Random Play by Graham Reid

When Auckland model Renata and actress Alicia-Anne Crawford stepped out last week at Une Enveloppe to announce the opening of "Fashion Month'' -- Blair Trader's new eatery on Auckland's fashionable Sandringham Road -- there were audible whispers and faux-gasps in the room. Both were wearing outfits -- "consembles'' as Auckland couturier Stef Britta wittily observed -- in the style of New York's StreetChic which, to outsiders, looks like an explosion in the Sesame Street costume department combined with westie-girl pragmatism. And, funnily enough, it is.

Usually a fashion style creeps up by increments, invades the media through showings and magazines, then goes mainstream. The next thing you know we are all wearing frilled leather miniskirts and platform soles, or loony bellbottoms and t-shirts with "Manbreasts'' or "Boychild'' stencilled on them. This process commonly takes many months to travel from the catwalks of New York and Milan to Wellesley Street in Auckland. StreetChic has done it in fewer than six weeks and has surprised even seasoned fashionistas and toy-boys by the rapidity of its arrival. Its progress can be charted on a daily basis if you follow the New York weeklies, as many "early adopters'' do.

After Une Envelope's opening -- well attended by "celebrities" from television news and reality programmes -- StreetChic achieved high visibility in Vulcan Lane last Wednesday and later that afternoon was seen on High Street. By Friday it was on Queen Street and already weekly magazines and fashion monthlies are commissioning stories on it. Helpfully, as often happens these days, StreetChic comes with its own soundtrack and three dance parties are scheduled incorporating elements of the style.

The hybrid of the garish and glam that has become StreetChic started only six weeks ago with the hip-hop outfit the Lo-Fat Tong from New Jersey whose career consisted of only two appearances in a local playground.

But when a local cable channel played the episode of Sesame Street with Teri Garr as guest the Lo-Fat Tong crew taped it and sampled voices when Kermit was in the Muppets' costume department. Later that day they used a loop from the tape in a rap track and dressed up Muppet-style for a local DJ competition. Footage of their performance was picked up by New York news channels. Overnight they became local heroes. The following weekend two other hip-hop crews paid respect by adopting the look and releasing dance singles in the Lo-Fat Tong style.

(Incidentally, Spannerman's "Sesame/System" is a much better single than Lo-Fat's "Survive Da Street", however Spannerman was last month labelled the commercial cash-in by rap tastemaker Doggy-D and his sales have suffered accordingly.) Features of the Lo-Fat Tong visual style were oversized fluffy slippers from K-Mart, striped leggings, brightly coloured shorts, and something lumpy and large as a top. As the Tong's Laramie Indian told CNN: "Dis was our style from da first-up. Ain't nobody done da style wasn't down with it forever, know-wha'umsayin'.''

When it moved out of the hip-hop community the following weekend it underwent a crucial transformation. Ludicrously large hats -- like those worn by German skiers -- came in and tops became multi-coloured rather than with a single splash of colour in the Lo-Fat look. It is those modifications -- a "loosening up'' according to fashion watcher Fiona Van Suiter -- which captured the imaginations of designers, models and those who attend gallery openings. Yet despite its op-shop, anything-goes, psychopathic, cartoon look there are rules. "Men! Women! You would never, never wear anything under the top,'' announced Giovanni Romano of Paris fashionhouse $tylu$. The look was adopted by model Melaney Evangaline -- "By choice,'' she insisted with a laugh -- who wore a StreetChic ensemble (by David Karin-Carpenter of DKC-NYC) to the opening of David Polsky's new multi-media opera "Hanoi, Under Night" on Broadway.

By coincidence one character in Polsky's five hour event Wysteria, a drag queen based on Jane Fonda, also wears a less extravagant version of the StreetChic style. The look was dubbed "StreetChic'' by Mike Walker on CBS's Today/Tomorrow programme. A style was born.

The following week New York's Village Voice had two major stories, one an interview in Ebonics with Lo-Fat Tong who distanced themselves from the clothing ranges but also announced they'd perform as special guests at Klaus Bergan's showing in Milan. In this country Net surfers were parodying the style three weeks ago, but then StreetChic appeared in a segment on TV3's Nightline which used UK footage in which Jean-Claude Gauloise discussed it with tastemaker Vivienne Eastmann. Both loved it, TV3's Catherine Bryan looked less convinced. Now social critics are weighing in. New York columnist Barbra Kaiser explained StreetChic as "the exegesis of theatre, fashion and media's infiltration of our socio-conscious selves. It is an ironic comment on our adult urbanism mixed with regressive fantasies of childhood and its cultural aphoristic codes. It is ironic it should be so ironic at a time when there is so much irony.''

