Stopping in small towns

On the way to Turangi we stopped at Foxton.  Mainly we stopped to go to the toilet.  I can tell you that the toilets at Foxton are good.  While I was waiting in the car for my turn I noticed this,

Which made me smile.  To be honest it was a bit of a smart-alecky, city-slicker smile.  Not entirely kind, but not entirely unkind.  I do like small towns like Foxton.  A main road that is a jumble of buildings and empty lots behind which are only fields.  Some of those buildings are quite substantial, and have a bit of style, but around them are only empty spaces where other equally grand buildings failed to materialise. 

After we left Foxton we only stopped one more time, for dinner at Taihape, before we got to our house north of Turangi at about 8pm.  In the house the next morning I found Bill Bryson’s book The Thunderbolt Kid on a book shelf.  I like Bill Bryson books.  Sometimes he is very, very funny.  The Thunderbolt Kid is about Bill’s childhood and it is a good read, but this passage in particular jumped out at me:

That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains.  Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else.  If our commercial enterprises in Des Moines weren’t the best, they were at least ours.  At the very least, they all had things about them that made them interesting.

Which struck me as being true. 

In Wellington there is an old department store called Kirkcaldie and Stains.  Sometime, probably in the 90s, it was modernised.  They kept the facade of the old building and built two office blocks that rose out of the shell.  A newer, shinier department store remained on the bottom three floors.  Somehow though, visiting Kirks as a child, when Kirks had not been rebuilt, was an infinitely richer and quirkier experience.  The old store had elevator operators, and a kind of mechanical puppet display on one wall, and cavernous bathrooms with attendants, and a tea room that proudly displayed photos of all the women who had won the Miss Kirkcaldie and Stains competition.  It had strange corners filled with rugs, and little nooks where you could unexpectedly come across an accounts department.  It was, in short, unique.  A conglomeration of things accumulated over time.  Which I rather liked, although I believe glossy and organised is generally more admired by shop designers.

In Year 12 Classics there is a topic on Athenian Art and Architecture in which we usually begin with the Parthenon.  When I first taught this topic I was dutifully impressed with the Parthenon which is justly famous for its pleasing proportions and architectural tricks that create the illusion of perfection.

But as time has gone on I am less interested in this building and more interested in a nearby shambles of a structure called the Erectheion (sounds like you’re saying “erection” with a lisp).

The Erectheion is a very bitsy building designed to accommodate an awkward site, and some already extant shrines and places of significance.  Which makes it kind of a mess of styles, but also a tremendously dense site of Athenian myth and history.  The hole in the roof may be from Poseidon’s trident, and where that trident struck the ground was a salt spring.  The olive tree was supposed to be the first olive tree, a gift from Athena.  Inside you could find the statue of Athena Polias, the most ancient and revered of the statues on the Acropolis; a statue that had reputedly fallen on that spot from the heavens.  Here you could find, tucked under a wall, the tomb of Athen’s first king who was half snake. 

Something about all of this makes it a richer building.  Certainly a more interesting one to talk about than the Parthenon.  It is often this way with places and people though.  Character comes out of difficulties or little shapes we mold about our oddities.

In Venice – to take another example – I bought, like many tourists, a copy of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.  Unlike many books about architecture or about Venice, Ruskin’s book explained to me why I liked the buildings of Venice.  It was because they were mostly a bit bonkers.  Even the buildings that weren’t and were considered fine examples of something else ended up looking bonkers because of all the higgedly-piggedly stuff around them.  It was Ruskin who made me look at the Ducal Palace properly.

Ruskin pointed out to me that the two windows on the right are a different design and on a different level from all the rest, and that they have two funny little square windows above them, and that this is partly why the building “works”.  This oddness is at the same time something you don’t notice, and something that you do.  It gives a little splash of character.

Which is something, I am beginning to conclude, we could do with more of as we are now very much in the hands of global chains, and large-scale property developments, and an idea of making ourselves international. 

I said that Cathy and I made one more stop for dinner after we left Foxton.  I must glumly inform you that we stopped at McDonalds.  I don’t mind the food at McDonalds, but I mind almost everything else.  When Cathy and I walked into McDonalds in Taihapi I had that same sinking feeling that I have whenever I darken the doors of a Starbucks, or a Wishbone, or a Mojo, or a Borders.  It’s the feeling of entering a place with no past, or no future; of entering a space that is a constant present representing on-trend corporate chic according to someone in an office ten thousand miles away.

