Hard News: Make you crazy like datura
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Listener cover design has been terrible for the last two or so years, but I'm sure it's getting worse
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It is not just the cover but the also the content. Some bright spots persist (music and film reviewing; Diana Wichtel; the profile on Steve Maharey an issue back) but, generally, it is not the magazine it used to be eg the whole issue of generic editorials, when you know that they are expressions of particular obsessions/prejudices of individuals on staff. And this week, given front page prominence to that prat Duncan Fallowell and his facile 'insights' into NZ life (you might well ask why it took four years for him to write up his travel notes!)..anf if I have to read another word about Joanne Black's house renovation and generally loony take on the world.
Anyway, I should probably shut up for a bit as my postings to PA are getting numerous. May all well come to crunching halt in two weeks, when teaching starts!
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yes, what's the strategy at The Listener? Is it the idea that people will buy more copies because they'll be unsure if they have the latest issue. You could take this philosophy to absurdity by simply having a brown paper cover that says Magazine, not unlike the scenes of generic food in the supermarket in the film Repo Man.
On another note - brilliant news over the Tasman! Indigenous Australians finally get their historic moment - an apology from the government in Canberra with support from all political parties. I wonder how it makes John Howard feel now?
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Interesting to read Simon Grigg's thoughts on Auckland regarding his recent visit. He has obviously already voted with his feet and many of his coments support that move. (Kinda what you expect.)
Certainly if reads like elements of a self fulfilling prophecy if or rationalisation after the fact perhaps.
If you live o/s you might even even want to find reasons to stay away which is a pity because the sun HAS been shining a great deal.
It does all read like a parallel universe to me. It is not the city I know. And BTW when I find great restaurants and cafe's the last thing I would do would be to broadcast that so they don't get overwhelmed.
If you find your friends in trouble - do you join them at the bottom or help them to see a different reality - or even find some other friends to hang out with.
Time for a change?
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The Listener has well and truly jumped the shark - the fluff that is put on the covers is symptomatic of the lightweight nature of the content inside (with, as mentioned, a few honourable exceptions). I'd be interested to know if this strategy is translating into greater sales, or is actually losing readers (I know I'm never even remotely tempted to purchase the magazine any more).
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Yeah, I don't really recognize Simon Grigg's Auckland either. Apart from the crap cafe food.
I do know though that when one's been away for a good length of time, and made "home" somewhere else, the differences upon return can be quite stark, and it's possible to go through a strange, oscillating "I love it!" / "I hate it!" kind of phase.
When you actually return for 'good' you get the more balanced perspective that goes with living somewhere.
Sure, kiwis in general get stick about alcohol, and "not being able to socialize without getting drunk" ... I suspect we're worse than some societies, but better than others, in that respect.
Yeah, and it has been a nice summer.
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I don't agree with Simon's idea that our shops should be open all the hours god sends. I posted on Simon's blog that I prefer one late night of shopping a week, so that retail staff can have normal lives. I lived for four years in a place where I could get a shitload of bullets, a bag of carrots, and a 60 inch plasma screen TV at 4am - from the same store! - and it helped me not one iota. (Apart from all that target practice I did every Thursday at 5am, shooting at the carrots while watching CHiPs reruns on the plasma TV.)
I couldn't agree with him more about the great 'it's time for Helen to go' wave, though. Why is it time for her to go? Because everything's going fine? Weird.
Joanne Black's column in the Listener reminds me of Peggy Hill's 'Musings' in the Arlen Bystander. No, Peggy, you are not an original thinker, and you are not funny (intentionally). You are also a megalomaniac.
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About the Mt Albert motorway and Fran O'Sullivan's response.
Transit did at one stage consider an above-ground (well, more correctly, surface) option. The trouble with that is that as well as taking probably more houses than cut & cover, it also divides the community into two and displaces a lot of open space - something I have a personal interest in as a regular walker through Alan Wood Park. Transit would be under pressure to provide compensating open space in a reserves-poor area - through acquiring yet more housing?
Only if the road builders were prepared to skimp on the mitigation (and find some way of avoiding Pak n Save) would this option be significantly cheaper. And skimping on the mitigation is not what I want..
Hell, even authoritarian Singapore has a policy of not sacrificing more housing for roads. It hasn't stopped them from building roads though - they are being tunnelled.
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I do know though that when one's been away for a good length of time, and made "home" somewhere else, the differences upon return can be quite stark, and it's possible to go through a strange, oscillating "I love it!" / "I hate it!" kind of phase.
And I wonder how much of that is the emotional vertigo of nostalgia getting mugged by reality? One of the glories of the human condition is our instinct to impose order on the apparently chaotic; but as any novelist can tell you, a narrative is as much about what you leave out (and why) as what you put down on the page.