"It is significant it should come in the Bush II Era,'' says Newstimes art critic Bruce Hughes. "This is a time of programmatic amnesia and infantile yearnings. It's the banner of America's obsession with the childlike, in a country where an anthropomorphic mouse is its most recognisable cultural artefact.''

Michelle D'Art-Traff writing in Belle Cite says however, "People will wear what they like and feel comfortable in -- and right now we are telling women that like it or not they will feel like and feel comfortable in StreetChic.'' Auckland sociologist Marie-Claire Symonds says its hardly surprising a style based on Sesame Street should catch on here: "It's kitschy and has that careless quality, like, 'So I look stupid. Who doesn't?' thing. It allows people to break away from trends and hop on a bandwagon instead.

"And of course Sesame Street had a huge impact on Aotearoan cultural mores. A 1994 survey showed 73 per cent of the population could count to 10 in Spanish. Directly attributable to Sesame Street.''

Parnell designer Anne Nagel (TM) says while she has worked on the periphery of the style for some years it was coincidence it arrived at the same time as her own "Chic-in-da-Street" collection. And Nigel Sharon's new outfits unveiled in a St Mary Bay brasserie last week featured tops of bilious green, garish red shorts and his local variant, ugg boots.

"We too often ignore footwear and I just felt the need to go with something unself-conscious, something you don' t have to think about. After all many people will find the tops, the fly-away vests and tight shorts challenging enough -- and what better way to say to yourself, 'Just enjoy' than ugg boots? It just adds a fun element to something which is otherwise quite serious.

"The American style is less playful than what we have been doing,'' says Nagel. "It is constrained by colour rather than liberated by it. Our work is vibrant and fun, theirs is more aware of the sense of it actually being a 'fashion.' "

And certainly the Nagel designs Renata and Alicia-Anne Crawford wore at the opening of Une Enveloppe were vibrant. Most stunning however has been the bright yellow jumpsuit over a red and white striped top that former City Life star Jo-hannah Cheng wore to a SkyCity function last Saturday. But local commentators looked aghast at her "super-sized" red shoes and remembered something Klaus Bergan said in Berlin last Wednesday when the doyenne of the catwalk Mikahora used similar large shoes in her SummerChic showing.

"It was a pretty collection, so special from someone so very, very special to us all. But the large red shoes? I suspect that is just Mickey's little game, teasing us with the idea that any serious fashion style could accommodate something as absurd and populist as a clown's shoes, and expect to have billions of customers served.''

A few years ago at the height of the OJ Simpson "trial" I was in Santa Monica so thought I'd go down and check out the circus around the courthouse. The "trial" had been going for quite a few months but the loopies were still in attendance with their banners, placards and odd charts tracing the persecution of OJ back to the Israelites or some such nonsense. Television crews, increasingly desperate to keep the story going, were interviewing every man and his dog. Literally.

I saw a woman reporter asking a guy in a wheelchair his opinion of the trial, and then she bent over, pointed the microphone at the wee dog in his lap and asked the man what his pooch thought of it all. I snapped a photo to capture the very moment that a major American network took to interviewing small animals about OJ. Every man and his bloody yappy little dog, in fact.

The OJ "trial" was nothing less than a circus and the Michael Jackson "trial" is shaping up the same way. The woman who has said Jackson molested her son sounds utterly flaky in that particularly American way -- big on the God Concept -- and has been involved in previous and similar litigation and accusation. Add to that Jackson and his posse turning up dressed in white and you have a whole lot of messianic complexes trying to occupy the same small space.

It will get more mad yet.

The uncle of the boy who previously alleged Jackson had molested him has written a book All That Glitters (sic) in which the boy says Jackson was "the Devil in God's clothes". Now the "Devil" bit I could almost understand and you would too if it was you who had been molested. But "in God's clothes"?

God wears epaulets and a military uniform, weird face masks and one white glove?

What kind of religion do these people have? I thought it was whacky that some conceived of God with a long white beard and wearing an XXOS nightie, but there's something seriously wrong with Bible class today if God is being sold as looking like a psychopathic guardsman.