Happily small towns are off-trend.  Global chains pass them by.  Those towns have old buildings that have been buggered about with, and dusty one room museums, and mural displays, and strange cafes that smell like sausage rolls and play National Radio.  I increasingly like them.  As much as I like the funny two windows on the end of the Ducal Palace, and the clumped together Erectheion, and wandering about the old Kirks in my memory again.

And I can tell you that we didn’t stop at McDonalds on the way back home after our trip.  We stopped in Foxton.  I gave Rosamund a bottle on the side of the road and we watched the long shadows stretch across the mostly empty street as the sun went down on the crumbling pub, and the second hand store, and Foxton’s fantastic murals.

Goodbye Pork Pie

Stories about 2 March, 1981 (5/10)

There’s only one sure thing in life.  That’s doubt, I think.

Goodbye Pork Pie

On the entertainment pages of the Evening Post for 2 March, 1981, there is a review for Dave Brubeck’s weekend gig at the Wellington Town Hall (he was in good form, apparently), and the usual movie and theatre listings.  Downstage were doing a Noel Coward play called Hayfever, and Bats were doing something called Bedroom Farce.

Looking at the movie listings I was struck by a dimly familiar name: Kerridge Odeon.  The Embassy, St. James and Majestic in town, and the Odeon and Regent in the Hutt were all Kerridge Odeon theatres.  There is an interesting biography of Mr Robert James Kerridge here.  Nowadays I think we would be a bit wary of a business man trying to buy up all of one form of media, and then making special distribution deals with foreign companies.  Not that we can stop it, we just like to complain about it a bit more.

I can remember going to see movies at the St. James when it was quite a horrible cinema, and not a beautifully restored theatre.  The main entrance was down a long, sloping corridor which is now used as a fire exit, and the toilets were directly off the back of the main auditorium.  I saw a few movies there, but the one I can actually remember was Absolute Beginners.  Mainly I remember that the audience was restless and rowdy and that jaffas and tangy fruits were dropped and thrown.  It was a silly movie anyway.

I believe that the Majestic was where the huge Majestic building is now, and the Embassy is still going of course.  There was another group of cinemas called Amalgamated Theatres although they seem a bit dodgier.  Cinerama (Courtney Place), Plaza (Manners Street), and the Lido (Willis Street).  The Paramount and the Penthouse were going too.  All of them were playing one film each.

If we were heading out that Monday night our choices at the flicks would be: The Secret Policeman’s Ball, Close Encounters (Special Edition), Blazing Saddles, Flying High, The Warriors, or La Strada.  Or we could go to the Majestic (4th smash week), or the Odeon (3rd record week) and see Goodbye Pork Pie.

The last time I saw this movie would have been on TV in the 1980s.  I have always remembered the ending when one of the heroes comes to the door naked, but other than vague memories of little yellow minis driving around I had forgotten most of the film so I decided that (for the purposes of research) I would need to see it again.

I went to Aro Street Video Store and got it out.  I mention this specifically because Aro Street is actually in Goodbye Pork Pie.  When the heroes pull into a dodgy mechanics workshop in Wellington they are on Aro Street.

Goodbye Pork Pie is a great movie that really cracks along.  It reminded me quite a bit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  This is a good thing in my version of the world.  There is a full page review in The Listener which is full of praise and which I agree with almost every word of.

Many of the things about New Zealand in the 1980s look about the same as they do now except the car stock on the road has completely changed, we don’t have red buses in Wellington anymore, and the cop cars and police uniforms are different.  Also, I think that Gerry calls Shirl a bitch a few times too many, and the first sex scene smells a bit of male screenplay writer fantasy.

Was Goodbye Pork Pie the first time New Zealanders went to the cinema to see a New Zealand film and actually enjoyed themselves?  I too have been made to watch Vigil and been told to admire the cinematography and note the symbolism, but wouldn’t we mostly have preferred to see Goodbye Pork Pie or Utu?

Both of those Geoff Murphy movies are cowboy outlaw movies about resisting the law (which is always an ass and always wins).  I wish he’d made more movies in New Zealand in the 80s, but aside from The Quiet Earth he didn’t.  Anyone could have made those Hollywood movies he directed, but only Geoff Murphy could have made Geoff Murphy movies in New Zealand in the 1980s.

As a New Zealander with a little sense of history you can’t help noticing the opening title card of this film that tells us it is a piece of History set in an age when petrol cost a buck a gallon.  It’s also worth remembering that Geoff Murphy was a member of Blerta with Bruno.  Which makes me feel like this film is looking longingly back at the time of Norman Kirk, and hippy culture when our economy was falsely booming and oil shocks were in the future, while also looking forward to a time when many people in New Zealand wanted to give the establishment (and Muldoon) the finger and found the cause they needed when the Springboks touched down in July of 1981 and the police changed their image in New Zealand forever.

