Random Play by Graham Reid

Coming back from up north on Sunday afternoon I saw a sign on the side of a building near Albany. It read something like “two islands, one GPS, no worries”.

This interested and amused me: who gets so lost in New Zealand they need a GPS system?

Buenos Aires and LA I could understand, but even within greater Auckland you can probably drive to within five minutes of approximately where you want to be and then just get out a map or ask in a dairy.

And a GPS in the vast emptiness of the South Island where there are so few roads to wrong-turn onto?

Maybe I’m exaggerating (I’m not). But I'd been thinking about the GPS thing over the weekend anyway.

We’d gone to a beautiful lodge near Matakana (mind your own business) and I’d left the specific directions at home: I knew it was a few kilometres past the village and that was about it. So we drove around for a few minutes in what we took to be the general area and then I stopped and asked a very nice lady who got out a regional giveaway guide book, found the address for me, had a chat and pointed us in the right direction.

Cool. We’d met a local, learned a few things to see in the district that we might not have known about otherwise, saw a bit more of the area than if we’d had a door-to-door GPS, and still arrived around the time we said we would.

When we turned up there was an Australian couple who had got there directly by using their GPS.

The difference was, I guess, that we’d had a mini-adventure while they’d been sitting in their room.

I’ve never used a GPS - not even in long drives across the US, France and northleft Canada. But I’ve never been “lost” either. And if I’ve gone in the wrong direction for a bit, well so what?

I think it would true to say about 90 percent of the enjoyable experiences I’ve had when travelling have been by accident: by taking a wrong turn and ending up in an odd but interesting town, having to stop and ask directions of people, and often as a result meeting folks who are happy to share a drink, a laugh, or an anecdote with a stranger.

Okay, that’s just me and I’m sure business people in a hurry need things to be easier.

But I’m also a bit over this idea of things always having to be easy.

That idea seemed to exercise the minds of many letter writers to the Herald this past fortnight: many were banging on about simplifying the English language.

Yes, we know that it is a complex beast and yes, that George Bernard Shaw was an advocate for simplifying, and that maybe we could accept “thru” for “through” because it is easier, and that let’s do away with punctuation because some people cant and wont and do’nt use it properly and so on.

All in the drive to make English, and therefore life, more simple?

I don’t agree.

What’s life without complexity? Why should we not exercise our brains? Might actually help in all kinds of ways.

These days we are used to the decimal currency - but there was one interesting and reasonably compelling argument against its introduction back in the late 60s: that while it would make everything easier because you could just shift the point or whatever, it was also a retrograde step for whatever side of our brains does the maths thing.

A dollar can be divided by 1, 2, 5 and 10 (and multiples thereof). But that old pounds, shillings and pence was a whole other beast.

Sure it was complex: there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound (don’t get me started on guineas!) and that meant you could divide a pound by 1,2,3,4, 6, 10, 12 (and multiples thereof). You got to know your times tables, plus division and subtraction.

Sort of hurts your brain to think about it, huh?

But is that a bad thing?

I think thinking is good, for its own sake.

We live in a world where a lot of our thinking is being done for us by machines which will do what we (or others) programme into them. We live in a time when people seemingly can’t tell the difference between a press release and a news story, a reality show and reality, a blundered off-the-cuff remark and some worryingly entrenched racism . . .

So I defend thinking: and the idea of driving to places without a GPS; and the complexities of the English language.

English has a remarkable history and I guess the reason I was so amused by those letter writers was because I have just been re-reading Bill Bryson’s 1990 book Mother Tongue which is now a paltry $12.99 in Penguin reprint.

It is a fascinating account of the rise and diversity of the English language and I commend it to anyone. Especially if English is a language you want to dumb down or simplify to make it easy on yourself.

It is also full of provocative asides that make you think: that in 1900 New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than Kiev, more Italians than Milan or Naples.

That there were at the time of Bryson’s writing about eight million speakers of Esperanto. Impressed? Don’t be. As Bryson notes, with those odds a Norwegian has as much chance of encountering another Norwegian in Mexico as Esperanto speakers have of meeting a fellow speaker.

Bryson’s book accounts for the varieties and vagaries of spoken and written English, and it make fascinating reading.
Makes you think, actually.

Although if you sort of agree with me in this matter then I am also reading a book which might be more to your taste.

