Speaker by Various Artists

In Remuera things are pretty much back to normal. The sideshow acts have packed up, the jewellery's gone back to the vault, the velour tracksuit (Jay Jays and the best thing in my wardrobe this past winter) is back on and the Rugby World Cup's finally starting to get interesting.

So before they get mushed in with rugby, cricket and gardening (and spat out again with my weekend Tai Chi cleanout) here are some random impressions from the past week spent deep undercover in the heady world of international fashion.

The TV coverage was excellent. It rocked. Every day was uploaded promptly and came well edited and not overlaid with too much froth or advertising (unlike some other new channels I could mention). Fashion TV might be dead and gone but this week at my house Sky TV Channel 9 has provided the same background ambience that FTV used to and it's been so great.

The celebrity model thing really only worked when it was either a real model like Nikki or Cindy (despite her well-documented woes she was professional and walked well), or when the wow factor was so great you didn't care they couldn't do the model walk and grinned their faces off – which is SO un-modelly (World and their aged beauties glamming it up in gold lame).

The music was strange and mostly didn't work for me. I don't know what most of the designers were thinking. That synthy 80's pop is edgy perhaps. Or easy to walk to? I spent the whole week waiting for Nickelback or something modern. The White Stripes at Insidious Fix was as good as it got. And the King. MC Mr Overstayer, rockin'the mic for his own show, first up on Monday morning. That worked a treat. Bill Urale is a national treasure. We need to buy his work and keep him in business.

The clothes for Winter 2004 were full of fishtails. It came to me late last week that this would be the case and I'm glad my fashion intuition's still working. The knitwear was fantastic. A lot of designers I'd never previously heard of will most certainly become household names if they can hold it together in the fickle world of the rag trade. Sakaguchi, IDXU, Helen Talbot and Sharon Ng. These four stood out for me.

Probably my favourite show though was for Ngati Babe and came right at the end of the week. The designer Te Kaihou Ngarotata is only 13 and comes from Central Hawkes Bay. Her show felt authentic and full of reality. The inspiration came from her forestry worker Dad and his passion for the bush and the sea. Kids with purple chin moko slopped around the stage in ugg boots and Whakatu gumboots. The practical hardwearing clothes provided a nice counterbalance to the peacock silks, satins and beaded creations we'd seen all week. Best of all Te Kaihou led the haka at the end with a confidence and poise not too many 13 year olds back in my teen years could have mustered.

I love progress.

Mother Teresa and I have been having a ball. L'Oreal New Zealand Fashion Week began on Sunday and continues officially until the end of Thursday in the Town Hall and Aotea Square, with an open to the public Newmarket Fashion Friday (inexplicably NOT in Newmarket) taking over the area that day. Mother Teresa's here because on Monday morning I was given a SIGN which would have been rude to ignore - especially when she was officially beatified on Fashion Week's first day.
 
While parking the car a wee postcard propped up against a pillar caught my eye. It was Mother Teresa of Kolkata and on the back a number of her more inspirational sayings:

"Give until it hurts, with a smile... If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are."

 
It seemed somehow appropriate to bring her along. A pack of ferocious fashionistas is not my idea of a good time and I felt I could do with some back-up.

In fact it turns out the general consensus is that this is one of the nicer events in the Australasian fashion calendar. Particularly this year, the event's third. It seems to have found its feet. The Powder Room is full of friendly faces and even the overseas guests have toned down the fashometer and are manicuring, facialing, imbibing and generally mixing in. Kerre Woodham and a whole horde of homespun Kiwis are making a convivial atmosphere up in what could otherwise be a rather unfriendly, ultramodern L'Oreal-themed space.

It reminds me of hopping on an Air New Zealand plane in London or LA when you've been away from home for a while. Feels New Zealandy. Comfy and familiar and a little unsophisticated in the midst of international glitz & glam. In my current beatific state I'm seeing links to pioneer women making an unfamiliar landscape their own and the CWI get-togethers of old, where newcomers bought a plate and were instantly in. This morning there was even some number 8 wire up there with Kerre on the red lips-shaped sofa. Nicholas Blanchet's architectural collection has loopy wire necklaces, metal fastenings & tall buildings. Nick's had a crash course in metallurgy this week - making the wire thing work, he tells Kerre.
 
