Random Play by Graham Reid

Well, the people have spoken. And if you take letters to the editor seriously then within our ranks we have the churlish, the nit-pickers, the spiteful and the blamers.
The waves had barely rolled back dragging the unfortunates with them when the letters started coming in. And what sorry reading they made.

America wasn’t doing enough. The New Zealand government wasn’t doing enough. Where was Helen Clark? Where was the deputy prime minister? Why wasn’t TVNZ giving more coverage? Where was Don Brash? What an embarrassment that Hercules is, and isn’t that symbolic of cuts in the defence budget? Those lists of how much governments were donating weren’t fair on us because if it was per capita …

And so they went on. Business as usual.

When Don Brash did come back from Hawaii (and how dare he and Helen Clark have holidays at Christmas!) it was to snap at the government. He unwittingly -- and other than that Orewa speech he seems to do most things unwittingly -- became an emblem of all that is petty-minded in the Kiwi character.

Some of the complaints letter writers made were valid of course. Initially television coverage was woefully inadequate given the magnitude of the disaster. (On Maori TV the news simply went on holiday). Even now it manages to shoe-horn this and other domestic and international news into its pre-ordained slot so sports coverage isn’t affected.

You do wonder if a serious earthquake or tsunami hit here whether we would still cross to Clint or whoever for an update on a groin strain injury. I suspect we would.

This is not to say that life shouldn’t go on.

One of the odder columns was Kerry Woodham in the Herald on Sunday comparing Britons’ Christmas spend-up with their donations. My guess is everyone here also spent more on themselves over Christmas than they gave to relief agencies. That doesn’t make anyone a bad person.

It was just another example of that holier-than-thou, churlish, nit-picking attitude that emerged in the course of a week.

Now television and newspapers have their reporters on the various scenes, mostly reporting on the good work Kiwis are doing. Which is fair enough perhaps -- we want to know what our people are up to -- but it also smacks a little of that same holy attitude.

My feeling is that everyone is responding as best they can. I’m no great defender of the prime minister but it was hardly her fault disaster struck when she was on holiday, no more than it was mine that I missed the first few days of it because of wilfully wanting to get away from the media for a while.

Once back on deck I filed a fast-turnaround story for the Listener about how your aid dollar goes to work. Not the best piece I have ever written (commissioned at 4pm for delivery by 9am the following morning) but it did throw up some interesting points which never made the final cut, especially about the situation in Aceh.

Aceh is an Indonesian province New Zealanders are vaguely familiar with. Leaders and members of the independence movement have spoken here about why they want autonomy from the government in Jakarta, and we have had sporadic media coverage of how military thugs have suppressed the people in the region, and shut the place off to foreign journalists.

In the days after the earthquake and tsunami which devastated this province in northern Sumatra I half-jokingly said to a friend that I wondered how long it would be before we heard Indonesia was being tardy with aid to that blighted place. It wasn’t long.

Within days, despite the slew of stories about the tragedy and aid workers racing to the region, there were small paragraphs appearing to say that in Banda Aceh, the capital, relief was being held up by the military.

One of the people from Oxfam I spoke to for the Listener piece also said the Indonesian government initially wouldn’t let aid workers into Aceh. But as the magnitude of the disaster hit and the world media was descending on Jakarta they had little choice. Aid workers are travelling roads where there is gunfire between the rebels and the military.

Aceh province, the wealth of which is funnelled back to Jakarta, has suffered for decades and this current tragedy seems an astonishingly cruel blow. The arrival of thousands of foreign aid workers and military personnel however may just allow the people a measure of the independence they have long sought. Their liberation struggle will perhaps be reported in international media which has previously ignored it.

The media attention might just help the struggle, although there is always the danger that indiscriminate acts, against say US or UN workers, would damage their cause immeasurably.

We are perhaps shocked that even at this time these freedom fighters, rebels or whatever you want to call them are keeping up their struggle. Our instincts (and holier-than-thou attitude?) might say they should all put down their guns and get on with the rebuilding.

But these are people who have fought for 30 years for independence. For some of them, whether we like it or not, life goes on.

It is business as usual.

Christmas presents are for kids really, but I can’t deny that I get as much pleasure out of receiving as I do giving. Even at this time tainted with sadness and awe, much of which we initially missed by being wilfully out of contact with media, I had a good Christmas.

And I can’t feel guilty about my good fortune.

This year, alongside the first season of Taxi on DVD, I got a terrific three CD set by the great Bill Sevesi.

Thank you Megan.

Bill is a local legend whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago at his modest home in Mt Albert. There, in a small room off the garage, Bill has created his distinctive Hawaiian-Pacific music, all coloured by the sound of shimmering steel guitar.