Written by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur - who I take to be grumpy old men or possibly radio breakfast jocks in the UK - it is a series of short pieces in which they sound off about stuff. Just irritating stuff.

Like “misery memoirs” of which we are spoiled for choice these days (The Little Prisoner: How a Childhood was Stolen and a Trust Betrayed); middle-class white boys with dreadlocks and get-rich hedge-fund kids; how whenever anything serious happens (like bombings in London) we always cross to find out “the Markets’ reaction”; the Kaiser Chiefs; of Yoko Ono and the whole “it’s what John would have wanted” thing; of Desperate Housewives’ star Teri Hatcher’s book Burnt Toast and Other Philosophies of Life. . . .

This often very funny collection of short and unconstrained rants (there are two volumes) is called Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?

Apropos of nothing: masses of music (over 600 albums posted with sample tracks), dozens of interviews (musicians, authors), travel stories (where to go and where you could usefully avoid), recipes, essays and video clips (Jerry Lewis! The Three Stooges!! Sean Connery!!!) are at Elsewhere which is being added to almost daily.

Enjoy. I do.

Under the new system it has actually become very easy for me to add copy, upload music, insert photos and clips, and so on at Elsewhere.

I can do it . . . ahh . . . without thinking. Hmmm.

PS: if you are having trouble accessing www.elsewhere.co.nz could you flick me an e-mail. A couple of people have said it takes yonks on their system. I'm curious as to why that might be. Too much information perhaps?! Ta.

While stepping carefully down Queen St the other day I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while.

“God, I thought you were dead!” he said and, quick as a lad, I replied, “Really? So did you ring Megan to see if she was okay, or call a cop?”

He looked a bit taken aback so I quickly made light of it by telling my now threadbare story of how I killed a man in my first month at the Herald by referring to him as “the late” -- and then he rung up.

But my friend’s sentiment -- he said it was because I hadn’t posted at publicaddress or heard me on radio lately -- was pretty accurate.

In the past two months I have been as one of the dead.

After I came back from the wonderful Outback (see previous post) I was immediately into a bout of writing to earn a living and then my website underwent a major overhaul and relaunch courtesy of the excellent people at gardyneHOLT.

It looks terrific (but then I would say that, huh?) and now has about 700 albums posted with sample tracks (the new Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan and Grace Jones among the more recent), many dozens of travel articles, interviews, essays and much, much more -- including video clips.
(The Lou Reed interview is as funny as the Benny Hill clip).

Have a look. It’s a very different but much improved (search function! tags!!) Elsewhere

To get the music up for all the albums however (and I still have a couple of dozen to go) meant what I have called “back-filling” which was a time-consuming task -- and indeed it consumed me for almost two months.

Which meant I sort of checked out of publicaddress, but also figured I wouldn’t be much missed.

After all, not much happened - unless you count the whole Winston thing, whatever it is that's happening in the US with that worrying woman McCain has picked, the whole economic crisis, the forthcoming election, New Zealand’s Got Talent and so on.

Hell, what could I have added to the discussion: that Winston is unworthy, Key untrustworthy, Clark expedient, Palin dangerous, we don’t have much talent ?.

My point is that after a couple of weeks not passing my opinion into the world it became harder and harder to catch up with the fast-passing game, and increasingly unnecessary.

Instead I got on with my life and over the weeks started to read the news with less and less enthusiasm, often changed the station from Morning Report, watched even less news on television (New Zealand channels I mean, I have despaired of them what with Duncan Garner telling us what certain politicians are thinking, or worse, telling us what to think . . .)

Life went on.

We went to movies and saw bands play, had dinner with friends, complained about the weather (or went for walks at Mission Bay on fine days), read some very interesting books, lingered over lovely dinners in restaurants or at home, saw a couple of plays, partied with people, did the shopping, went to the movies again, had a long weekend up North at Megan’s parents’ place, back-filled at Elsewhere, sent e-mails to people, vacuumed and tidied up, spoke with my kids in London . . .

I began to feel irresponsible not following every nuance of that Winston/Helen saga, started to care very little about Wall Street (which seemed to be the great passion and preoccupation of people who’d never discussed economics much until that point) and bleakly considered stabbings in my city and suburbs before turning the page to find out who was coming for the Big Day Out. Looks like a good line-up.

And so the days go by.

My friend was probably right.

By not engaging with these great events of our time sent to test or divert us, I was probably dead.

It just didn’t seem like it from where I was standing.