Frankly, the Jackson "trial" doesn't interest me much other than for it's voyeuristic possibilities because after OJ (and a dozen other high profile celeb-trials since) any notion that Justice might be present in the courthouse is pretty alien. So it won't be a trial as we understand it, more a spectacle played out for a nation watching another of its own go down while the outside world shrugs its shoulders in indifference to America's politics, heroes and especially its judicial system.

What does interest me however is the line taken by Jackson's apologists, that he is An Innocent, a Peter Pan, a childlike man for whom the world is little more than a technocolour playground dreamed up by Walt Disney.

This is the conclusion to a recent book detailing Jackson's private affairs, Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness by J. Randy Taraborrelli (Pan MacMillan $27.95).

J. Randy -- if we might be so familiar and call him that -- is one of those celeb-biographers whose previous darlings have included Diana Ross, Madonna, the women of Camelot (Jackie, Ethel and Joan, the Kennedy women) and Princess Grace. His Jackson book is an update of his 1992 edition which, to give it credit, was pretty thorough, and the result of research and interviews with Michael and various family members. Mostly however J. Randy is Michael-watcher in the same way that Brits have royal-watchers.

But there's something uncomfortable about his new final pages of this book in which any semblance of objectivity (and to be fair there had been only small doses of it beforehand) is thrown out and J. Randy comes off as just another Jackson apologist.

While we might agree that it is a tragic turn of events if Michael J. has been targeted with untrue allegations of child-molestation, it is something else to editorialise that this has happened just when he had begun to rediscover the joy of making music, that this "thing" (as J. Randy calls it) could set him back years, and ask "Will this man never be free of crisis?"

This is J. Randy painting Michael J. as the victim, especially when he says that alone among his peers Michael J. has had to endure exploitation and hundreds of lawsuits, and perhaps he is just one of the unluckiest people ever to be in show-business.

"You have to feel sorry for the guy," says J. Randy.

Well, actually you don't. Jackson is not, as J. Randy would have us believe "only human, no more than the nine-to-five worker trying to support a large family on a meagre wage and no less than the wealthy socialite without a care in the world".

No, Michael Jackson is different -- and that's because he chose to be. The preceding 600 pages show how adept he was at manipulating the media and his image, and being a hard-arsed guy when that was required. Yes, he had a difficult childhood but as an adult he has been surrounded by lawyers, record company minions, Liza Minnelli and other low-lifes.

J. Randy concedes that Jackson is not a child, but in making the point that he is a man, he then asks that because of that he should be allowed to lead a good and dignified life.

But let's be clear about this, Jackson is a 46 year old man, an astute businessman (read the section on how he outplayed Yoko Ono and his then-friend Paul McCartney to win control of the Beatles catalogue) and was once very adept at media massage. Like OJ, he lived in world where no one ever said, "No" to him.

Jackson is not a child, he is an adult and to suggest he has no sexual desires is to deny nature and bizarre in the extreme. But his apologists constantly play the Peter Pan card when it comes to Michael Jackson. They are not alone in that, and in reportage the age thing increasingly troubles me. We are sometimes told that people in their 20s -- usually representative rugby players who get boozed up and bop someone in bar -- are just young.

Nope, at that age they are adults, albeit irresponsible ones. So let's not have their age used as an excuse.

There is a creeping erosion of age so as to disavow responsibility and culpability for individual actions.

Lynndie England, the US army reservist charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, might not have done too much with her life (she was working in a chicken processing plant when she was called up) but at 21 she was hardly the "girl" that her mother said. Her lawyer said she was "being made a poster child for the deficiencies of the administration's Iraq war".

England might not be the brightest light in the harbour, but she is not a child and not a girl. She is a woman. An adult. And with that comes an understanding of right and wrong, and responsibility for your own actions.

Right, J. Randy?

Michael Jackson is not a child.

Many years ago I met an interesting if utterly pig-ignorant man. I was in my early 20s and he would have been at least three decades my senior. I can't remember how we got onto it, but it came up that I had been to Vietnam and Beirut a few years before.

He was surprised -- the former was a warzone, the latter just tipping that way -- and then said, in words which I will never forget, that he thought travel was pretty over-rated: "It's the same thing everywhere, just people and houses."

This conversation took place in his hometown of Whangarei and I thought he and his city deserved each other. Back then Whangarei was -- and this is being charitable -- a dull, nasty, introverted, suspicious little shit-hole. I suspect it has all changed now. Today it is probably a hotbed of intellectualism and cutting-edge art, I wouldn't know. I still consider it a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else. Just people and houses, I reckon.

