Random Play by Graham Reid

Yes, there are many important things to consider right now: the modified plan for Eden Park (I told you so); the further decline of the Listener (down 11 percent according to Nielsen Media Research); Helen Clark’s hilarious example of hubris (see previous post); the new Arcade Fire album which sounds a bit like old Echo and the Bunnymen in places . . .

But between all these pressing matters is the tragic story of Britney Spears, the virgin who fell from grace to the seedy.

Unlike many people who are enjoying her latest emotional crash -- shaving her head -- and saying witty things like, “Oops she did it again” I take absolutely no pleasure, and can find no humour, in this at all. I just think it sad.

I don’t care for Britney’s music and the little I have heard of it only confirms that it isn‘t made for me. But no one has a gun at my head making me listen to it, just as I don’t demand anyone listen to Captain Beefheart or Yoko Ono’s early albums for which I have an unnatural affection.

But I was genuinely saddened to read that she seems to have now utterly flipped out after splitting with her husband, hanging around with Paris Hilton, being photographed without underwear, and going into a tailspin on what are euphemistically called “painkillers”. It appears people around her are unable to help.

No one -- whether you care for their vacuous pop or not -- deserves that in their short life. And hers has been short: she is only 25.

Just think about that for a moment. Twenty-five -- and what are you/were you doing at 25?

I spent a long time interviewing in, and observing, the entertainment industry and among the many things I learned early was this: it eats its young. And worse, enjoys doing so.

I remember very clearly interviewing Tiffany who enjoyed a brief flirtation with fame when she covered a couple of 60s songs back in the late 80s. She was 16 -- and at the time I spoke to her she was dead tired, and suing her mother and step-father for control of her substantial earnings. Her life and dreams were unravelling and I reminded people at the end of the article of one important fact: “And she‘s only 16“.

By coincidence last night I found some articles I wrote a decade ago. Among them was a piece about Paula Yates on the death of her partner Michael Hutchence who was found famously swinging from the door of his hotel room in Australia.

As I did earlier that year about the failed and famous Princess Diana -- whom I argued had seduced the media and made the mistake of thinking she could control it -- I had some sympathy for Yates: she was just such a sad wee thing and so desperate for attention she would do anything to get it.

She told the world she wasn’t toilet trained until she was five (I blame the parents), was anorexic when she was eight, and had been initiated to sex at 12 “with an Argentinean” she said, as if his nationality added to her cachet of notoriety. She pose nude for Penthouse when she was 18.

Poor Paula. It must have been a hard haul up. But as she learned it is a remarkably fast slide down. A mother of four, she was dead of a heroin overdose at 41.

And so to Britney.

If we have a skerrick of compassion in us, this is a sad, sad story.

What exactly did this girl from small-town Louisiana -- now a mother of two -- do to deserve this, and the ridicule of many?

All she wanted was to be was a famous singer, not an uncommon desire. She seems to have worked hard and had some genuine talent as an entertainer, made a lot of kids happy, has obviously made some very bad decisions, and has grown up in public.

She was famously photographed and condemned for driving without her baby strapped in a seatbelt. Well, look out your windscreen on any day in any city . . .

Britney Spears strikes me as an emblem of our age: the desperate need to be, if not famous, then at least visible in this otherwise anonymous world; the pressures that fame imposes on people who may otherwise be very ordinary if not fragile; the delight we take in those who stumble and fall; the need for celebrity crashes to fill our news pages and smug conversation . . .

Some of the latter comes from those who are just a bit embarrassed about once liking Britney when they were pre-teens. Too cool for school these days, of course. Into My Chemical Romance now.

Britney Spears made a lot of money and that is spoken of as if it were some kind of crime. Frankly I’d prefer an entertainer who brings pleasure to millions -- and she did -- to make shiploads of money than, say, a “property developer”.

But right now I hear a cruel delight that if it had to happened to someone then she, somehow, deserved it more than . . . Me? You?

I just think it sad. And she’s only 25.

PS. The subscriber base for Music From Elsewhere rocketed last week, I guess that’s what happens when you offer free stuff. We are sliver shy of another two Important Landmarks so I’ve got goodies to give away again to two lucky new subscriber. Check it out here under Music From Elsewhere.
I’d post a Britney track if I had an album by her. (No, that is a joke, folks)

A senior lecturer in journalism at Kakamoana University, and the Head Apologist for NCEA (English) have both given support to prime minister Helen Clark’s criticism of the media.

In an address to the Press Gallery last week Ms Clark suggested journalists should not be taking the most interesting parts of an interview and placing them at the top of a story.