I have returned from the Outback with stories to write up, literally hundreds of photos, much fun had and lessons learned. I pass on a few random play observations here about that wonderful, dramatic place.

Things to Know: There’s a simple rule for driving in the Outback, fill up at every petrol station because the sites and sights -- and petrol stations -- can often be separated by endless ribbons of highway. Skip a top-up and you can find that half tank which gave you such confidence is draining away -- just like the colour in your cheeks when you realise you are long way from anywhere and there is no one else on this road. I only slowed down for a flat spot with petrol pumps laughingly called Mount Ebenezer some 250kms south west of Alice Springs and by the time I had taken the turnoff to Kings Canyon that pump was 50kms behind me, my gauge was dropping to just above quarter full and my heart sank when a sign said the next pump was 170kms away. It was a constant 28 degrees and cloudless outside -- but I felt a cold chill in my colon.

How big is very big? In the plane on the way back from the Outback I did some maths: in seven days I flew approximately 10,000kms (with Qantas!); drove more than 1500kms by myself; was in a chopper and on a 4WD military style jeep with bull-bars all round; spent time in nine airports (some repeats); slept in five different beds from swanky hotels to bush campers; heard more Crowded House, Cold Chisel, Paul Kelly, Aboriginal reggae and Barnesy than I have in a decade; and had variations of lamb (ribs, shanks and buffet cuts) for dinner on three consecutive night -- yet in all those hours and days of driving never saw a single sheep.

An Encounter: In the Ducks Nuts in Darwin a young Australian-Indian guy asked me what I was reading. I told him and he squatted down to take closer look. After a few minutes of conversation in which he told me New Zealand was another state of Australia and that he knew nothing about Aboriginals because he came from Melbourne he said, “this is all very interesting but I’m really drunk so if you’ll excuse me I need to go and vomit.”

A Book: In Darwin, Steve put me on to Why Warriors Lie Down and Die by Richard Trudgen. It is a remarkable account of the original people of the eastern part of the Northern Territory who traded with Indonesians for centuries before Europeans arrived; have words in their language from India; were forced off their land by white settlers in the mid 19th century; were being massacred (women and children lined up and shot) as late as the early 20th century; fought three major wars with invading settlers (spears against guns) to retain their land; were wiped out in the hundreds and possibly thousands by malaria; had their traditional trading taken from them by white settlers and Japanese in fishing boats; were given back some land only to have it taken again when bauxite was discovered on it in 1952; were told in 1972 that their traditional trade in crocodile skins was now illegal so their income was stopped overnight . . .

It is an extraordinary story of a people who can speak four or five indigenous languages but struggle with English (largely because of the concepts such as “committee“, “self-determination” and so on that certain English words contain) and it goes a long way to explaining the current plight of Aboriginal peoples in the region. As a young doctor noted, his colleagues who were going to hospitals in Europe were obliged to spend three months learning the local language, but no one expected him to learn the language spoken in Arnhem Land by his patients.

A Casual Comment: While being driven around a property 130kms south of Darwin that stretched to distant mountains Scott, the owner of Mt Bundy Station was talking about how the area was used by the airforce during World War II. He had a runway near his house. “And yeah, there’s another airfield on this property apparently, but we haven’t found it yet.” It’s some country when you can misplace an airfield.

Roadside Attractions: Dead kangaroos (I gave myself double points for dead cows), burned out cars, signs in the desert which read “Floodway” and have poles measuring the depth of invisible water in metres, mysterious mountains of bottles and fire patches literally a hundred kilometres away from the nearest town, Uluru and Kata Tjuta on the horizon for hours before you get close . . .

A Puzzlement: A chopper pilot at a small settlement about 120kms west of Alice Springs was surprised when I said I came from New Zealand, he didn’t think I had a Kiwi accent. I asked him -- the third person in as many days who had made the comment -- where he thought I came from. “Wales maybe? I dunno mate.”

A News Story: A Northern Territory man -- aged 39 -- made the front page of the very irreverent NT News. He filmed himself masturbating while driving at 160km/h on the Stuart Highway. In his car he had 4.96kg cannabis hidden in an eskie in the boot, two plants on the back seat, two pipes and a loaded .22 rifle. The father of three was also a disqualified driver -- but was granted bail so he could marry his girlfriend of six months. The brilliant heading on the article: “Is this bloke a complete tosser?”

