Speaker by Various Artists

The automated tour guide at the top of the Empire State Building in New York tells the story of a rescue worker at Ground Zero days after the terrorist attacks five years ago. The worker saw in a glance that no-one could have survived the buildings' collapse. Still, he dug and hunted through the rubble. What was he looking for? According to the Empire State audioguide, he realized later he had been looking for his freedom.

It's the kind of sentiment likely to resurface on the fifth anniversary of the attacks that killed close to 3000 people. In the week before the anniversary newspapers have been plucking out every angle they can. The Village Voice critiques former mayor Rudi Giuliani's performance on the day. The commuter paper AM talks to some of the estimated 80,000 New York Muslims aged 6-18 to find out how it's been "coming of age after 9/11". Business pages look at the way the tragedy has been marketed, as increased sales in comfort food, anti-anxiety pills, cosmetic surgery and cozy fireplaces have all been attributed to a new national psyche post-September 11.

Academic and author of The Selling of 9/11: How a national tragedy became a commodity, Dana Heller, is quoted as saying "9/11 became part of our consumer culture, and on one hand I found that difficult and disturbing. On the other hand, I saw it as part of a long tradition in our history, as a genuine process of grieving."

At the White House, President Bush has been making a series of speeches defending his administration's war on terror, trying to stir from the ashes some God Defend Americanism before the November mid-term elections.

One way or another, Americans are again searching for meaning in the horror of that day, loading it with every kind of psychological, social and political sentiment.

It's a search that many tourists to New York make every day. Ground Zero must be one of the most visited sites in the city. Although it's hardly mentioned in the tourist guides - what would you list it under, "sightseeing", "attraction"? - hundreds were gathered there last week when I wandered down. There's a Japanese film crew, an Indian family, Spanish teenagers and many Americans. The crowd is mostly quiet and subdued; the respectful hush of a cemetery. You can see in their eyes that they've come looking for some emotional connection and understanding. They know something important happened here and want to see it with their own eyes.

What they find is a hole in the ground. The only thing to see is what isn't there. There is a sense of something missing ? a space in a city with all too few spaces, an emptiness even. But in truth that emptiness comes from knowledge brought with you, the unforgettable images of planes hitting skyscrapers. If you somehow knew nothing of what happened there, Ground Zero would look like nothing more than a building site, with high wire fences, wheelbarrows and labourers.

That is, except for the photos and a timeline of events on September 11, 2001 lining the fence. The most striking picture is of a crowd on a street corner looking up at the World Trade Centre. There's no caption as to what they're seeing ? perhaps a plane hitting, people jumping, or a tower collapsing. You don't see the towers in the photo, but you know the kind of things they're seeing, because you've seen the footage. Their faces burn. But theyre all different. One is of eye-popping horror, one of denial. One man wears the kind of expression you make when you see someone take a punch.

The other photos recall the day - survivors covered in dust, police officers and firefighters helping injured people, the tears of New Yorkers - and the buildings, with pictures of the World Trade Centre while it still stood. What you don't see is the thing itself. Notably, there's no photo of the planes hitting towers.

The only other "sight" for the crowds to see is the list of the names of those innocents who died in 2001. The list's title labels them "heroes". And that's one of the problems faced by visitors to Ground Zero, and America generally - when you come seeking meaning and find only a hole, it's all too easy fill that hole with myth and sentiment.

Not far away, up on Broadway, Alan Bennett's Tony Award-winning play The History Boys neatly sums up what's going on. One of the teachers, although talking about World War One, observes that the best way to start forgetting something is to start commemorating it.

Forced to look at nothing, the tourists don't know quite how to behave. Some, of course, break down. There?s the old man dressed all in red, white and blue with a kitchen clock hung around his neck and the young conspiracy peddler declaiming loudly that everyone should "learn the facts".

But many revert to tourist mode. They pose for photos in front of the emptiness, grinning. They line up for photographs beside the subway sign - the only sign that still says World Trade Center. The Indian family, three generations full, gathers before the photos on the fence for series of family snaps.

There's more meaning up the road at St Paul's chapel, which became a shrine, drop-in centre and meeting point after the attack. A memorial altar groans beneath pictures of the dead. A series of displays recall the "missing" posters in the days after and the 15,000 teddy bears that arrived from around the world for New York kids, the 1000 massage therapists who donated time to relieve the rescue workers' physical aches and the many church members who helped ease their emotional ones. The church put 15-foot canvasses at their gate for passers-by to write on. In just the first six months 400 were filled.

But the one available to write on last week was dominated by bald "God Bless Americas". Five years on, it seems the questions posed by the attacks are often being answered by nothing more than patriotism.

As I stood at Ground Zero looking for understanding like everyone else, I realized I was looking in the wrong place. That hole in the ground is a result, not a cause. The answers are waiting to be found in Mecca and Gaza, in Washington and Jerusalem, in the beliefs of Muslims - Sunni and Shia, moderate and fundamentalist.

