear and your prospects of being fellated and Michele A'Court is in marvellous form. There once was a time years ago at Kitty O'Briens when I was startled by how angry she seemed. But that was long ago. She has the deft touch of saying how lovely someone is once she's finished giving them a thorough bagging.

I'm pretty sure she actually means it, too. The comedians I warm to are the ones who have a generosity of spirit. They mock, they prick bubbles, but they don't hate. They have an affection for our flawed humanity.

This afternoon I will take Mary-Margaret and a friend to get a share of the fun.This year the kids get stand up. I know the girls will love it. Jamie Noone hosts it, and there will be Al Pitcher, Paul Tonkinson and Mike Boon. Next week they will have the marvellous Janey Godley.

I fully expect to remain awake for the whole thing.

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Suits YOU sir | Apr 23, 2008 09:48

Let's consider Chris Trotter's thesis that the patrons of the National Party are not likely to be digging deep just to see the election of a Labour Lite replacement.

Let's view it through the prism of yesterday's broadband announcement. The announcement is welcome news to this Internet trader. It might be rather vague on detail and raise unanswered questions about regulation and matching private sector investment but the intent is nonetheless laudable.

Here's my response to the snide folk who have been saying: faster downloading for your YouTube and your porn and your pirated movies. I spend thousands on hosting in the USA because no-one here can set me up with a fast enough server and a big enough data allowance. That money could be being spent here. Ask Rod Drury what it could mean for the Software As A Service businesses he's involved in.

It's becoming trite to say it, but it's nonetheless true: internet infrastructure is as important to us as roads, railways and refrigerated ships. Why not have it in abundance, rather than relatively scarce and expensive? Let a thousand e-commerce sites bloom!

So what about the Trotter thesis? Ask yourself how thrilled Maurice 'no-hands' Williamson is to see his party putting up all that tyre smoke as John Key throws a handbrake turn on the do-nothing policy the party's IT spokesperson favours.

This collector's card goes in the same page of the party photo album as the images of Guyon Espiner stalking Lockwood and Maurice down the corridor, trying to get them to repeat their private declarations of climate change skepticism.

Consider for a moment those audiences in the rooms where the recalcitrant former ministers confided their doubts. Consider whether such people might be a source of the funds which Chris Trotter posits are being pledged in expectation of suitable policy settings for the gentleman who dresses to the right.

The leader might be willing to bolt himself steadfastly to the slightly left of centre ground in order to secure the prestigious job, but the bungy rope must be getting pretty damn taught, if the expression on Maurice's face is any guide.

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The worst that could happen | Apr 16, 2008 11:43

I only realised much later that I had been warned, as a child, of Stranger Danger. It was at our cubs group in the Kimbolton Hall.

If a man offers you some sweets to get in his car, tell him no, they said. I was skeptical. This was so completely implausible. Why on earth would a complete stranger want to share his sweets with me?

There was also a cub manual in which the message was reinforced with a picture of a grinning chap in a fedora leaning out of the car, Minties in his beckoning hand. Dib, dib, dib, Akela. We will do our best. We will read maps. We will not get in cars.

We went on a trip to Taupo and I wandered off from the pack. I had no idea where I was. A nice man asked me if I needed help. Yes please, I told him, I'm a cub. We're on a trip and I'm lost.

Hop in my car and I'll take you back , he said.

Do the mothers reading this passage flinch in apprehension more than the fathers, I wonder? It's ridiculous to generalise. I have a sunny optimistic nature; Karren apprehends more hazards for our daughter than I do. They worry her.

When I was five years old, my dad had me steering the tractor as he walked behind feeding out hay. My mother -- the same one who would once, younger, walk across a railway viaduct on a dare -- was aghast when she saw the ridge we were driving along. Dad is a careful and cautious man, but he still took more latitude than people might approve of these days. So did all the farmers. Occasionally one would let their loose clothing get too near the PTO shaft of the tractor and there would be another funeral in the district.

I didn't get molested that day in Taupo. I got delivered back to the scout hall. The tractor never tipped over.

What's the worst that can happen? One day you have a healthy eight year old daughter, the next you're in Starship learning about Ewing's Sarcoma.

So many of our friends have spent anxious nights at Starship. They have mostly brought home their children safe and well. But some discover Ward 7. This is where the cancer kids go. This is where you discover that everything you took for granted about your child's life has vapourised. This is where you are inducted into a new world of blinking monitors and wretched days of waiting.