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Good posts by Grigg. I agree with so much of what he says, but I also lived abroad for quite a while and got some perspective. That seems to me to be the meat of his comment on politics, that Aucklanders (and probably NZers generally) lose sight of the bigger picture, because they are in the picture.
However,I don't think what he says is limited to Auckland. When I catch up with old friends from Melbourne I realize that no one has a sense of perspective, and their obsession with the minor doings of local politics and culture are just bemusing to foreigners. I see an awesome town with incredible infrastructure, they see a roadwork that adds 2 minutes to their trip to the supermarket and think of it as too much government in their lives.
Even commenting that NZ is at the end of the earth is a typical example of this. Australians always used to say this about Australia. And then there's places that really are isolated, like Fiji. When I was last in Europe, that place which seems to most NZers to be the centre of human culture from which we are so far removed, I spoke to dozens of people who lamented what a shithole where they were was, whether it was a beautiful little town in Hungary, or wildest Amsterdam, or bustling Berlin, or sunny Barcelona. They all dreamed of a wonderful carefree life of idyllic charm down in little old NZ, even people who had actually been here. They seemed not so much to not realize that most people here are 9 to 5ers living in cities, as to not care.
The grass is always greener. But it's not. NZ actually does have the greenest grass in the world, no matter how much of a 'drought' we are having.
We micro analyze the world around us. We can recognize people we know from hundreds of metres away, but have trouble telling people from other races apart when standing face to face. We can tell the difference between socialist Labour and capitalist National, when any foreigner would have trouble distinguishing between the slight shades of market socialism that they both are. We think our boss is being an unbearable wanker and we can't stand our jobs, but anyone who actually has a life of real hardship sees a life of ease and prosperity. We see the All Blacks going down the toilet, but everyone else on the planet knows they're still the best Rugby team on the planet on any average day. We think we suffer from cultural cringe, until you realize that most people everywhere are total philistines, who just happen to be near a lot of great art they neither appreciate nor participated in, nor supported.
Such discernment is a form of blindness. Like a cat stalking prey, oblivious of all other dangers, the filters of our minds adapt us to the subtle variations of our surroundings whilst at the same time blinding us to the enormous variations that really exist in the world.
Is it something to worry about, or simply acknowledge? NZers can't see themselves the way foreigners do. And on the flipside, foreigners can't see us the way we do. Neither perspective is 'right'. One is more global, the outsider looking in. But the insider looking in sees more detail. Furthermore, they see the foreigner in a way the foreigner can't see themself.
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Auckland is indeed far, far more beautifully located than Sydney, Sydney's got a harbour and either you are in it... or you are out of it, bobbing about in the huge swells of the Tasman sea. Sure, Sydney has the Opera house but my suspicion that the Opera House was an abberation in a land of brash philistines have been seemingly confirmed by those ugly ronson-like apartments they've whacked up just behind them. Eating in Auckland is uneven, but - for example - the Kingsland eating strip is very good (I love Bouchon, I love Canton, I adore Mekong Nuea...) and I think the Albert Street food court is smashing. I suppose you do have to know where to go.
Most Auckland businesses in fact close at 6.00pm (not 5.30pm), which means you can get there before they close if you are organised. Personally, I don't mind my fellow New Zealanders being able to get home in time from work to do stuff like, you know, enjoy the magnificent harbour or go for a walk or have a BBQ with friends. I suppose if you doesn't mind having a serving class of second class citizens like (say) Hispanics or if you don't mind having a third world economy where its trade or starve then I suppose it is annoying to think you can't buy a brushed cotton shirt at 6.30pm on a Wednesday. But to me, if early closing is one of the last echoes of our glorious pre-1984 egalitarian society then I don't mind in the slightest.
My friends are all reasonably well adjusted, probably more open-minded and emprical in their approach to their fellow human beings than any other society I've lived in. As for a booze, well you can hardly demand 24x7 access to everything then complain when people start drinking more. At the end of the day New Zealand is still a predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture, and the Anglo-Saxon types are not widley remarked on for their civilised approach to liquor.
Much of what he has to say has some element of truth; But like a lot of ex-pat comments it seems to betray a rose-tinted view of where they are, and a sort of cultural cringe towards their homeland that leads them to complain about it isn't, rather than loving what it is.
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3410,
My current peeve about the Listener: It doesn't even look like New Zealand any more. God damned Getty images on every page. I mean, why bother? Might as well just sell more ad space; the graphic content would be little different.
Housing Affordability: The biggest villain - and the one that never gets mentioned - is the banks. They are the ones who've created the mortgage arms race of recent decades, lending $400k where just 20 years ago $60k would've done the trick. Has no one else noticed that: a) banks are entirely in charge of how much money people may spend on a house, and b) it is absolutely in their interest to lend as much as possible, or am I missing something? -
I find the Listener a rather dreary read. I would never buy it myself. And when are they going to carry schedules for all public TV stations in New Zealand instead of Sky channels, which have their own publication?