But the words of that man -- who, needless to say, had never left the comfort of Whangarei in his life -- have stuck with me. And sometimes I wonder why we do travel.

First let it be said there is a lot of nonsense written about travel, usually by travel writers (among whom I count myself having scribbled words about odd places over many years). Mostly travel writers are on a junket which means they not only don't pay for anything (maybe their own drinks, and even then some still moan) but they also get chauffeured around to see the sights and are back at the hotel bar in time for a long loud grizzle about everything just before a slap-up free dinner.

Then they come home and tell you how wonderful it all was.

I know, I have done some of these things (except the moaning I hope). I met a German guy on a travel junket in Florida who complained it was too hot outside. Not the kind of, "God, it's hot outside" that we all do from time to time. No, this guy just went on and on about it. He took 35 degrees and panama hats personally.

Finally I said, "What would you like me to do, turn it down?"

He didn't think that was funny but after he stormed out of the room in a huff everyone else did. We laughed about it, and him, for days.

I often wondered what that absurd little, overdressed man -- being a German he was head-to-toe in black and carried a leather jacket -- had to say about balmy Miami to his readers. "Don't go, it's just people and houses ... and heat", perhaps?

My guess is he just rewrote the travel brochures and stuff he was provided with, and then went on a bender with his mates telling them how crap Florida, and probably America as whole, is.

Travel writing in New Zealand newspapers and magazines has improved over the past decade although you still see those pieces which are dripping with cliches: has there ever been a palm tree that hasn't waved in the breeze, an ocean that hasn't lapped gently on the side of the canoe?

And there are always those writers who feel it their mission to report what the guide or taxi driver had to say. That tells me they didn't speak to anyone else, or maybe just the pool boy to ask for another mai tai. However there's no greater virtue in backpacking and roughing it.

In Vietnam one time I met two rather dull young girls from the Wisconsin. They seemed nice enough so my companion and I invited them to dinner in a cheap place near the beach at Nha Trang. It was a perfect evening -- stars laced the heavens, a cooling breeze blew off an ocean that turned turquoise then black before our eyes -- but these girls who were travelling through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand bitched about every damn thing. They were backpacking on the cheap so were saving their pennies (in a country where you could eat a slap-up meal for US$3).

They said the Vietnamese hadn't been particularly nice to them. This was the real surprise, I've been there many times and felt nothing but a rare generosity of spirit everywhere. I suggested that might be because they were perceived by locals as rich foreigners (which relatively they were), but also stingy. I hinted they might want to relax a bit about saving money and appreciate where they were. They were also vegans so couldn't find much to eat in South East Asia and complained about the way locals treated their pigs, chickens and other livestock.

Basically they thought Vietnam wasn't much cop and preferred Madison, Wisconsin.

They confirmed what I have always thought: travel doesn't necessarily broaden the mind. I have met many too people who have travelled widely and the result has been they have had their prejudices confirmed.

I met an American family on a train in Paris and they had at least six double suitcases and a pram for their baby. I watched sympathetically as the husband grappled with this enormous load in the narrow corridor then tried to heave them onto the compartment above his head. He refused all offers of assistance so I watched with increasing amusement. Then I cracked up when he brought into the small carriage a baby's car seat. He had been told they didn't have them in Europe. I thought of him hauling this load up the stairs of the small hotel where they were staying in Venice, of him trying to master the way Italians drive, of the uncomfortable nights with the baby. Then his mother-in-law arrived. She was travelling with them too.

It was a nightmare waiting to happen and already he was hating it. They'd been away from Baltimore for just two nights -- "This was my wife's idea," he said somewhat bitterly -- and already he'd had his pocket picked in Paris. They'd never been out of the States before and he'd decided they would never go again.

Yes, some people make travel tough for themselves. That doesn't mean travel is so arduous as to be unenjoyable. Fun and discomfort aren't mutually exclusive -- unless you are always used to travelling up the front of a plane and then are confronted with having to carry your own bags up the muddy track to the hillside hut in Cambodia.

Travel invites you to be uncomfortable, to have your worldview shaken up, to eat strange foods and meet people who see the world very differently. Sometimes to confront history as it is lived by its victims. Too often travel writers tell you of a place as if it has no historical or political context.

Many people, seasoned travel writers among them, also see only what they want to see when they travel. I was in Bangkok and a young American bemoaned the fact that McDonalds were everywhere. Well, they are in a lot of places around the world -- yes, too many obviously -- but they aren't everywhere.