It's not our eight year old daughter with the disease; it's Finlee, the family friend of our daughter's friend Belle. Last weekend I read the narrative Belle's mother, Michelle Hancock, has compiled and photographed these past six months. It is sobering, it is anguished. A healthy, happy eight year old daughter disappears into a world of bone removal and therapy and a vast collection of beads and no sure promise that any of this will be enough. The screw turns a a little each day.

It wasn't our daughter it happened to; it wasn't ever, I hope, yours. But it always could be. At Starship's Oncology Ward -- Ward 7 -- it is cramped. You have four patients to a room, in pain, weak, vomitting. You have families, you have noise, you have anguish, and you find a corner to curl up in and sleep fitfully through the night with your child, attending to their meds and the equipment at half hour intervals.

Being able to wake up and discover it was a bad dream would be the preferable option, but a second best one would to be have more room: some space to retreat into, to cope with your grief; enough room for everyone to move.

Michelle Hancock is a photojournalist. She has taken remarkable pictures to accompany the narrative. It is being staged as an exhibition at Devonport's Depot Artspace to raise funds towards the rebuilding of the Starship Oncology ward and it opens this weekend. It is a compelling documentary of a mother and daughter finding their way through.

Every bit helps. 28 Clarence St, Devonport, from this Sunday, April 20, for a week or so.

Why not take your daughter along, read the story, count your blessings, squeeze her hand, and leave some money?

UPDATE

If you'd like to support the Oncology Ward rebuild at Starship you can donate here. (Select Cancer Ward Appeal from the dropdown box.)

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What I've done with Julie Christie is my own business | Apr 15, 2008 08:04

I have decided to stand for Parliament this election. The calibre of MPs continues to decline, and frankly we need someone of my quality. My experience is long, wide, and deep; my network of contacts is impressive; I have the common touch and I can campaign like a sonofabitch.

I have come this far before and balked; there are certain undisclosed matters that could make things awkward. Today, however, I am cleaning out my Augean stables. You might want to roll up your trousers.

1. I once wrote a favourable review of a John Key speech in exchange for sexual favours from a Young Nat. I have never visited John Key.

2. I am a silent partner in that South Auckland block of flats you read about in the Listener.

3. I have been supplying public relations counsel to seven members of the Hawkes Bay district health board. I have in the last four months conducted 48 workshops for nurses and cleaning staff on the effective use of Powerpoint.

4. Four years ago I was shopping in a Christchurch supermarket when I noticed a pretty young Russian humming discordantly to herself.

5. One night when I was getting fonged with Matthew Hooton and John Ansell I made a joke about Iwi and Kiwi.

6. My billboard design business was paid $83,621 for "Want Longer Lasting Sex?"

7. I get a three cent royalty on every packet of Bluebird chips your kids buy for the rugby cards.

8. I play 18 holes with Mark Bryers on Tuesdays and nine with Rod Petricevic on Thursdays. On Saturdays David Richwhite lets me take the chopper out to dive-bomb sunbathers at Opito Bay. If I don't bag ten, I have to detail his Hummer.

9. I have two pairs of Crocs.

10. My friend Damian Christie has three.

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Top ten surprises in Wishart's 'explosive' new Helen Clark biography | Apr 14, 2008 07:47

1. Photographed by Soviet agent in 1974 in three-way with Selwyn Toogood and Heather Eggleton.

2. Silent partner in Jonathon Hunt's taxi company.

3. Most wounding heckler taunt: "What's in the bag, Helen?"

4. Skipped Springbok tour protests, stayed home to listen to new Kenny Rogers album.

5. Sisterhood nickname for John Key: 'strap-on'.

6. Telecom 'gift': thirty years' free text messaging.

7. Coven meets on Sunday evenings behind Premier House, gets covered in possum fat, dances naked around patio heater.

8. John Key: allergic to possums.

9. Mystery driver of Doone's car was Ruth Dyson.

10. Iraena Asher knew too much.

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49 Chinese to Replace John Campbell | Apr 09, 2008 14:28

If a Chinese politician should ask you to explain our country's Foreign Minister, be inscrutable. Say: "he is a hair-gelled mystery to us all; a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, tucked inside a double-breasted suit, coiffed with infinite care and as untouchable as a matinee idol. We mostly have no idea what he's on about."

In truth he is the Huey Long of New Zealand politics. His constituency is the little guy, afraid of the unknown; bruised and resentful at the blithe disregard shown to all the little guys by the corporate brigands and the cosseted politicians.

Peters lives comfortably amidst change, but he knows his voters are leery of it. Peters trades on everything they do not know: the people they have not met; the books they have not read; the worlds they have not walked in.