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nice post, BenW
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When it comes to the listener, I suppose it starts a fire better than North & South, which is what it seems to be trying to be. Despite its pryotechnically superior qualities, I've stopped buying it anyway. You can read Wide Area News from the shelf in Whitcoulls.
I think Metro might be picking up again though.
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3410, I find it hard to see banks as villains. I would not have a property if it was not for them.
In fact, I can't see any villians in housing affordability. OK, it's a bugger that I grew up in St Mary's Bay, but will probably never be able to live there, certainly not in the kind of place I grew up in. But on the other hand, when my folks bought there, I have clear memories of the neighborhood, and it was nowhere near as desirable as it is now. As in, I haven't seen any slums anywhere in South Auckland today that were as bad. I'm not kidding.
Auckland has just got wealthier and more desirable generally, and house prices reflect that. It's only something to lament if you haven't managed to get wealthier yourself - but the banks surely don't have much to do with that.
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Only if the road builders were prepared to skimp on the mitigation (and find some way of avoiding Pak n Save) would this option be significantly cheaper. And skimping on the mitigation is not what I want..
Which is why the surface option left the picture some time ago. Depicting the tunnel option as some sort of parish-pump vote-buying exercise on the Prime Minister's part is just a silly fantasy.
Completion of the western ring route is a mixed blessing for our household. It'll let me get to the airport from Pt Chev in as little as 15 minutes, but I can also see that it's going to saturate the northwestern motorway, which despite the Motorway Patrol madness, is a quick and efficient way in and out of town at the moment.
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...and an even better post from Ben Wilson. Personally, I find a yearning to be somewhere than you live rather enervating. Call me optimist (who can't be, in wake of the remarkable changes happening today in Australia!) always but I have always considered that you look for the best in where you live. Which is why I get a bit pissed at cheap shots about Hamilton, which is a city that has given me much in the past ten years. When I got out to our backyard on a warm summer night and gaze upon the massive star-filled sky, or look out our kitchen windows, across the tree ferns and cabbage trees, to the river--I feel at home. Now, I will go down to my vegetable garden and pick tomatoes (the size of small pumpkins), which are growing furiously in our rich river terrace. We have all the cafes and shops and museums but they are not what makes for a sense of belonging.
Pheww!!! -
... apologies for the few glitches in my grammar (I never had a grandma!)
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> In fact, I can't see any villians in housing affordability.
I can - it's those rat bastard mini-developers who take a slightly shabby house on a reasonable section (just right for first home buyers with families), then rip it down, concrete over the lot & build 3 cheap&nasty 'over-60s' units.
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Jamie, lol. True. Developers are the scourge of the earth because they develop, and then instead of cheap vacant lots or 1890s termite shacks, we have more expensive property that old folks can live in. Can't they just get on with it and die?
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3410, I find it hard to see banks as villains.
Certainly not when their sub-prime chickens are coming home to roost like a gonzo re-make of The Birds. Politically speaking, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for either Bill English or Michael Cullen to look voters in the eye and suggest that folks who go on credit-binges they can't realistically service have nobody but themselves to blame.
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waking to this was a wee bit of a shock. Ben added to my ramble exceptionally well I think. Reading though, what were at best random thoughts. I perhaps didn't make my affection for NZ obvious enough. So...I love Auckland as a city, and as a gathering of people, and the country its in. And its worth pointing out that leaving for a spell, and returning every three months are so as I do, has not made me any more mouthy about the flaws or strengths of the place.
Sure, kiwis in general get stick about alcohol, and "not being able to socialize without getting drunk" ... I suspect we're worse than some societies, but better than others, in that respect.
The consumption of alcohol scares me somewhat but far less than the litany of stories and personal brushes I had with the letter P. In the three years I've been gone it seems to have cut through Auckland like a scythe and folks who have no involvement with that or any other 'scene' are having to deal with its effects..like the woman I know who's flatmate had spend the last two months rent on the drug without the rest of the (adult, well employed) flat knowing until the owner came knocking.
I hate hearing this sort of crap and I encountered these sorts of stories over and over again.
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Eating in Auckland is uneven, but - for example - the Kingsland eating strip is very good (I love Bouchon, I love Canton, I adore Mekong Nuea...) and I think the Albert Street food court is smashing. I suppose you do have to know where to go.
see, there you go, ruining it all by telling everyone. Mekong Nuea was one of the little places I meant...god I miss the raw prawns, so much so that we've been trying to replicate them.
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god I miss the raw prawns
You want a recipe for raw prawns?
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