And I had to admit that when London's TimeOut did a McDonalds-sponsored guide to Paris I found it incredibly useful. They marked every Mc-Shop so when you came of the Metro in some strange district you could orientate yourself on the map by referring to the highly visible Golden Arches. And that's why you think they are everywhere, you register them because they are recognisable.

In the States recently I needed an internet cafe and couldn't find one anywhere. There are certainly fewer of them in Savannah than in Seoul because people are more monied so have connections at home. So I looked and looked and couldn't see a sign which said "Internet Cafe" or whatever. Eventually I was guided to Kinko's chainstores which have internet facilities. After that I just looked for Kinko's in every town. No problem.

You will find what you are looking for, if that is all you are looking for.

It's called the McDonalds-is-Everywhere Syndrome.

If you want to believe Ho Chi Minh City is going to hell through Americanism then you will see the evidence: fast food stores, jeans outlets and bars called Apocalypse Now. What you won't be able to read are the signs in Vietnamese and because of that you ignore them. You are forced to for the sake of your senses and sanity. But they are everywhere advertising local rock bands, concerts, health seminars, cultural events, local body elections and so on.

Just because you see a McDonalds in Ho Chi Minh doesn't mean the place has tumbled to foreign consumer capitalism.

Travel -- and travel writing -- requires that you look beyond the obvious. Otherwise you would just see . . . what? Just people and houses probably. In The Art of Travel by the popular philosopher Alain de Botton -- a series of gently provocative and helpful essays which answer that question, why are we sometimes so disappointed by travel? -- the author tells of a character in the 19th century novel A Rebours by the French writer JK Huysman.

The misanthropic Duc des Esseintes lives alone in a vast villa outside Paris. He rarely ventures out so as to avoid encountering the ugliness of the world and its inhabitants. He prefers to stay alone in his bed reading classic literature. One day however he reads Dickens and is struck by a sudden passion to see the England he evokes. Des Esseintes has his servants pack his many trunks and takes the next train to Paris. He goes to a bookseller and buys Baedecker's Guide to London then sits in a wine bar with mostly English patrons. In his imagination he sees them as characters from Dickens. Then he goes to an English tavern near the station and eats oxtail soup, beef and potatoes, and has a couple of pints of English ale.

But when it comes time to board the train he thinks how troublesome the trip might be, how he would have to endure an unfamiliar bed and stand in queues, and feel the English cold. And anyway, why should anyone travel when they are comfortable in their own chair? And wasn't he already experiencing the smells and taste of London? What could he expect other than disappointment and discomfort when trying to engage the real thing? Maybe at the back of his mind he also thought it might be "just people and houses"?

"So Des Esseintes paid the bill, left the tavern and took the first train back to his villa, along with his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas and his sticks -- and never left home again." I admire his intellectual decision not to travel. Although I doubt he would have got on well with my man in Whangarei.

Now that the Olympic Games are over and completely forgotten -- funny how fame fades away, huh? -- it might be time to consider what our sportspeople may have learned by the experience during their debriefings on remote Fijian resorts. Let's hope one thing is not be interviewed on television.

They have little to say and what they do utter is usually a babble of cliches.

"Yeah, no, it was awesome."

Oh c'mon!

Let all sportspeople know this: "Awesome" is a word reserved for the day you see the Virgin Mary descending on a cloud. That is awesome.

Those who get past "awesome" tend to speak in code. I thought it was great someone did a PB (I asked around and it's a Personal Best, if you didn't know) but was utterly mystified when a very large man said it was good to get the W.

That's a short way of saying "win" said a friend. I got pedantic and pointed out that it isn't: win is a one syllable word and double-you two syllables. Then he said it was a very Kiwi way of avoiding looking too proud. God, we are a complicated people.

Now if we are to believe these people are out there representing our country then why doesn't someone take them aside and give them some media management? Or at least provide them with a word other than "awesome". I had no particular beef against the Olympics and have the greatest admiration for those who test themselves in this most gruelling public arena. But I had little time for television columnists who predictably complain at length about the thing cluttering up their screens. It wasn't like they didn't know it was going to happen, there had been a few years warning. They could have got the videos in, they could turn to any number of other channels.

Television sport (other than big time rugby and anything involving grown men beating each other to a pulp in a boxing ring ) doesn't really divert me much, but Olympic events on television are inevitable and that doesn't seem worth getting all het up for. Coronation Street will return, of that we can be numbingly certain.