"Likee soupee?" she asked the Chinese ambassador, breaking the silence.

The diplomat nodded and continued with his meal.

Dinner concluded, he rose to speak, in eloquent English.

Taking his seat, he turned to her: "Likee speechee?"

Peters dismisses the Free Trade agreement with China for being too meagre. We could have got a lot more out of them, he says, if those fools Moore and Douglas hadn't dropped all our tariffs 20 years ago (and they don't want you, he says darkly, to be reminded of that.)

To put it another way, we have arrived at the banquet table too late for the oysters, so we should walk away hungry, rather than fill our plate with noodles and barbecue pork. This is, as usual, disingenuous of him, although it certainly throws some light on the thinking that gave us such protracted coalition negotiations in 1996.

China's surely not in it for the access to our market so much as they are interested in getting this deal to work and thereby creating a stepping stone to bigger things.

When Peters talks about dropping the tariffs twenty years ago, he speaks to his disaffected constituency. He speaks to the small business people who went to the wall, the manufacturers who went out of business, the hard working blue collar wage workers whose jobs disappeared.

If you were lucky, in those turbulent days, you struck restructuring lotto. Ask the disaffected. They got nothing but debts, but there's a bloke down the road who got redundancy. Big payout. He bought a lifestyle block, put in a spa pool and a pool room, went on a holiday, and by Christmas all the money was gone.

They tell you: Our ex-brother in law got a redundancy cheque from Telecom and the next day they they took him back on as a consultant. We got nothing. We had had to sell the house.

It was a time of capricious fortune. If you were a beneficiary who got worked over by Ruth and Jenny, Helen Clark's party and the Alliance were campaigning for you throughout the '90s, but if you were a certain kind of small businessman or a casualty of the restructuring, it felt as though only Winston understood what had happened. It had to be some sort of con job, some evil conspiracy that had put you in this position. You were a hard worker and a proud Kiwi. How could it not be a giant scam?

This political thread reaches back further, to Social Credit and another urbane leader with another fine head of hair who nurtured distrust of the vested interests and the establishment. Peters maintains the suspicion of collusion and conspiracy; smoky, shadowy figures in rooms taking New Zealand away from New Zealanders. His words are peppered with it. "They want you to forget about.." "They don't want you to know about..."

In Winston's world, someone is always getting done over. We are all being royally shafted and the proceeds are going to Switzerland. Some politically-connected tycoon in a corporate box is helping himself to our birthright. And that's all you need to know. Likee votee?

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Rage against the machines | Apr 03, 2008 10:27

Sometimes, things go wrong and our inner cave man comes out. The movie Office Space sees the hero and his two laid off friends drag a hated printer from their office out into an open field where they set upon it with baseball bats and extreme prejudice. The South Park people did much the same thing to Isaac Hayes' chef character. Who among us has not wrestled with these murderous feelings?

I can imagine Brian Connell wanting to do such things to Chis Faafoi's microphone. Or indeed Chris Faafoi. Why stop at house cats?

John Key would probably like to haul the word slippery from the dictionary and do damage to it if he could just get his hands around it.

Somewhere in IRD, there is surely a calculator that shows the signs of having been flung quite some distance.

All around the world, people great and small battle these wrathful urges. Robert Mugabe seems a man who gives in to them with few qualms. Hillary Clinton must battle them often, especially when the tape rolls once again and everyone remarks archly upon her courage under Bosnian sniper fire.

Who among us?

In the DIY phase of my life, the combination of my imperfect coordination and a hammer was an abiding source of misery. I would damage myself and commence to hammering something nearby with the utmost vigour a dozen or so times, cursing wildly, as I waited for the initial pain to abate.

Those days are behind me now, however I am still an occasional user of Windows, so I still know the sensation of extreme exasperation and impotent rage. The sounds I make are much the same but it's unwise to take a hammer to a computer.

This is not to say that some people haven't done so. Wired magazine knows the anguish. The title of their story is self-explanatory: Destroy Your Most Hated Gadget, Take Pictures

There are moments, they write, when you wish that your cellphone -- an otherwise helpful gadget -- had nerves and self-awareness so that you could cause it pain. Now is your chance to get even. Send them your pictures of catharsis. Or take vicarious pleasure in strolling through their gallery. So much destruction! So much deep satisfaction.

I have a contribution in mind. I wrote here and here of my encounters with a fried server. I have here at the world headquarters of speechesdotcom, the three dead disks from the most recent crash, freighted here all the way from the USA just so I could make some kind of cautionary art form out of them. Here are the three innocuous disks, crammed full of fractured noughts and ones that once gave up addresses, speeches and the hopes and dreams of website customers all around the globe. In less than a moment, they became a paperweight.