Either that or it’s a good yarn about a couple of mad buggers who do something daft and almost get away with it.

Spare the rod (and the car seat); spoil the child

Stories about 2 March, 1981 (4/10)

In the first season of Madmen they sometimes lingered on moments when you realised how much society’s attitudes towards certain things had changed since the heady days of the 1960s.  Watching heavily pregnant women chain smoke and hit the liquor is a good example, although my favourite was probably the episode that had kids running around playing games with plastic bags on their heads.  Thanks to years of indoctrination parents now view playing with plastic bags as something akin to letting a baby play with a handgun.  Which is probably a bit of an over-reaction.  Which is why these Madmen moments provoke a mixed reaction in me.  After my initial shocked laugh there always comes a nagging doubt: perhaps it is we who are the ridiculous ones.

I had a similar moment reading the Evening Post for 2 March, 1981 when I read the article about Plunket’s campaign for compulsory children’s carseats.

One in four babies still travelled on an adult’s knee in the front seat and three out of every four children between six months and four years were not restrained….  The law says that children over eight have to be restrained but only 50% are.

Aside from thinking “holy crap!” when I  read this, I also wondered what the logic could possibly be in making seat belts compulsory for people over eight, but leaving it voluntary for kids under eight.  Think of the children!  Perhaps it was a cost thing, and the politicians didn’t want to tell every family in New Zealand that they now had to buy a car seat?  They sure are expensive.  Then again it would probably be cheaper for the country not to build crash barriers on roads, but I’m pleased they do.  Still, there’s that nagging doubt.  Perhaps if there weren’t so many cars all trying to go so fast with such tense, and stressed-out drivers feeling parental-anxiety about the latest safety feature their car doesn’t have…

In other news, Mr Ben Couch, the Minister of Police, was talking about bringing back birching for violent offendors in prison; Berend de Bes had been crowned Baker of the Year (he had a shop in Johnsonville Mall); the government had announced that licenses for the importation of pre-recorded video cassettes would only be issued to “those companies who have a reputable source of material” (the infamous Miss Bartlett had been concerned that the willy-nilly issuing of licences would lead to the importation of porn); and the Minister of Labour, Mr Bolger, was declaring that the recent round of strikes across New Zealand were part of a plot: “the objective of the unions working together is to achieve the ‘nationalisation’ and ‘worker control’ of New Zealand industry”.

The article about birching was actually included on the Youth Focus page, and asked for students to write in and express their views on corporal punishment in schools, which was still popular when I went to primary school.  I was only beaten with a leather belt once in my time at school, but plenty of other boys had a taste of the belt on a regular basis.  What a curiously, barbaric way to instil respect and discipline.  Students sometimes jokingly say to me now that they bet I wish we still had the strap, but nothing would drive me out of teaching faster than the idea of having to physically harm another person.

Well, losing all my holidays would probably drive me out faster, but corporal punishment would be a close second.

Close-ish.

Rule Britannia

We went to the Governor General’s House on Sunday.  The local paper the week before told us that there would be an open day, and that the recent refurbishments had cost $45 million dollars.  Lewis’ did the curtains.  I say this because Lewis’ did our curtains, and having paid for their services I can easily imagine that it cost $45 million to refurbish the Governor General’s house.  The Governor General’s house has an awful lot of curtains.

After walking up the very long driveway we joined a very long queue and watched the elderly whisked past on golf carts to the front of the line, and Eleanor wrecking her pants by sliding down grassy banks on her bottom.  Once we got inside past the security there were also queues as we funnelled out of large rooms through doorways or up staircases.  The new carpet had pilled from all the foot traffic, and some people seemed determined to try out all the couches and armchairs.  A young man sank into a leather armchair in the library with gratitude, as I watched Eleanor and friends gambol past expensive looking vases on flimsy side tables.  The security feigned indifference but undoubtedly had mace ready to subdue parents who had been told the cost of replacing shattered vases.  The library was disappointing although it did have a large book on duck stamps which I assume had an unintentionally funny introduction.

To be fair to all the armchair connoisseurs, there were a lot of very nice, upholstered chairs in the Governor General’s house that were crying out to be sat on.  The carpet we were wearing in was nice too.  In the main entrance there were wood panels showing each of the Governor General’s coat of arms.  Dame Sylvia Cartwright’s was blank which seemed more believable than the ornate shields of her mainly plebeian forerunners.  Down a long corridor were pictures of the previous Governor Generals with Captain William Hobson first in the line.

“He looks like a woman,” someone observed.

“He was quite ill,” I said, as if that explained anything. 