A senior lecturer in journalism, media studies and shiatsu massage at Kakamoana University in Northland said that the prime minister’s statement had considerable merit and journalists would be wise to think about it.

“When we look at the state of journalism today we see that writers and editors seem keen to hook in readers to a story,” said Dr Peter Hirini-Johnstone.

“This is all very well, but a point of difference between print journalism and other forms such as the internet or television could be that rather than simply go for gold, it could run interviews with people like the prime minister verbatim so readers could make up their own minds as to what is important and what is not.

“People like the prime minister and the Very Reverend Dr Michael Cullen have a lot of very interesting things to say, and it does them and the public a disservice if their flow of ideas is misrepresented or interrupted.

“Look at how often Dr Cullen just drops an idea -- like taxing mortgages -- and it gets misrepresented, like it was a bad thing. I for one would like to have read the complete transcript of what he said as he was getting into the car and speeding off.”

Dr Hirini-Johnstone denied his comments were motivated by his recent interest in seeking the Kakamoana seat for Labour in the next election, or that a research grant application for his book “Media, And The Minority Who Read” had just been lodged with a funding body in Wellington.

“These things are not relevant at all and in fact this is just a fine example of what I have been saying. If people could see a complete transcript of this conversation,” he told an ANN reporter, “they would see that I spent a good 10 or 12 minutes prior to this discussing other things such as the Treaty, my recipe for braised beef, and my wife’s sciatica problems.

“But will you read that anywhere in this report? I doubt it. What you’ll see is just the relevant issue picked out and bannered. This decontextualises what I was saying, and is also disrespectful to my wife and her on-going health issues -- which you may not think are important, but most definitely are to us.”

Further support for the prime minister’s suggestion came from Dr Gillian Wellsford, Chief Apologist for NCEA (English) who said she saw this as a wider literacy issue.

“What we have seen in the past three decades is the growth of Short Concentration Span And Attention-Learning Related Deficit Syndrome among the general population.

“A key feature of SCSAALRDS is people just wanting to get core information quickly without having to work for it. As a result we have had to design exams which involve multiple choice rather than the more demanding essays of, say, the 1960s.

“The post-television-video game generation, which is in fact almost everyone these days, just wants to get its hands on facts -- and to a great extend journalists are pandering to that. All too often we see journalists filtering out vast amounts of nonsense spoken by politicians and only giving their readers the important information.

“And what kind of society does that create? I’d suggest a society that thinks politicians speak in a pithy and coherent way, and make salient points, albeit in soundbite form.

“Yet anyone who has listened to these people blather on and on knows otherwise.

“I believe we would have a more informed and even more deeply cynical electorate if newspapers and television ran interviews with politicians in their entirety.

“It is my belief that if this had happened to someone like Winston Peters -- or even the Archbishop and Grand Poobah Elect Brian Tamaki -- right at the start of their careers they would have hung themselves out to dry years ago and we wouldn’t have to be bothered with them now.

“Anyway, that’s just my opinion and I don’t speak for the NCEA examiners on this point. They are having trouble enough just getting the multiple choice things right. Know what I mean?”

A spokesman for the Press Gallery later observed that it was standard practice in what is known as “journalism” to put interesting and important information at the start of a story but the prime minister’s criticisms had been listened to seriously.

“In the Press Gallery,” said Ms Diana Warner, “we have some of the finest, most keenly intelligent and subservient journalists in the country, if not the world, and so we will be considering her comments carefully -- before laughing loudly and contemptuously.”

Although I wasn’t born in Auckland it is where I grew up. I consider it my city. I have lived in Mt Eden, in Birkdale on the North Shore, in Pt Chev and am now -- given the mortgage add-on required to repair our leaky building -- in “Morningside for life”.

I spent 17 years working at the Herald in the centre of the city and went to clubs, theatre, cinemas and so on in the central city for many decades. Still do, in fact.

I was also a regular at many and various bars: for years Cheers in Wyndham St was where I would retreat every Thursday for a five hour lunch while the section I worked on was being pasted together. I was a regular in places like Deschlers, and before that the Occidental, then located halfway between the old Star building and the Herald so a meeting place for old rogues and scribblers with carbon and nicotine stained fingers.

A little later it was a meeting point for Flying Nunners who had their head office just around the corner.

The Mexican Cafe seduced me far too often.

I spent a lot time at the Belgian Bar too, and for far too many years when I was given a fast turnaround assignment on a Wednesday afternoon for Saturday’s paper I would get all my documents together and repair to Tony’s on Wellesley St. There I would order a bottle of some cheap red and over the course of a few hours do all the research, drink the wine, have a $10 steak and then head back to the office with papers covered in scribbles and arrows, and documents with scrawled numbers and highlighter marks.