Bill is about 80 now and despite a Queen’s Service Medal in 95 and a few other awards he still hasn’t been given the popular acclaim he surely deserves.

The music he has created warms your heart and these past few days as drizzle and high winds sank most people’s summer holidays Bill’s music speaks of impossibly romantic nights beneath palm trees by a silent, moon-kissed shoreline.

The set I have been playing, Beyond the Reef, has a gorgeously amateur feel to it: Daphne Walker’s vocals wobble through the title track, there are tracks with titles like Blue Moana and The Sea & I, and throughout there is the easy sound of the Pacific Ocean lapping on the sand just beyond earshot.

There are unfortunately no liner notes to the collection but my guess is most of these songs were recorded in that tiny room in Bill’s garage which has dozens of crudely marked cassette tapes stacked around the walls and a vocal booth so small that a person of average height can barely get through the door, let alone stand up inside it.

Yet out of such modest surroundings Bill Sevesi has created an imagined Pacific which sings on every song. Listen to the leisurely Oneroa with its lazy melody and sleepy rhythm and try to not think of a tropical island. You simply cannot help but do so.

Bill was born William Jeffs in Nuku’alofa but long ago adopted the Tongan version of his name Sevesi. As a boy growing up in Auckland he fell in love with the sound of Hawaiian music by the likes of Sol Hoopi which was immensely popular in the 30s.

His first job was in a radio factory where he and his mates built an amplifier and steel guitar for him. He learned music by listening to records and one night, after watching the band for weeks, he was invited up to play with Epi Shalfoon’s outfit at the Crystal Palace in Mt Eden.

He played Isa Lei, the only song he really knew, but was an instant success. He went off and learned a swag of similar songs but just as his own band was starting to make headway he went off to Italy in 1944. The war sickened him and on his return home he threw away the ribbon he was given and started his music career again as Bill Sevesi and His Islanders which became an institution at the Orange Ballroom in those pre-Beatle days.

He made his first recording in 1949 with the country singer Tex Morton and his band played on other people’s records under numerous pseudonyms.

But as the decades rolled on Hawaiian music became less fashionable, liquor laws changed and so did the club scene, and in mid 73 Bill gave up on the Orange Ballroom.

In a sense however that was the start of his second career. He has recorded prolifically ever since, encouraged innumerable young musicians, and he has been acknowledged by the steel guitar hall of fame in St Louis.

Bill’s music is timeless and pure magic.

Whenever I mentioned Bill name in print while I was at the Herald he never failed to ring and say thank you. Those messages, usually just left on the answer phone, were genuine and never an unwelcome. He wanted nothing more than that, just to say thanks. That is rare, and Bill is a rare musician and an even more rare individual.

I have no idea whether he has ever made money out of his lifetime of creativity but he has made something better: music.

These past few days when some of us are cursing our misfortune with the weather but are also mindful of the enormity of the tragedy which has devastated so many lives I have been listening to Bill’s beautiful life-affirming music.

What was once a pleasure has become a necessity because while we have been reminded again that even in the midst of life there is death, there is also the opposite.

And Bill Sevesi’s music is about life and love and promise in all its hazy, romantic beauty. It’s been good to hear at the end of an occasionally difficult and sometimes very sad year.

Thanks Bill, and happy new year to you and yours.

We live in a cynical world, as Jerry Maguire said.

And there are reasons to be cynical: corruption and graft, deja-vu politics, corporate fraud and payouts, famine and futility …

Yet it is also too easy to by-pass healthy scepticism and head straight for the negativism of a suspicious, cynical view of Man and the world.

Cynicism seems to be at its most refined among those who perhaps have the least reason be cynical: journalists who have come from backgrounds of education (and sometimes privilege) but for whom the glass is always half empty, the motives always suspect, the results of any action or effort invariably unfavourable.

For some reason many people take cynics more seriously than they do others, they attribute to them greater intelligence or seriousness because of their pinch-lipped wariness or downright contempt for the world they are forced to inhabit.

Personally I find a lot of cynics to be bores and sometimes, it seems to me, their cynicism is a substitute for a personality. It also allows someone the opportunity to adopt an attitude in the absence of considered thought. Or a sense of generous humour.

This is not to say we might be better off if we were all mindlessly cheerful optimists, but that cynical misanthropes will seldom see the grace and beauty around them, or the achievements of others in anything other than a negative light. Their world view is too self-reflective.

I mention this because the other day I heard someone say, “I hate Christmas”.