A Television Programme: The Hollow Men (co-written by Rob Sitch aka Mike Moore in the classic media parody Frontline) is one of the most incisive political satires around. Yep, it has a lot of Australian references, but like the equally droll The Games and Frontline, it makes equally good sense to a New Zealand audience. I hope we get it here (the episode I saw a little of was terrifyingly familiar), but equally hope we don’t try to do a local version.

The Real World: In interviews Kevin Rudd has an astonishing ability to speak at great length saying nothing specific but punctuating every phrase with buzzwords like “the future”, “the Australian people” “positive outcomes” and so on. It is disturbing, and like The Hollow Men, very familiar. If you get my drift.

It’s a fact, Jack: Every Australian athlete going to the Games or the Paralympics is already a “hero” on the fast-track to being a “legend“. They also all appear to have “-o” or “-y” already appended to their name for easy familiarity.

And this: After dinner I had some maps out looking at the next distant point on the largely empty map when I got chatting to a waitress. I said I was surprised to see that Adelaide River where I was headed was actually about 120kms south of Darwin. I said I’d thought it was just around the corner. She said, “if you want ‘just around the corner’ you should go to New Zealand.”

Finally: I’ve posted a few photos of the great and arid Outback, dramatic Uluru and so on here. Not all pretty. Click on them to make them bigger. Enjoy.

I always miss the big ones: we were flying back from somewhere when the All Blacks went down in the last World Cup, and the one before that I was in Madrid looking for a sports bar that had rugby on the big screen. (ho ho ho)

Even the Irish pub was screening some minor European soccer and it was two days before I finallly read on the Herald website about a nation in mourning and so on.

Being far away lends perspective however: such things as a loss in the rugby seem less important than we often think they are.

And last night at Bojangles pub here in Alice Springs -- where they did have the Big Game on the Big Screen -- it was interesting that only maybe a dozen people out of the press of locals and international tourists even cast an eye towards the game.

The match was played out to a soundtrack of Cold Chisel (Flame Trees stilll a great song), Jimmy Barnes, AC/DC, a bunch of young guys bellowing along with "we don't need no education", various Stones and Creedeence classics, and a swag of Aussie pubrock I couldn't identify.

Ready-mix Bundaberg'n'Coke by the bottle was cheaper than beer, and this pub with its memorabilia-crowded walls did a fine and loud trade. People ate and drank and smoked (yep, smoked inside!) and somewhere in the background Robbie Deans was being hailed a hero.

Even though I had gone with the sole purpose of seeing the game it too for me sank into the background as I spoke with an interesting guy who had come to this remote place -- as far from Sydney as Auckland is -- to be a tour guide.

At the turn of last century Alice Springs (then called Stuart I think) had only 30 European residents. Today the town has a population of a little less than 30,000 (a significant percentage European but a highly visible Aboriginal population) and caters for 250,000 international visitors a year.

My new-found mate laughed about that: "This place gets by on the myth that it is close to Uluru," he laughed, pointing out that the Big Red Rock was actually as far away from Alice as the top of Scotland from London -- and that the drive was rather more featureless, dry and unforgiving.

That is where I am heading tomorrow but I'm going the long way and going to take three days to get there.

I love deserts and this region does them very well and with great breadth. This morning I drove five minutes east of town and the tarseal ran out. It was corrugated dust as far as I could see. I turned back after the fifth burned-out car in the low scrub of spinafex.

Yesterday and today however I have given over to smalltown Alice which strikes me as about the size of Kaikohe. It is an interesting place: there are about a dozen art galleries devoted to Aboriginal original work which I have become increasingly interested in these past few years -- but the effect is somewhat diminished by community rubbish bins and tables in cafes also being covered in the dot paintings of the people of this region.

And I find it uncomfortable looking at these painting (which go for anything upwards of $6000) in galleries mostly staffed by Europeans while outside the local people sit in the parks and streets looking forlorn. I feel even more uncomfortable when a man my age holds out is hand and says, "hey boss".

My mate at the pub said it was best not to jump to too many conclusions when I asked him about that and why there were so few Aboriginal people in the pubs.

They were outdoor people and liked to sit in the parks and beside the road, he said. In many ways they live much as they have always done despite wearing tracksuits in the heat and sitting in small circles on what I take to be hot dust. Maybe.

But that doesn't quite explain the public service announcement on television warning people not to sleep on the roads. Or the number of people aimlessly drifting day and night.