I would announce to my editor that the story was done, it was just a typing job now.

I loved this kind of life -- and of course the Shakespeare Tavern was a rather-too-regular haunt with Herald troops.

I say all this, not with nostalgia, but to establish the premise that I loved Auckland. These days I am not so sure.

Yesterday I took a train in to the city because I had a meeting in Stanley St, a 15 minute walk from Britomart Station. Just as well I left early.

The 15 minute trip from Morningside took 45 minutes as the train stopped regularly between stations with no explanation, and then ground to a halt at Newmarket while they put some water in it to stop it from overheating. A number of angry folk abandoned the train at this point and, I guess, got a cab into town.

At Britomart I couldn’t help notice the pungas have either died or been trimmed down to ugly stumps and the water spray feature that I recall from a year or so ago doesn’t appear to be working. The place is starting to look shabby.

And what is it with the lack of seating for passengers? At the end of the working day the many dozens who wait have to mostly stand around. Sometimes for a very long time. The staff seem to happily take up one of the benches.

Anyway . . .

I left Britomart and walked through that weird netherworld between Quay and Customs St: a scrabble of car parks and not much else. I guess this is where the Spiegeltent is going to be during the forthcoming festival. That should bring some life to the area which is largely a space going begging at the moment. And after the tent has gone?

I walked along the foot of town and would like to hear the architectural defence of those appallingly ugly Scene towers which are brutally ugly at ground level and even less attractive above. They also cut out light and create a wind tunnel. But we knew that before permission was given, right?

Of course that area now -- which was once the bustling Railway Station and old hotels -- is now just a place where articulated tracks carrying containers thunder through. Another no man’s land, this one noisy and fume-filled.

After my meeting I went into the city and walked the length of Queen St up to Real Groovy (those $6 dump-bins of vinyl bins are terrific by the way: I am into US stadium rock and buying albums by Kansas and Styx and Journey!)

It was a depressing walk up Queen St: the footpaths were filthy; the walk was deafening because of jackhammers; and the air thick with fumes from vehicles servicing the roadworks. I stopped to watch the demolition of another building: avoided the four drunk guys in the middle of the footpath passing beers around; and gave a wide berth to a guy out of his head on something and yelling at no one in particular.

The group of Japanese girls was justifiably terrified.

Of course you long ago gave up on seeing any cops just walking around the street. We gave them all cars, and that seems to be where they stay these days. In the States I like the fact you go to café or fast food joint and there would be a couple of cops sitting there: visibility is the key.

I went around the Chancery area and wondered why traffic still runs through there. You could close a couple of those small roads which now just slice through otherwise pleasant pedestrian areas -- and what about no traffic in High St between 9am and 6pm? Maybe service vehicles only? Worth thinking about?

And so it went: an increasingly depressing walk during which I only heard music once (a Turkish Café, thanks).

The main drag is becoming increasingly ugly.

These days I don’t have to go to the city that much -- in and out to movies, shows, record shops and the Herald mostly -- and so I seem to notice more and more the incrementally run-down quality of the place.

I mention this because yesterday just before I caught the train -- and I’ll think twice about that again -- I read that John Banks and Dick Hubbard could be going at it again for mayor. Hmm.

Hubbard said he was a businessman who rolled up his sleeves and got the city running in a business-like manner. Banks talked about rates and about, if he ran, being more inclusive. Double hmm.

I dunno. I always thought Hubbard got in only because it was anyone-but-Banks for many voters, and he hasn’t done much that has impressed me. Like all these guys -- and John Key I suspect is another -- he’ll get enthusiastic about something with a Big Vision (World Cup, waterfront stadium etc) and then have to have a cold shower of reality.

My wish is that anyone running for public office should just spend more time walking the streets of their hometown, looking at it from ground-level -- both literally and metaphorically.

Auckland is still my city and when I was interviewed by Paul Henry the other day (about New Zealand being 4th in the world as a great place to live, in some dodgy survey) I did say I loved the fact that I could (and do) swim at a beach just 10 minutes from the main street of the biggest city in the country. I doubted you could do that in too many places.

I love Mission Bay, and I still love Auckland. I wouldn't want to live in a town anywhere else in the country.

But less and less I am enthusiastic about that main street. Not even the whiff of Tony’s can get me in there these days.

There is a Tui sign in Britomart which I thought very apt: something about the only thing wrong with Auckland is billboards.