I didn't watch much of the Olympics other than what I caught when on random scan but that's not any great personal-political statement, I seldom watch sport anyway so why would I start now? Archery for God's sake?

The sports seen on television are probably great fun -- better if you are winning I guess -- but the previews, interviews and reviews are just appalling. Commentators become cheerleaders or apologists. And I really don't care how hard someone has trained, what sacrifices they have made, how tough it has all been.

That's like theatre people who expect critics to be kind because they've worked hard on their production and the director has mortgaged the house to float the show. It's irrelevant to the final performance, it's special pleading. A lot of people work hard, a lot of people make great sacrifices -- and they don't do it to follow their dream. They do it because it puts food on the table and keeps the creditors at bay, and often little more than that.

We should be very clear about this, these competitors are in it for themselves. Sportspeople who go to the Olympics are not doing it for us, the country, or any greater good.

There is nothing morally superior about sportspeople (or artists or television newsreaders for that matter) and if there was then these people would be saints. And they clearly aren't. Not even this bargain-basement halo-flogging Pope would canonise them.

I liked it when one of the Rowing Twins said she had no idea that four million people were in the boat with them (as some local commentator suggested), they were just heads down and doing it.

We might reflect in their glory or commiserate with them in their failure to meet the challenge they have set themselves, but we should not be mistaken, these athletes are there to pursue their own goals, meet their own challenges. This is their art, and for that they have suffered.

We should expect to suffer for our art. God knows I have for mine -- although standing in the rain outside Madrid's famous art gallery the Prado on a bitterly cold day last year might just have be taking it too far. It was for me. I quit the queue and headed back to my tiny hotel room for a warm shower, then jumped puddles to the nearby bar where I cheerfully wasted both myself and a wet Sunday. That night I staggered back through the downpour to my small hotel room and in the dark slipped on the wet linoleum. I split open my nose on the iron doorhandle of my room. As I was mopping up buckets of blood and feeling relieved I was so self-medicated I wasn't in pain I reflected on this appropriate end to a day which had begun badly anyway.

My intentions when I got up that miserable morning had been excellent -- the room of Goya's late period "black paintings" which I had travelled halfway around the world to see. I woke early that day and when pulling back the curtain the whole thing crashed off its hooks. I got on the bed to hook it back up, the bed wobbled and I was pitched forward, smashing against the window. Only an unsteady hand on the frame prevented me from pitching out and onto the concrete courtyard three storeys below.

I spent an hour trying to explain by gestures and re-enactment what had happened to a dumpy and distressed cleaning woman who reacted as if I had just told her the guys from the Inquisition were popping back after lunch and looked pretty unhappy. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in rapid and incomprehensible Spanish.

I fled and made my way through increasingly heavy showers down to the gallery. Things could only improve.

But I hadn't counted on the Prado also hosting a Monet exhibition and the queues of well-prepared people bussed in at opening time with their protective umbrellas and raincoats.

My leather jacket simply directed the rain to my jeans and boots, so I cut my losses. Goya (whose "black paintings" truly are awesome incidentally) would still be there when the weather improved. I hadn't so much quit as done a Steve Ferguson. I was holding my efforts and energy back for a greater event. This wasn't the first time I have suffered for great art. In fact a fortnight before the Madrid misery I had also almost been foiled by Joan Miro in balmy Barcelona. Miro occupies a central place in the history of contemporary art. But he almost wilfully seemed to have marginalised his magnificent museum in Barcelona. It's a bit off the beaten track and you don't want to try walking there. Take it from one who did. It's a marathon, not a sprint. The handsome Fundacio Joan Miro has a commanding view across the city -- from which you can conclude it is located at a very high point. Very high.

It was a warm afternoon when I headed off to the much vaunted gallery on Montjuic (Jewish Mountain) in the south west of the city with its collection of around 400 of his paintings, many of them compellingly massive.

I took the Metro to nearby Espanya station and figured the museum wasn't too far away after what promised to be an interesting walk. The Montjuic area is stacked with attractions like the archeological museum, theatres and gardens. A little further over is the 1992 Olympic Stadium area and I thought that maybe after giving Miro a day I might wander over that way at dusk and watch the emerald Mediterranean disappear under the falling dark. But of course everything is flat on a map -- especially the cheap kind I was trusting -- and as incline leaned into small hill then became alarmingly steep road I could feel the weight of my small bag increase with every aching step. Up another incline, up three helpfully placed escalators, then some more walking along a road which dipped briefly only to rise even more sharply ...