It happens every year at this time, people trot out the usual list of woes -- shopping, crowds, Jingle Bells in the supermarket, consumerism -- but it’s not like the evidence of previous years hasn’t warned them of what is to come. How depressing to know that the days when so many are enjoying themselves will be, for you, filled with woe and discomfort.

I happen to dislike standing up in crowded damp buses on the way into town on a wet day, but all the evidence of my life says that’s the way it will be at 8.30am in winter from the stop at the city end of Sandringham Rd.

As the Americans say, “Hey, whaddya gonna do?”

You could just accept it and take it all with something approaching good grace, or at least have the consideration not to bang on about it to people who couldn’t care less about your shallow self-interest.

I guess the cynics and miserablists passed lightly over one of the Mankind’s great architectural achievements this week, a poetic piece of work which, to me at least, is a thrilling and beautiful statement of a collective art driven by a guiding vision.

It is functional sculpture in the public domain which, like the cathedrals of old, speaks of the most lofty ambitions of Humankind.

I refer to the new bridge across the valley in southern France which appears to be a flawless marriage of form and function. It is being referred to as the Millau Viaduct after the village beneath which it now bypasses. But perhaps in time to come it will be the Norman Foster Bridge after the British architectural genius who designed it.

Bridges like this fascinate me: the fragile symmetry and spider web-thin cabling; the harmoniously mathematical sweep and grand scale; the sense of space and soaring pillars which create a rhyme scheme of physicality across the great void.

I am guessing we have just witnessed the first great piece of 21st century architecture which will take its place alongside other visionary modernist works of last century like the Sydney Opera House and New York’s Guggenheim.

As with so many architects -- we think of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Meier (who designed the Getty Museum in LA) -- Foster can be a domineering character who browbeats and cajoles others into pursuing his singular vision. But, as with a great movie director who is also in charge of hundreds of people, his craft demands someone who can steer a crew in a specific, if seemingly unspecified, direction.

Foster has designed dozens of extraordinary buildings but lost a bid to redevelop the site of the Twin Towers in New York. A pity perhaps, his was the most popular design with the public: two towers which joined at the top. A metaphor which touched the hearts of New Yorkers.

Foster is an ambitious modernist whose work contains and explains the human rather than defers to principals of design which can diminish it. It is a rare skill, visionary even.

When you look at the images of the Millau motorway, sometimes in the clouds 270 meters above the River Tarn (higher than the Skytower), you cannot help but feel in awe of the inspired thought and the arduous labour which went in to its construction.

But more than that it allows the spirit to soar, it offers a glimpse of what is possible.

I cannot wait to see it, to drive across it, to sit and look at it from the valley below.

Even in the images available on websites and on television it is an inspirational piece of work, a monument to Man’s inventiveness and higher motives.

Foster says, “Ideally passing over the bridge should allow one to ‘elevate oneself’. Looking at it should provoke an emotion.”

It has. But I have yet to hear what the cynics are saying.

So news readers rather than news makers are making the news. Again.
Frankly, if $800,000 is to be Judy Bailey’s salary then it is absolutely absurd. But if that’s what her people can negotiate, then good on them. Moet for breakfast I assume.

On National Radio this morning some civilians were saying that objections to Mrs Bailey’s salary came from people who were just envious. I agree. I for one am envious.

I wish I could negotiate that much money -- more than a dozen times what I am currently earning -- for reading words aloud that other people write. More fool me I am at the bottom of the totem pole just doing the scribbling. Still, there is a nobility down here where the women’s magazine never come crawling, and you never have to answer that fateful question: Tell us three things about yourself that we don’t know.

So good on you Judy. Spend wisely but often, our economy needs you. It’s the trickle-down theory.

What I find almost more objectionable than Mrs Bailey salary-for-syllables however is this constant reference to her as “the mother of the nation”, a phrase which is now used without any irony or humour. I would love to know who invented that one so I could hunt them down and, in the words of bro’Town, “kill you, and kill you again until you cry from your eyes”.

This “mother” thing conspires to elevate and asexualise, and make Mrs Bailey an emblem of motherhood. It makes her position unassailable and beyond criticism. Have a go at Judy and you are taking on some powerful emotions in the public consciousness because, well she’s just quite nice really and it isn’t fair to pick on nice people.

In other news about newsreaders, I swear that when I put up my last post I had no idea that very day TV3 would announce a new 7pm current affairs show fronted by John Campbell to go up against One and Prime. Just coincidence, but Campbell’s assertions about advocacy journalism had been much on my mind, especially after seeing one of the Queen’s Tour shows.

So will we be seeing some of that hard-hitting stuff in his new programme next year?

Let’s hope so, although his comments in the Sunday Star Times weren’t encouraging.