PS: Music at Elsewhere right now includes the new Lucinda Williams, recent but ignored Leonard Cohen, the very cool El Perro Del Mar, and something real good for Valentine’s Day. And much more.
It’s here
We are within a whisker of the 200 subscriber who will get a gift pack. So sign up (it’s free, the register button is at the top of the music page) and you might get lucky.

UPDATE: WE HAVE OUR 200TH SUBSCRIBER FOLKS: CONGRATS JP.
BUT FEEL FREE TO SUBSCRIBE ANYWAY, THE SITE IS AN INTERESTING TIMEWASTER FOR YOU IN THE OFFICE AND I DO REGULAR GIVEAWAYS, SO IF NOT THIS TIME . . .

The death before Christmas of a New Zealander working for a private security firm in Iraq -- and David Fisher’s interesting follow-up in yesterday’s Herald on Sunday -- had me digging through papers to find an article I picked up in LA in August 2005.

By curious coincidence I was in the States to interview a group of actors in the courageous drama series Over There, the only tele-series set in a current war and which pulled few punches about the stark realities of what was happening to American troops on the ground, and their families at home.

I wrote a Listener article about the series when it was re-screening here after disappearing below the radar the first time around. In the States it had been dropped after its first season.

“Created by writer Chris Gerolmo and industry veteran Steven Bochco (who devised the innovative Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and LA Law), Over There proved too uncomfortable for an American public with increasing doubts about this war, and which had even less interest in seeing their troops portrayed as often unheroic, sometimes confused and occasionally as nasty bastards.

“When a central character gets his leg blown off at the end of the first bruising episode it was almost asking viewers to change channels. And when one American soldier, the fatalistic Mrs B, stands over the body of an insurgent, slowly crushing his dead fingers beneath her boot, we are invited to think the humiliations at Abu Ghraib probably started with just such small but calculated incidents.

“Over four million in the States watched that uncompromising opening episode, only 1.3 million viewers tuned in for the final.”

In that same article I noted this: “Coincidentally when this Fox cable series ran in the States, the network was also screening Company of Heroes, a two hour documentary about a Marine company taking Fallujah in November 2004. It was a graphic account of door-to-door fighting, death on the frontline and the fears of those back home. It was Over There, but true.

“And the www.goarmy.com recruitment ads running at the time looked scarily similar to Over There, Company of Heroes and CNN footage.

“The lines between advertising, documentary, news and drama were effectively being erased, more casualties of war.”

After I had been on the set in a dry valley north of the city -- which looked uncannily like what I imagine Iraqi villages to be -- and interviewing the actors in their trailers I lazed around the pool on the following day and, as is my custom, took every newspaper available.

Inevitably I come home with clippings, whole supplements, books sections and the like. These clutter up my house for a month, sometimes a decade, and then I finally get rid of them.

The 8000 word article The Other Army in the New York Times Magazine of August 14 2005 by war correspondent Daniel Bergner made its way home and took no finding at all yesterday. I have read it repeatedly. (It’s on-line at the Times but you have to pay.)

Bergner spent what was obviously weeks with guys working for the private security company Triple Canopy and offers a penetrating insight into this life of big money and high risk.

The company had contracts to guard 13 Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters throughout Iraq, a six month (renewable) deal worth around $US90 million.

Bergner notes that when it won the contract it “scarcely existed”. Its managing partners had military backgrounds, a company name, and money borrowed from family and friends to bid on the contract.

Anyway they got the gig, searched the Net for armoured vehicles and guns, placed recruiting ads, and then got together a couple of rucksacks full of cash -- each holding half a million dollars -- to pay their “personnel”.

Triple Canopy is now one of the largest private security firms in Iraq.

That’s the fascinating story, the figures are even more interesting: there are around 25,000 - 30,000 armed people working for these companies.

According to Bergner the word “mercenaries” is despised by them and even “private military company” is dismissed as inaccurate. “Private security company” is the favoured term.

Bernger says the Pentagon refuses to discuss the role of these companies (he tried repeatedly), largely he suspects because of the military’s embarrassment about the [low] number of troops which initially stormed into the country.

“Some people will tell you they’re here for Mom and apple pie,” a private security guy told Bergner, “That’s bull. It’s the money.”

Ah yes, the money: they make between $US400 and $US700 a day -- although Bergner says non-Westerners earn far less and Triple Canopy’s Fijian and Chilean guys only make between $US40 and $US150 a week. Yep, a week! They sleep in barracks while the Americans have their own dorms.

In this way democracy and equality is spread.