Clearly, as our sportspeople say, my preparation hadn't been what it should have been. I hadn't done the hard yards and was having to do them now. I pushed through the pain barrier.

Yes, there was quite a view but Miro, not a city snoozing under a haze of heat, was what I was after. Mostly I just wanted to stop suffering for someone else's art. Of course there is a bus right to the door as I learned on arrival -- I found it for the trip back down which was some small consolation -- but the struggle was worth it.

Miro is the greatest Catalan artist of last century. He was born in 1893 and grew up in the old part of the city. His father was a watchmaker and silversmith but early in life Miro was taken by drawing and gravitated to the countryside and coastline. As a young artist he split his time between Paris and the Catalan coast, met Picasso and his circle, and explored collage as well as painting.

He couldn't draw -- then again who can these days? -- but boy, he could paint. His one dimensional works may lack perspective but they create a sense of depth like few others. And they gain power from their enormous scale.

Miro created his own visual language and his curved patterns evoke birds (a favourite subject, along with women) and a timelessness.

Room after room in his enormous museum reveals massive, sometimes minimal, paintings and glowing rainbow-hued tapestries. Yeah, no. Awesome. Realised by the architect Josep Lluis Sert and built in the white Mediterranean style, the museum itself offers a gentle walk through Miro's art starting with breathtakingly large tapestries of bold colour. There are his earliest drawing (and no, he really wasn't that good) and further on some of his sculpture. But in the natural light and airiness of these generous spaces it is his large-scale paintings which are the most forceful.

In one area called the Octogon, which many patrons walk past because it appears there is little to see, are great white canvases with thin, single lines of paint on them. They are late works and designed for contemplation -- or for those who wish to slow down and really see. Seldom has so little said so much and, in this building of his own design, to so many.

At this time of his life Miro wanted his painting not to be an end in itself, but to bring about a certain state of mind, to stimulate the imagination or induce meditation. They possess a zen simplicity and intellectual elegance. Miro wasn't without humour however. On the terrace outside are his whimsical sculptures made from parts of shop mannequins, chairs and found objects. They are vivid reds, blues and yellows, and stand like frozen clowns -- or moments -- amid the whiteness of the museum walls and the pale, misty blue sky above.

And so the hours rolled by effortlessly in Miro's gently provocative company. I took a break for a coffee at the cafe, wandered the terrace once more to enjoy the city stretched out below, browsed in the shop a while, then went back to take in again the tapestries and Alexander Calder's beautiful, liquid metal Mercury Fountain.

It was late afternoon when I finally walked out into the cooler air. I let the idea of the Olympic Stadium go and got on the bus with a gentleman from Denmark. We chatted about Miro, Barcelona, and the various merits and debits of our homeland. Halfway down the hill we passed a couple wheezing their way up, doing the hard yards, suffering for their art.

He looked at me conspiratorially: "A few years ago I was foolish enough to try to walk here. I am pleased to learn I am not the only one."

I smiled, then looked out the window at the houses of Barcelona.

A DJ came to my house recently. This isn't the kind of thing I would normally admit to, but bear with me. First, he wasn't a DJ in the old sense -- not one of those guys who sells ads and their own egos between "classic" rock on the radio -- but an actual bona fide, samplin' and scratchin' vinyl junkie. And second, he wasn't one of those more obscure-than-thou DJs who looks for limited edition vinyl issued in December 73 so he can sample the cymbal on some track then gets all huffy and superior when you didn't recognise the source.

Nope, my visitor was just a guy, much like me, who just liked to listen to old records and turn up those rare gems. If they fitted his brief he'd sample them, and if not no matter. When he walked into my office he turned to my wife and said, "Oh, this isn't right" in a voice filled with awe, admiration, envy, and I suspect, a note of pity. But mostly it was as if he'd just walked into King Solomon's vinyl-mine.

I confess to being a hoarder. Nothing embarrassing like bottles, matchboxes, or beer cans. I collect art objects. Well, records actually.

Over the decades I've scrounged through junk shops and school fairs looking for that first Sadistic Mika Band album, things by Sam the Sham and Pharaohs, Japanese psychedelic rock from the early 70s, spoken word albums from the 40s, Gracie Fields' singles ... Just the usual stuff. My walls bulge with the likes of Father Guido Sarducci's "Live at the St Douglas Convent", the Addicts (reformed junkies singing songs of praise, and recently voted worst or weirdest album of all time by Q magazine) and the Alfred E Newman "Mad" album.