Some kind of tropical fever had begun to slowly destroy Hobson’s health earlier in his career before he came to New Zealand.  Still, I see what they mean.  He does have a feminine cast to his features, and a chaste hint of a smile. 

I have a lot of time for Hobson; a fairly gentle warrior of the British Empire.  He policed pirates in the Caribbean, and was on one of the escort ships that took Napoleon to St. Helena before he ended up in New Zealand.  In (god forsaken) New Zealand he tried to cobble together a legal document in a foreign language with the help of missionaries and the idealistic sentiments expressed to him in a letter by Lord Normanby.  After he had done it he didn’t last long.

His grave is a lonely place.  Tucked down by a busy Auckland street under a dripping canopy of trees and largely forgotten.  The homeless make tents under the nearby bridge, and drunken gravestones pitch down the hill between the trees.  You feel more like you will be mugged than moved standing at his graveside, although some might see that as appropriate at the grave of one of the makers of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Not, of course, that William Hobson, or Fitzroy, or the whole lot of the first Governor Generals ever lived in the house that we were trooping around on Sunday.  It was completed in 1910, and Hobson died in 1842 in Auckland.  He had no staff to speak of, no money to speak of, and no guns to speak of, just a title and some far, far off imperial backers to try and conjure authority with.  So it is almost a shock to see him there, first in the hall of prints and photos that line the hall to the banqueting chamber.  First in a line of Governor Generals who become increasingly pompous looking; weighed down with titles and moustaches and regalia.  I wonder what this kid from Ireland called William Hobson ever knew about elaborate silver services of the type we see in the banqueting hall where our tour of the house ended.

There was a soldier in the banqueting hall in a soldier’s khaki suit.  Eleanor marched up to him.

“What are you?
“I’m a soldier.”
“Why do you have money on your jacket?”
“They’re medals.”
“Why do you have medals?”

“I was a good boy.”

“What did you do?”

“I ate my vegetables.”

I don’t know exactly what Apiata did to get his V.C. but I hope it was more than polish off a plate of sprouts.  Eleanor, however, seemed satisfied with this answer and marched off.

Back outside the wind whipped across the long lawn and blew flicks of rain at us from the north.  Eleanor and our friends’ kids flew off across the lawn while I zipped Rosamund inside my sweatshirt.

It’s a grand old building and when it was built what it represented must have made complete sense to the citizens of New Zealand.  Now I’m not sure what it means.  I wondered too what Hobson would make of it.  As we walked away I imagined him watching quietly from his frame in the hallway as the staff closed the doors, and began to hoover up the dirt that the great, great grandsons and daughters of empire had tracked in on the carpet.

Last Season’s Man

In the middle of the movie I’ve Loved You So Long an annoyingly persistent man lectures his friends about a writer he loves.  The annoyingly persistent man (it’s late, he’s drunk too much, it’s a large dinner party) can’t believe that another person at the table doesn’t rate a certain writer.  As he gets a bit stroppy others at the table offer the sensible notion that it’s just a difference of opinion, a matter of taste, but he won’t have it.  For him it’s a matter that transcends taste: “He’s a genius and you’re just too dumb to see it,” he says hotly.

It is strangely annoying when someone doesn’t like something you like, and really quite exciting when you find someone who loves what you love.  I have often wondered why I get so tetchy when someone slights or criticises a book or a film I like.  I think that it might be something to do with feeling that a representation of the world that strongly resonates with me is being discounted or even mocked, and even though what is being devalued is at a distance from me it still makes me feel like my own view of the world is being minimised.

Perhaps that’s it.  I’m not sure, but that’s a good enough definition for now, and it explains why people can wind up saying offensive things to each other at dinner parties about movies, and books and albums.

Different stories are important (“this writer is a genius!”), and having your story, your version of the world, accepted as the most true gives you a lot of power.  Everyone knows this.  It is true at an individual level when you are in a dispute over who did what when you pranged your car, and it is true at a community level when different groups compete to shape their environment.  For me the easiest example to reach for is from the classroom.

The last time a student launched a stream of abuse at me, gave me the finger and stormed out of the classroom I was really angry about it (unsurprisingly).  After the lesson I wrote an email to that student’s dean and to the principal expressing my disgust and WHAT I WANTED DONE.  The dean and the principal approached me, apologised for the student’s behaviour and had that student stood down for a couple of days.  Fine.