These companies are of course eroding the official military because guys who are staring death in face from inside an American uniform figure they might as well do it for better remuneration.

Special Forces has apparently responded with re-enlistment bonuses of up to $US150,000.

At the time of writing Bergner noted that Triple Canopy -- by not losing a single worker or having a client killed -- had just been named one of three companies that will divide up a billion bucks from the State Department to carry out protection work in high-risk countries around the world.

One of the founders of Triple Canopy, Matt Mann, spoke about “creating a national asset”.

Scary.

Outside of the stunning book Generation Kill by Evan Wright (a Rolling Stone writer who went with a Marines special operation unit in the opening days of the war as they ploughed on to Baghdad to the sound of thumping hip-hop and heavy metal), this is one of the most illuminating pieces I have read about what this war means from the ground and through American eyes.

Money, thrills, camaraderie -- and it beats sitting around a small town in North Carolina.

But that tele-series was also enlightening -- and as it unfolded it was evident writer Gerolmo had drawn on Generation Kill for incidents and attitudes. It’s out on DVD now. You need only to watch the second gripping episode (the unit is manning a roadblock at night and who knows who or what is in that car coming down the road: Fleeing civilians? Insurgents?) to see why it didn’t really grab the folks at home.

When the Arab-American soldier Tariq tries to explain to his colleagues why young Saudis have joined the conflict Gerolmo gives him an analogy viewers on the couch might understand: It’s like being a hippie in the 60s and hearing about Woodstock. You can’t just not go.

“It’s jihad, the holy war against the Americans. For some of these kids it’s like the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in their world.”

That wasn’t what many American viewers wanted to hear.

[Apropos of nothing I see according to the Herald on Sunday that Eric Clapton has never played here before. Then who was that guy at the Supertop about 18 years ago?]

[More Music from Elsewhere is here ]

While clearing out the garage the other day I came on an odd box of old clippings, some of them of my own things from the Herald. One might provide PublicAddress readers with some amusement.

Back in August 95 a guy called Roger Watkins published Hostage to the Beat, a book about Kiwi music (which I don’t remember).

For some reason -- my own amusement possibly -- I published a list of rare Kiwi singles, noting in the introduction that “only the truth has been changed to protect the innocent”.

I re-present that list here and would like, in the manner of old Telethons, to challenge all others to match it. Let’s hear which old singles you have. Or would like to.

Ray’n’the Reptiles; She’s a Gob: Ill-conceived project by John Baker (of Wild Things fame) who aligned Ray Columbus with the re-formed Suburban Reptiles for this 87 punk version of She’s a Mod. Wreckless Eric covered it on his 89 comeback album. He didn’t come back either.

DD Smashed; Outlook for Thirst Day: After Bliss Dave Dobbyn briefly fell prey to commercial interests from breweries and threw in his lot with an Irish metalhead pub band. Liberally applied sponsor’s products resulted in this rather off-key single which Dobbyn later reworked to greater effect.

Chris Knox; Address to the Third Soviet Congress 1921: Those who were there say it was late, the background noise intolerable, and so perhaps Chris misheard. But being a Beatles fan he felt he had to immediately record what he took to be the lyrics of a previously unreleased Lennon song. The 37-minute cass-single began with the unpromising line, “Comrades and fellow party members . . .”

Mika; Out, in the Street: Genuinely inspired reworking of the old Alistair Riddell/Space Waltz hit but, naturally, given a gender flip. Released on the eve of the 81 Springbok tour. The flamboyant street parade to promote it clashed violently with a pro-tour march. All copies of the double A-side single, being carried by lightly-oiled boys, were destroyed in the resulting melee.

Swingers; Counting the Sheep: Terrific song hampered by lyrics that were clearly drawn from the band’s rural isolation on a high-country run in the South Island. A move to Sydney saw a toughening up of the band’s attitude (the bagpipe solo was dropped) and a lyrical rewrite. Remaining copies of this early version now ruthlessly sought by Phil Judd, and the Bats.

La De Dahs; How is the Air Up There 89: Ecologically-conscious former rockers re-formed to rework their 69s hit as a new age plea to ban “spray cans and stuff because of the ozone layer and all that”. Picture sleeve recently valued at $45 ($35 if record still in cover.)

Mutton Birds; Karangahape Road (But Not That Boring Bit Up By The Sheraton): Somewhat limp follow-up to Dominion Road and not among Don McGlashan’s best. Two versions exist: collectors favour the one with the 27-second euphonium solo after the words “and I’m lying in a coma, outside Verona.”

Okay folks, put your funny hat on and let’s hear yours.