The shows have been mixed affairs. Musically there's been a lot of 80's synth music and retro leanings, contrasting a little strangely with George FM who are busy pumping modern house sounds throughout the public areas. Best music so far was courtesy of King Kapisi live on the mic for his own Overstayer collection. Zambesi took the ultra-loud industrial noise road with Rammstein and EVERYBODY's done Lou Reed.

Some of the less established designers chose NZ artists - dubby Rhombus for Insidious Fix and Dimmer's "I believe you are a star" for Catch which worked well with their Lunar themed show.
 
Shows are split between the Great Hall and the Max Marquee, with the bigger guns & most of the group shows getting the bigger production specs in the Town Hall. The Marquee provides comfy dark intimacy and somehow feels more fun. The models are less experienced in there though and the clothes are not always shown at their best.
 
Some figures: Apparel exports are worth $260 million a year, add footwear & textiles in and you get another $95 million. 62% of NZ's apparel exports go to Australia and 16% to the USA. This year at Fashion Week there are 140 models, 97 hairdressers, 36 makeup artists and 15 stylists. There are over 40 designers showing collections and over 50 exhibitors with stands. It's big business.

The 140 models are mostly stick thin and dark haired. Barbara Lee's show got a lot of coverage with Nikki Watson, looking tanned and boob-some, in her centerpiece dress of red satin & feathers. Nikki looked rather out of place. A little bit of LA via Treasure Island inside our Air NZ cocoon. This afternoon there's more LA in town. Cindy Taylor from E! TV is modelling in the IPG/IPB show. She's here filing reports for "Wild On" and my friend Mike is her local cameraman.
 
So yep, every day has been filled with Celebrity! and Glamour! I've made a point of talking to everyone I sit with and so far have met buyers from Melbourne & Mapua amongst others. Also Laura the PA to Fashion Week's special guest Cosmo Jenks who I am assured is a real live London It-Girl as well as being Jay Kay's milliner. Laura is keeping her end of the bargain and wears a new Cosmo Jenks hat each show. We're on air kissing terms now. Being a PA means telling me as soon as we've shaken hands that Cosmo LOVED World's show and that the opening ceremony made her cry. Then there's Nathan Kake who is NZ's version of the Queer Eye beauty guy, he does fashion disaster makeovers on Good Morning every Thursday and performed miracles on me in The Powder Room as well.
 
Later...
 
Well this afternoon the tanned Nikki Watson suddenly made sense and upstaged Miss E! TV. After a dramatic opening number featuring drag queen Bambi smoking and lip-synching Roni Size's "The Jackal" at the same time, the IPG/IPB show went body baring crazy. And there was Nikki flanked by African Warriors looking just about perfect in a diamante bikini. "It began in Afrika ka ka ka," blared the Chemical Brothers. Turet

from IPG/IPB is most definitely our version of Donatella Versace. The crowd loved it. Cindy with her lion mane of hair looked non-plussed and must have been wondering why she was there. Still, having 400 million viewers must help you feel worthwhile. And as a last resort there’s always the fabulous Nathan & one of his Good Morning makeovers.

It's been a hip hop-heavy week. Wednesday saw Philly's finest The Roots hit the stage at the St James for a two hour jam, and the weekend brought the Aotearoa hip hop Summit back to Auckland for the third time in its four year history.

The Roots first came to attention during a spell in the UK but have taken a while longer to connect with an audience on their home turf. After stellar performances from King Kapisi, Scribe and Verse Two, the seven-piece Roots bounced onto the stage and jumped into a bunch of old school classics - tunes played by DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash way back at the dawn of hip hop in mid-70's New York.

The full speed bongo-fuelled medley showed that The Roots had no intention of slowly warming up. They grooved through a blend of their own songs and more classics. One started out as Soul Makossa, shifted into The Roots, then back to Soul Makossa again. A spectacular medley jumped from Prince's 'When Doves Cry' to the Kinks' 'All day and all of the night' to Salt'n'Pepa's 'Push it'. These guys played their asses off. The Roots ain't nothing but a party.