Keith Ng, who is the sweetest natured and wisest of young men, nevertheless possesses a cool, perfectly evil streak. I showed the disks to him and explained my plan. There was a perceptible sadistic glint in his eye as he pondered the possibilities, before settling on extreme heat stress, in a kiln. I like that a lot, but just in case I'm overlooking something even more satisfying, what suggestions does anyone else have?

I'm also looking to borrow a kiln.

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Ask her now | Apr 01, 2008 08:03

My future wife and I were out of a job on the same day in 1990. Meet the new boss. You may remember him as the eight week Prime Minister, Mike Moore. We remember him as the man whose people handed us a get out of jail card. Who would have wanted to work on that doomed election campaign?

What do you do when you're out of work in the middle of a recession? You take yourselves off on a jaunt to the United States of America.

We were an office romance. There seemed to be an implicit understanding that at a suitably romantic moment on the trip, I might, you know, do that question popping thing. There was an evening out on the water under the Golden Gate bridge that suggested itself, but there was a cold breeze. Anywhere in the French Quarter would have been good. Manhattan was mostly too noisy, Chicago too wet, Washington DC too busy. There was a moment in an Amtrak dining car when I felt on the point of it, but then the food arrived.

Weeks went by; we came back home. I was still waiting for the right moment. I voted Green in a National landslide. Clearly I was ready for a leap into the unknown.

All the same, it still took me another two months.

There is a man named Manu who lives in the USA. He and his girlfriend enjoy a blog entitled ParisDailyPhoto, which offers precisely what its title suggests.

On the Internet, nice people help other people. Eric, who curates ParisDailyPhoto, is such a man. Manu emailed him to say that he and his girlfriend were coming to Paris. What his girlfriend did not know was that Manu was planning to propose to her in front of the Eiffel Tower. Could Eric possibly be there to surreptitiously take a photo of the young lovers at the magic moment and publish the picture on his blog?

Eric is a Frenchman with a generous heart. This is what he wrote.

My romantic soul couldn't resist, so, we arranged for a time and place, and there I was last night (Monday) at 7:45 pm sharp on the Passerelle Debilly. By the way, we did not even talk. All this was to remain a secret until today! - so I don't even know if she said yes.

Click to his blog to see the beautiful picture, and the rest of the story.

And then there is death. Karren and I chose Mary-Margaret's name because I would say to all her other suggestions, that's nice but I still like Mary-Margaret.

There is a Nanci Griffith song. I like it because just like young Bob the baby, I like the country music. Listen to this. It's Nanci Griffith in concert introducing the song in her sweet West Texas drawl and providing some charming context to the song about her best friend Mary Margaret. It's what streaming audio sounded like on the Internet in 1996. If anyone can help me identify its source (I think it might be a BBC recording), I'll gladly go and buy the original.

It's a song about shared hopes, shared lives and friendship. It's the song that gave us the name for our daughter.

Also, we liked the idea of a Mary-Margaret who could leave behind a privileged and stuffy life in Grosse Point Michigan to fly planes in Alaska and call herself Maggie. It's fictional, but when you're naming your child, you're working largely with an imaginary character too.

We tell our daughter that girls can do anything and we play her the song, and I think: this is a little girl whose generosity and empathy suits the sentiments of the song and its singer.

Mary Margaret Heenie, the Mary Margaret of the song, died last month. She was 53.

I came upon her story a decade or so ago. She spoke about her illness in an interview, while she waited for a lung transplant. I feel sad for someone I only know of from a song, and whose life perhaps gave her less than she hoped of it.

Our own Mary-Margaret's life is still ahead of her. Since she was little and her cousins went there, she has had her name down for a private school, but we wonder if it's the right choice. This might seem an improbable week to be saying it, but we like the look of Takapuna Grammar. In the 90s it seemed to be in disarray, but notwithstanding one pupil going to jail for drug trafficking and now a bad bullying story, it looks like a decent sort of school these days.

We have a decision to make. On the one hand: fine facilities and excellent teaching at the private school. On the other hand, the possibly malign influence of indulged wealthy offspring. We are weighing the arguments, not the least of them being that Mary-Margaret would like to go to the local school.

The private school sent us a letter last month inviting the prospective pupil for an interview. It referred throughout the letter to "Mary-Margare". They profess to have a place for her if she meets their standards, but it would appear that not even their database has quite enough room.

At the very least, you need to get the name right when you ask the important questions.

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