He and producer Carol Hirschfeld will reflect their love of contemporary New Zealand, he said, and that “the old conflict model is boring everyone shitless. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with celebrating things from time to time.”

Not at all. It’s nice to be nice sometimes.

So news readers have been making the news again, but if you were Kate or Eric or Paul (no, not that one, the other) or one of those who has just watched the gravy train pull out and left you on the platform you might be sorely miffed.

Not something that troubles most of us though.

We can’t afford the ticket, let alone the champagne in the dining car.

At last living up to this column’s title, here are some random thoughts from the internal playlist.

Home entertaining: Summer’s coming and we all know what that means: barbecues. And women columnists banging on about blokes and their barbies, some of them pretending to great psychological insight by comparing the size of a man’s barbecue with his perception of his penis.

Ladies, when it comes to the penis, get a grip.

(And I don’t mean like former-Beckham paramour Rebecca Loos who stimulated a boar to obtain its sperm on a British reality tv show recently. For a full 10 minutes no less. A determined lass obviously, huh David? Or just ham-fisted as an Australian paper headlined?)

Anyway back to the lady scribblers.

When these women columnists are preparing their armoury of wit for this predictable annual assault -- and would you invite one to your barbecue knowing they are going to be demeaning to you and your friends for a few pieces of silver? -- might I mention this.

What might make a more interesting “think-piece” column -- but more difficult because it sidesteps the easy options -- is how women interact at such informal functions.

I don’t mean post-Sex/City nonsense -- “Then I realised” -- but something insightful about the way women are often thrown together as strangers because of the coincidences of a friendship their partners share. Men tend to poke the sausages and talk about uncontroversial common ground for a while, how do women psychologically sound each other out?

I’d like to read something like that while I stoke up my absolutely enormous barbecue.

VC and Barrister: It’s always in the small print. This from the back of the Auckland City Art Gallery newsletter. “Long standing Gallery sponsor Simpson Grierson was applauded for backing Public/Private Tumatanui/Tumataiti, the 2nd Auckland Triennial. The law firm received the 2004 Creative New Zealand Award for Bravery at the recent NBR Business Sponsorship for Arts Awards. CNZ Chairman Peter Biggs congratulated Simpson Grierson for ‘thinking outside the square‘. “

Now in my day “bravery” was a word reserved for something rather more risky than investing money in an art show. But anyway, hats off to the firm (its collective chest now weighed down by medals?) and also to Biggs for courageously going where no cliché has gone before.

Conscience nonsense: The “debate” over the Civil Union Bill saw a new low in thinking and rattled any belief you might have that some of these opponents were rational, sentient beings. Among the more hilarious perhaps was New Zealand First MP Dail Jones who said his reason for voting against the bill was not Christian-based but because he grew up in Pakistan and some of those “high standards of decency” rubbed off on him. (Mr Choudhary, a Muslim, voted for it incidentally)

Interesting though that so many MPs discovered they had gays and lesbians in the extended family and suddenly the abstract world of political belief, religion or convenient social philosophy ran headlong into something called the real world. (You know, the place you and I live in.)

For those who cited the name of God during the “debate” here’s something to prove if God exists there is wicked sense of humour at work: In Bucharest a former conman who was once jailed for claiming his winning lottery was stolen has just won one of Romania‘s biggest jackpots. He picked up a cool $50,000 with a genuine ticket. God works in mysterious ways, huh?

Journos on the frontline: Much amusement to be had out of the torturous and defensive statements which emerged after TV3 newsreader Carol Hirschfeld attended the rally which supported Ahmed Zaoui. TV3 head of news Mark Jennings said her attendance did not constitute political bias and that she had been there to support her husband Finlay McDonald. (Finlay was slammed up in pokie too?)

Finlay said she was there to look after the kids and because she was interested, and that there was a difference between expressing a political opinion openly and attending public events out of curiosity.

All of this may be strictly true of course, but when it comes to that hoary old notion of objectivity it is starting to look like those in the media, ironically, are the ones now keen to perpetrate the myth.

In this regard you might recall John Campbell banging on about advocacy journalism, and for a little while there he seemed to be the conscience of New Zealand media by citing John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and other such luminaries.

A thought: If TV3 are going to revamp news and current affairs programmes next year to take on One and the steroid-swallowing Prime then maybe this will be the opportunity for Campbell to put that agenda out there in a gutsy programme. The soft interview show and The Queen’s Tour were fine, but not quite what you might have expected from someone who was making such a strong case for advocacy journalism.

And finally: my sincere thanks again to all those who wrote after my last posting. I am genuinely touched that so many people, strangers mostly, took the time to convey their thoughts and best wishes. The cyberspace network can be more caring than some friends in the real world.