Right now a local Aboriginal band has started up in the park across the road ("one, two, three, go") so I'm off to watch that for a while, later I'll buy more bottled water (it's a cloudless day in the low 20s, it is winter) and maybe take some photos of the Todd River opposite where I am staying.

That is where they hold the Henley-on-Todd annual regatta. I'm told that twice in the past 20 years or so they've had to cancel it because there was water in the river.

Yep, this is a very different place.

Sort of puts things in perspective, I think.

It’s not true you learn nothing by being gainfully unemployed and watching daytime television: why just this week I have learned that Scorpio (1973) starring Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster is a pretty lousy film; that Mississippi is the fattest state in the US and that Oprah is going to do something about it, and that Winston Peters is in trouble but John Key can’t score a point out of it -- if his lacklustre performance in Parliament yesterday was anything to go by.

Key’s spineless and simplistic line of questioning confirmed my already low opinion of his ability to think on his feet. It allowed Helen Clark to rebuff him effortlessly before every New Zealand First MP got to their feet and asked her patsy questions along the lines of, “is the member being referred to the same Foreign Affairs minister who was invited to North Korea to resolve nuclear issues, was invited to the White House by Condoleezza Rice to solve the Middle East crisis, and in his downtime made the rains come to drought affected areas of the world which provided hope and prosperity for millions . . .”

This was all good fun, but Key and Bill English sat as if they were just about to pounce -- and simply didn’t. Or, I believe, couldn’t. Their two minions behind them looked like eager schoolboys willing their head prefect on, but nothing was coming. And Clark dropped in Nick Smith’s name every now and again just to send a shiver through their ranks.

It was a desultory performance by Key who looks more and more shallow -- and ineffectual as a potential leader -- by the day. Oh, some will say he can’t afford to annoy Winston (isn’t this a sorry state of affairs?) but his target was Labour and he still couldn’t make it stick. He seemed hung up on $100,000 when there could have been lateral and unexpected approaches which might have caught Clark off-guard.

But his questions were so obvious it made Oprah’s quizzing of former fat-folk who had lost a couple of hundred pounds look like the Spanish Inquisition.

A small tip to the Nats: to indicate how gravely you view the situation it might be useful to refer to the gentleman in question (as TV One News did) as “the Foreign Minister” rather than “Winston Peters“. The latter suggests same-old same-old deja-vu blah-blah about controversial Winston, but the former reminds people that this guy is actually Quite A Big Deal and so we should take these allegation seriously.

I’m delighted Winston is taking it Very Seriously Indeed also and has said he intends to litigate against the Dominion Post for the current series of issues it has brought up today.

(This raises the obvious question for him surely: “who’s gonna pay the bill this time?“)

There is a rolling boil at the moment and Mr Peters is very lucky to be out of the country, but he will come back swinging and that will be fun. The man who applies the highest standards of integrity to others (notably the media which he wooed and won in his early years by being a good bloke after-hours) now finds those codes being applied to him. Bluff and bluster might not be the way to go -- but he knows no other.

It won’t be comfortable and this is the time to start checking the meaning of “hubris“, “petard” and maybe even “pants on fire“.

Simple folk like me who worry about fat-folk in Mississippi have the luxury of asking dumb questions like, why is it okay for a politician not to know where money comes from to bail them out of debt? If it were me with a big lawyer’s bill and it was quietly paid off I’d be asking a lot of questions -- and I’m sure that being a busy man would be no excuse when someone said it had been the neo-Nazis, Feminist Futurists or Radical Rotarians for Electoral Reform who had ponied up the cash, and that they didn‘t expect anything in return?

Hmmm. Simple questions can often be more illuminating than the very complex and nuanced ones, I think.

Over the years I have enjoyed any number of free lunches, as I am sure many of us have. So we can dismiss that old cliché -- but a lunch is a lunch, $100 tops probably. If lunch was actually lunch for a team of lawyers at the French Cafe, plus their fee for months of work then the situation, not to mention the bill, is quite different.

But that’s just me -- and what do I know? I’m the guy who watched the fat-folks of Mississippi take up the challenge to lose weight this year. For those clocking in at around 500 pounds it isn’t going to be easy. Lots of sweating is my guess.

But maybe not as much as some people closer to home in the coming months.

Cheer up: Lots of good, interesting and odd music is right here.