There were the obligatory solo pieces, with the drummer ?uestlove (real name) and the percussionist switching spots and assaulting the drum kit. The bass player pulled out a demented psychedelic solo that ended up on some old school and The Commodores' 'Brick house'. Earlier in the day, as a guest on Slave and Otis's bFM Drive radio show, ?uestlove was astonished to discover that the Commodores' bass player Ronald LaPread lived in Auckland. Slave put out a call to Ronald inviting him along to that night's show and ?uestlove put his name on the guest list. Both guitarists got solo spots. One did a huge Hendrix noisefest and the other - a very fly-looking cat dressed like Sly Stone - played it cool and crooned to the ladies.

The Roots finished off their set with a few more name drops before the MC dedicated the final song to the ladies, inviting them backstage after the show for a meet and greet. He was also thoughtful enough to mention the name of the hotel where the band were staying, just in case. After the final song, the members stood at the front of stage to shake hands with the crowd. Nice fellas.

The night was marred somewhat by an appalling sound mix that meant the warmth and energy coming off the stage was very poorly translated. The funky Roots' sound was reduced to something harsh and brittle and the MC's rapping was sometimes impossible to hear. Perhaps the PA had been tuned to suit the White Stripes, who played at the same venue the previous night. Two-piece rock is not the same as seven-piece hip hop.

The fourth annual Aotearoa hip hop Summit kicked off on Friday night with live performances, the ITF DJ championship finals and a B-boy invitational battle. The DJ champs came down to a head-to-head battle between DJ CXL and last year's winner Manchoo, who pulled one out of the bag and won it.

The B-boy battle was a series of full-on dance duels between a number of very agile young men who threw their bodies around in a funky fashion.

There were live performances from locals Hamofide (starting with the Honeypuffs jingle, replacing "honeypuffs" with "Hamofide"); DJ Raw and the Footsouljahs crew from Welli; Mareko; and UK guest DJs the Mixologists. The highlight was an MC called Tha Feelstyle who guested with DJ Raw to drop in a rap in Samoan - very cool. Watch out for this cat.

Hats off to the Footsouljahs crew for some fine guest spots, including man of the moment (number one single in the country, third week running) Scribe. Their dramatic announcement ("We've got a surprise for you - Che Fu!") didn't quite come off when Che didn't make it out on stage. "Ah, Che aint here," the MC announced, "but we got another song for you." Nice recovery.

Saturday was Disrupt The System - graffiti artists doing their thang live in Aotea Square with live performances from up and coming MCs and DJs.

Controversy surrounded this year's event. The Auckland City Council recently passed a resolution demanding that any Council funding of hip hop related events must be dependent on the graffiti artists involved denouncing graffiti vandalism - a ludicrous suggestion. The Summit organisers refused to sign any such agreement and withdrew their funding application. It's not difficult to tell the difference between graffiti art and tagging. One requires skill and talent; the other is scribbling your name. Yet more evidence why you should vote at the next Auckland City elections.

Many of the live acts at the Summit were plugging upcoming CD releases - an indication of the vibrancy of the local scene. High profile releases include King Kapisi, Scribe, Mareko and PMoney. MC Lucia served up some tasty diva/MC styles from her forthcoming album. MC Wordperfect let rip with some good party tunes aided by Kapisi (his album is called Spellcheck). Welli crew GND delivered some lively tunes, highlighting MC Kyla (arguably the hottest female MC in the country) and human beatbox Dougie B (the dude in the Telecom ad).

No Artifical Flavours made a late appearance after being rescheduled from earlier in the day due tp technical difficulties. Taaz, their MC, introduced his DJ, Manchoo, to fill in "while we race home to get a CD - that's called keeping it hori."

The Summit's final event was the Saturday Nite Summit Jam with special guest DJ Jazzy Jeff.

First act Dei Hamo have been floating round the scene for a while. They were very entertaining, right down to getting the ladies up on stage to help them shake it. The Dawn Raid showcase consisted of four of the label's acts accompanied by a 20-strong posse of dancers. A friend commented to me that when the Deceptikonz preformed 'Stop drop and roll' complete with hand movements (and the posse joined in) it looked like a school musical.

Pop rap outfit Nesian Mystic followed. The young girlies loved them but they seemed a bit lightweight in context. Scribe strolled onto the stage rhyming "How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any..." Hats off to the C4 presenter who thought Scribe was saying "Not many, Aunt Fanny...". The place went crazy. He closed with 'Stand Up', a second track from his forthcoming album, and crazy cheering. The songs in between made only a minor impact on the crowd. It was probably lack of familiarity but that won't be a problem for too long, methinks.