Feeding the habit hasn't come cheap - all that shoe leather if nothing else - but some years back I made a great leap backwards and bought a wind-up gramophone ? and locked into something completely different and full of pleasant surprises. It was like a time-tunnel to another, more innocent world. Certainly one more crudely recorded anyway. It's not one of those large, extended-trumpet affairs with a dog peering down it, just a simple wind-it-up and drop-on-the-disc gramophone. I don't even know the year it was made.

My modest machine is a Sonora ("clear as a bell" it extravagantly claims) with an Avonia "Swiss Made" sound box. The sound is scraped out of the grooves by a vicious looking steel needle and travels up into the "sound box" which deflects the noise onto the metal lid. No volume control, no knobs to fiddle ... what's in the grooves is what you get. Plus crackle.

Now some folks get all huffy about sound quality and surface noise but I'm with Iggy Pop who, back when CDs first floated into view and people banged on about the pristine sound, memorably barked: "Life has surface noise!" Current sound equipment is pretty fragile and disposable but my solid Sonora packs up into itself to become a solid metal suitcase that also holds 10 crusty old 78s. Consider it a larger, heavier, more inconvenient and limited-capacity iPod if you will, but it's ideal for picnics. My very own meadow-blaster.

The 78rpm habit is cheap. My "system" only cost about $100 and the records are no great outlay. Most often you don't even have to buy them, any number of people are desperate to unload Ed Ames records on you. Usually if you are in a junk shop - the hospice of the discarded 78 - and the owner spots you crouching over the fragile, musty-smelling pile it's, "Five bucks the lot if you're interested, mate".

Naturally 78s snap easily so you have to be careful, but it depends on how serious you are. I try not to let too many go on me but if it happens, it happens. I was upset to lose "Raunchy" by Bill Justis and His Orchestra (the tune that George Harrison played to Paul and John to secure himself a place in the Beatles), but it was a disposable pleasure anyway. For the philosophical among us their fragility requires the zen quality of non-attachment to them, and tells you something about the transitory nature of art, if not existence.

Most of the records are terrible anyway. But I suspect the ratio of quality to crap is about what it is today. Although there's some real bad stuff out there. Jimmy Durante croaking "The Day I Read A Book" and "I'm a Vulture for Horticulture", the irrepressible Jean McPherson, the Mills Brothers ... And my copy of the Four Aces singing "Mr. Sandman" is only relieved by dirt in the grooves which make it come out something like, "Mr. Sandman, I'm such a lug ... Mr. Sandman, bring me a drink . . ."

But Jesus, they made a lot of novelty records back then: Stan Freeberg blowing bubbles through a straw, and the hilarious "He Holds the Lantern While His Mother Chops the Wood" by the Knaves "with novelty accompaniment".

And the group called Max Hansen with Hans Peder Ase and His Orchestra. Can you imagine what that might have looked like on a picture disc? However the good ones: solo cello by Pablo Casals, the genius of Paul Robeson, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing "Shotgun Boogie", Louis and Ella, Mario Lanza, Fletcher Henderson . . .

Then there was the craze for Hawaiian music in the late 20s and 30s. There was the real thing from Sol Hoopi (almost impossible to find but worth the search), and the unlikely sounding but genuine Ray Kinney and Dick McIntyre with His Harmony Hawaiians.

These are treasures indeed. And all come with the sound of bacon frying. Few 78s have dates on them, the long-gone record companies often obscure, and the songs by second-tier performers who will never make it to Google.

So you just enjoy them in their splendid, cultural isolation.

I don't search out particular discs but would like to hear again Miklos Rosza's theme to the film "Lost Weekend". It was banned in its day becauseit allegedly engendered feelings of deep depression in the emotionally unstable. Like Joy Division, but orchestrated.

Recently a friend came over with his young son while I had the old Sonora out. He'd never seen a vinyl single let alone my archaic machine.

He asked in that genuine, if foolhardy, spirit of inquiry some kids have.

So I told him: long before iPods, downloading, CDs and DVDs, before stereos, before radiograms ... Poor kid, but he hung in there.

"What do you call them?"

"Them? They're 78s."

"Yeah? Grandma's got a whole box of them in her garage."

"Really?" "Yeah."

"A box full of them you say . . ."

So wind me up and let the lo-tech set me free.

"Yaka hula hickey du-laaa," as the old song says.