On reflection though two things bothered me about this.  Firstly, if I am brutally honest with myself, I think I was 20% responsible for the boy’s actions towards me.  I had been unwelcoming to him when he came into class late, I had given him grief about his laughable attempt at uniform (which I can never be bothered doing because I generally don’t give a toss), and when he kept butting in with smart comments while I was trying to help a student sitting next to him I turned around and snapped, “Are you trying to be smart?”  It was this remark that inspired his long and colourful description of what he thought I should go and do with myself.  Now if you’re reading this and you’re not a teacher you might be thinking that I am being a bit hard on myself (or you might be writing to the Teachers’ Council to have me struck off), but as a teacher I think you should really rise above this kind of day-to-day needle from some random knucklehead.  So I’m going to take 20% of the blame.

The second thing that has come to bother me is how pleasurable it felt to have my version of events instantly priveleged as true, and validated with swift justice because I was the teacher.  It was a nice feeling at the time, but since it has worried me.  Of course there are mitigating factors.  The boy in question has a long track record at the school, and I am a teacher who doesn’t tend to get sworn at or kick up stinks about things.  Still, it made me think.

Which is bad, because it leads to long posts like this and other thoughts.  Other thoughts like this:

Do you accept that some Maori have a different view of things from the majority of Pakeha or don’t you?  Do you think that for many Maori it is still possible to see the world from a more communal viewpoint than an individualistic one, or do you think that this is nice in a Patricia Grace short story but after that we should just be sensible and get on with the business of running the country and building roads?  Or, in other words, do you accept a Maori story alongside a Pakeha one or do you reject the need for this either wholly or in part?  Naturally your answer to these questions matters, and matters even more when it combines with others and turns into a majority view, because a majority view in a democracy leads to actions, and actions can harm those whose stories are minimised.

Last year I went to the Waiwhetu Marae to hear Moana Jackson talk about the Maori perspective of the Treaty of Waitangi.  It was incredibly illuminating and significantly changed my understanding.  He told a lot of stories in his talk and one of them was about a rock in a river in his koru’s hometown.  This story was about the things his koru told him about the meaning of that large rock to the iwi.  Unfortunately it was also a story about the council dynamiting that rock as part of a flood management progamme.  Nobody told the iwi about this programme before it was carried out or thought to ask them for their story.  It was a devastating and humiliating act.

Which leads us to a current example where the battle over who is telling the truest story is still fresh and the result undecided.  The result in this case is important because it calls into question a person’s integrity, and will probably be a factor, ironically, in their legacy.

Before you read the next section you should know that it is about the C.K. Stead’s story Last Season’s Man which recently won a British short story competition.  If you are the type of person who reads short stories you should probably read it first before you carry on.  The story can be found here.

I liked Last Season’s Man.  It had a nice shift in the second third, a satisfying resolution, and it reread well.  Taking the story by itself I would reccommend it.

Then comes all the context that comes with reading any story, and shapes our view of it.  Firstly, there is my feeling for the author’s past work.  I have read two of Stead’s books in the past, Mansfield and My Name was Judas, and because I enjoyed both books I am already favourably disposed towards this short story.  I am also aware of Stead’s age and antagonising reputation and found that this added an interesting layer to the story which is somewhat about how an artist’s legacy is judged by his or her society.

Secondly there is the context of reading a story by a New Zealander and being a New Zealander.  A foreigner reading this story would not particularly notice this sentence:

We are a small country with a tight intellectual community. If things go against you… you can be left, like the chicken in the enclosed yard all the other chickens turn against, your skin bleeding and your feathers plucked.

But if you are from New Zealand I think you do and feel that it is about us, as Kim Hill said in her brief chat with Stead about the story on National Radio.

Finally, I discovered, via the DimPost, that there is quite a back story to this short story which adds a great deal to re-readings of Last Season’s Man because Stead seems to have been in a very similar situation to the protaganist in his short story; namely finding himself the subject of a critical essay from a younger writer (Nigel Cox) who then later died.  From reading the original article by Nigel Cox, and some of the reaction to Stead’s story from people close to Cox in the Sunday Star Times it would appear to be disingenuous of Stead to say he has no idea what anyone is talking about.  Equally, though, I would say that it’s not exactly a straight line between biography and fiction.  Each reader, in the end, will make their determination whether the short story and the back story sit together unhappily or intriguingly.  I suspect it will be the former in New Zealand, and the later everywhere else.

So here we see people’s competing stories about a story.  Whose do we accept?  Or perhaps we don’t care.  It’s all very well to privilege the teacher’s version over the student’s version, or the non-fiction account over the poem’s, or the Pakeha tale over the Maori one, but I  prefer to do so cautiously.  It might be that the student was a bit right, and that people are reading the poem a hundred years latter and laughing at the history book, or winning their case with the Waitangi Tribunal.  In the case of Stead v Cox, for me, the jury is still out.