And then on came Jazzy Jeff. No Fresh Prince in tow but he did have MC Pauly Yamz who hyped up the crowd while Jeff dropped some party classics. He even reached into his bag for 'Summertime' at the close of the set.

It's amazing how many times you can hear the phrase "make some noise for" in one weekend. Hats of to MC Slave for remorselessly working the crowd and nice distribution of the free sh*t ('cause free sh*t is good sh*t, like Slave says).

The Summit will be back next year, though probably in a greatly reduced format. Sponsorship is reportedly hard to come by because corporates don't seem to get it. It seems a shame that the premiere event on the local hip hop calendar is set to shrink at a time when there's so much strong talent rising to the surface. Anyone out there got deep pockets?

Tourism Waikato's Lynda Keene is clearly from the philosophical school of marketing.

"There's a lot of Kiwis out there who do whinge about a whole bunch of things, but they need to take their glasses off - we live in paradise here. My guess is that most people who are unhappy with New Zealand haven't travelled around the world that much."

Keene was responding to a Waikato Times enquiry about why we came 15th in a four-yearly survey that analyses happiness levels in 65 countries.

I have to disagree with Ms Keene. My theory is that some of the people least happy with New Zealand are those who have seen what the rest of the world offers and wonder why we can't have some of that good stuff.

While I spent half my holiday, a 10-city romp through the bars and restaurants and trains of Europe and New York, singing the praises of these pleasant isles, the other half was taken up getting mildly pissed off at what we haven't got - and debating Darkiegate. We finally have something to thank Holmes for: a new term of mock abuse.

The jetlag is still fogging my head, along with a cold bug picked up on that last painful leg from LA, but the questions are ringing in my ears like tinnitus.

Fact is, we do live in a paradise. Of sorts. The general quality of life is good. We're blessed with a beautiful natural environment. We have enough milk fat to afford a decent health system, some social support, clean public toilets. We have no real slums. There are thankfully no suicide bombers, few beggars (though the down-and-outs in France and Spain often either have better musical skill or the cutest families of dogs and cats), no overpopulation, reasonable race relations, foreshore aside (though it's perturbing to hear a to-the-core aging greenie drumming up support of anti-GM signatures in, of all places, Bath say "Gosh, aren't there a lot of Asians in Auckland now?")

Perhaps we need to be slightly more like Australia, as Russell Brown's correspondent suggests, but I'd rather our cities borrowed more from Europe. Truth is, it's often the boring, petty, everyday irritations that decide whether we are personally happy or grumpy.

1. Why has Auckland no underground train system?

2. Or night buses?

3. Why do we have a third-world train system that doesn't go many places we would want or run on Sundays?

4. Why must people pay to walk over the harbour bridge, and there's no cycle or train link across it?

5. Ring roads are a mixed blessing, but when will ours be finished?

6. How, when Auckland is busting at the seams, can the motorway link between Albany and Puhoi have dropped down the list of roading priorities?

7. Why wasn't a train track laid next to it?

8. Why is urban parkland in places like New York and Paris so aggressively protected and expanded? (Central Park 341 hectares, One Tree Hill, Cornwall Park, Domain 200 hectares)

9. Where are all our public urban spaces, and just where does that subdivision reserves levy go? (A Regional Open Space Strategy has just been published. Say hello to ROSS before December 19 here.)

10. Where is all our public art?

11. How come you can buy a fixed-price lunch in Spain for $15 that includes bread, two proper courses and wine?

12. Why do people not want to have a permanent job as a waiter?

13. Why are there no more drunks in Paris than NZ cities when you can buy (admittedly bad) wine for $1.50 a bottle?

14. Speaking of which, why can young Europeans just sit on one beer or wine for ages?

15. Why doesn't Auckland institute a siesta regime in the summer?

16. Why did it surprise me that it cost no more to buy a high couture shirt in Europe for the same price than a serious NZ brand shirt?

17. Why, when there are six in Australia, is there no Ikea here, or, given its 1000 shops, a Zara or two?

18. Why have we allowed so many of our large companies to be owned by foreigners?

19. Why are our newspapers and TV still so lame?

20. Is northern Europe becoming so expensive that the traditional OE will die as young professionals refuse to live like students?

It's not often you might have been in the company of a spy, or even a suspected one, but a recent promo on BBC World for Dreamspaces, a series about modern architecture and contemporary design, took me back to when I was.

The promo features Marco Polo House in Battersea, where I worked for a couple of years at The Observer, and which has a stunning grey-and-white stripped exterior with sort of Egyptian styling.

It was certainly flash and stood out like dogs' balls from the surrounding brick and stone buildings. From one side it afforded fantastic views of the Battersea Power Station, the austere, somewhat unsettling four-chimneyed art deco building on the Thames that featured on the Pink Floyd album Animals. It was also across the road from the lovely Battersea Park where we'd sometimes eat lunch.

The inside sported an atrium and lots of huge green and silver metal piping, plus glass lifts, but I can tell you that it wasn't really a dreamspace to work in: pretty much like any other office really, although from where I worked we could look into the atrium of neighbouring BSkyB (now just Sky and no longer there) and see a Dalek. They're bigger than you'd think and actually kind of scary despite the fact that they couldn't possibly go up steps.

The atrium in The Observer used to drive the subeditors mad - someone must have thought it was a good idea to put the subs under a glass roof, but anyone who uses a computer will tell you otherwise. They had to shield their machines from the light and the heat (it was boiling on a sunny day) and wear sunhats.

The interior was often used as a film location - a couple of thrillers about journalists and a Red Dwarf episode - and set designers would create their idea of what a newspaper newsroom or magazine looks like which, of course, is nothing like the real thing.

I worked as a production assistant for a magazine that was published within the building - Money Observer. I got in by default really, after being sent there as a secretarial temp, and because it was really only half a job, ended up helping with the magazine. When the real production assistant left, I was the natural replacement.

New Zealanders might tell you about the class-ridden nature of working environments in the UK; it was certainly true of The Observer. Columnist Simon Hoggart, who'd written so brilliantly from America, turned out to be quite snobby. His UK columns weren't nearly as insightful and he even once dissed Bob Marley's version of "I Shot the Sheriff", clearly having no understanding of the political nature of the song.

The photographer Jane Bown turned out to be pretty hoity as well. She takes amazing portraits (and is still doing so, check this story where Luke Dodd describes going with Jane to this year's Glastonbury), and is particularly famous for a portrait of Samuel Beckett, which is one of only three frames the curmudgeonly Beckett allowed her to snap. When I sat near her one day in The Observer café she kept on talking about "getting a New Zealand girl in". To do what, I wondered. It seemed to be a thing with the well-heeled that you get a girl in to do stuff for you.

I was reminded about all this when I saw the building on TV- it was an interesting time for sure. One thing about working as a journalist, or even on the periphery as I was, is that sense of being close to history unfolding. While I was at The Observer a freelance journalist there, an Iranian called Farzad Bazoft, was arrested in Iraq in 1989 and subsequently executed after shocking footage of him, looking beaten and confused, appeared on the news.

The Iraqis said he was a spy and I must admit he didn't seem to be much of a journalist. He would often come up to Money Observer and get one of the journos there to rewrite his stories. Then again, it didn't seem like he'd be much of a spy either.

After he was hanged, on the orders of Saddam himself, some of The Observer staff went down to the Iraqi embassy for a bit of a silent protest outside. We had to be well back behind the barriers, and there was talk of the incident in 1984 where a policewoman was shot from within the Libyan embassy. Could someone poke a gun out of one of the windows, we wondered, and have a pop at us?

The most fascinating part of the protest was the day the editor Donald Trelford turned up. It was all stage-managed by Observer journalists: photographers had been informed of his presence and were swarming outside the barriers, some with small stepladders, and when Trelford appeared, Observer journalists behind him raised placards so that he was surrounded by Farzad's face - click, click, click, there was tomorrow's picture.

It's kinda nice that to know that, 13 years after Farzad's murder, he's been cleared. The man who interrogated him was tracked down by The Observer to Nasiriyah and had this to say. If you want to know more about journos on the front line, the International Federation of Journalists has a comprehensive website.