At the time I was living in a bedsit in Dunedin. Space was at a premium, and I’d put the TV on my bedside table. Then I fell asleep with it on. It was September 10th 2001.

When I awoke with a splutter at 6am the next morning, I didn’t laugh or cry. I don’t know anyone who laughed and I frankly don’t believe anybody in the civilized world did, however often they insist the contrary. And tears simply didn’t occur to me at the time. My first thought was “Man, that’s cool footage.” It was only six hours later, while I lunched with two computer jocks who had suddenly and unaccountably acquired incisive knowledge of suicide psychology, Islam, aviation technology, civil defense, structural engineering and international law, that it occurred to me that we were dealing with anything of widespread social import.

The 9/11 attacks were atrocities. That is, they were atrocious. Five years of minute examination by the entire population of the world has not diminished the fact that their definitive quality was their deplorably high degree of atrociousness. This point unites John Howard, freshly ground-strafed Afghan peasants, the Prince of Wales and the Christchurch peace activist who wore a balaclava while I interviewed him because he didn’t want the CIA to have his face on file.

Indeed, the only statement more common than “9/11 was an atrocity” is “9/11 was an atrocity but…” The ‘but’ is usually a hinge by which some piss-ant can use the attack as an anthill to piss from – “but they deserved it”, “but they should have foreseen it”, “but it was mostly just stupid Americans, ha ha ha” Speaking as a piss-ant myself, therefore, I feel justified in using the idiom to point out something that the last half-decade has made startlingly apparent. 9/11 was an atrocity, but it was also an atrocious failure.

Five years on it’s easy to forget al-Qaeda’s statements after the attacks – “We didn’t do it and watch out or we’ll do it again.” They were full of warnings about how there was worse to come and that America and its allies would soon fall before a wave of righteous violence. This hasn’t happened. Western civilization in general, and America in particular, endures. Children play. Students study. Petroleum flows, at least for the moment. Media culture remains wholly pluralistic; diatribes by Fox News scriptwriters and book-length tantrums by anti-American crybabies are openly sold, often from the same shelf, while Team America sits in the DVD section brilliantly deflating both. The Patriot Act sounds scary, but you’ll notice the Dixie Chicks lost audience goodwill, not their citizenship, liberty, lives or even record deals. The maelstrom of blood and fire al-Qaeda warned us about has turned out to consist of various mawkish stand-up routines about how having your nail scissors confiscated at the airport is annoying. This is not a weakened, frightened or damaged society.

Nor are we a world at war. In a world at war, pretty much everybody’s boyfriend heads to the battlefront and a noticeable proportion of them don’t come back. In a world at war, the economies of continents are re-organised to keep the troops supplied, people dig air raid shelters in their backyards, peaceniks are ignored rather than interviewed and cities, rather than buildings, get demolished. In a world at war, there is no wriggle room for civilians or even civil society. This situation occurred within living memory and was inconvenient for all concerned. It will take more than an act of human sacrifice by frustrated ideological throwbacks to make it happen again.

That said, Osama bin Laden often finds himself compared to the guy who brought it about – Adolf Hitler. And the comparison makes sense insofar as both men can also be characterized, ultimately, as retrograde ideologues working out their frustrations through idiotically self-destructive outrages. But Hitler, despite his lack of ideological discipline, knew not to give it all up in one hit. He fought for six years, managing not only to conquer Europe and become the defining factor in the lives of a billion people, but to lose it all again and get Germany destroyed and then, most productively or all, commit suicide. bin Laden, by comparison, has fought for three or four widely-separated days, inspired numerous people to commit suicide and accomplished almost nothing.

9/11 did provoke the War On Terror. Here pundits have a point when they say America ignored the Arab world for too long. This conflict was long overdue and has become all the more difficult as a result. But this in itself has not advanced al-Qaeda’s agenda or made things easier for them. There’s a school of thought that holds that al-Qaeda is less about fighting America than it is about fighting moderate Islam, and the way the War On Terror has panned out backs that up. If we discount the awful – but, in military terms, marginal – attacks on London and Madrid, al-Qaeda has fought its nasty little excuse for a war in Islamic countries, chiefly the countries Rumsfeld always said they’d be in anyway. And they’re not exactly prospering there either. I notice, for example, that it’s not Marines or members of the Iraqi Security Forces who’re hiding behind masks and websites, making their press releases from basements and having their weapons smuggled in through tunnels under the closed border with Syria. Meanwhile anyone with any doubts about who has the moral high ground in the War On Terror might want to ask a leader of one of Iraq’s blackly comic lolly scramble of insurgent groups when he plans to investigate allegations that his agents killed or mistreated Iraqi civilians.

The War On Terror will, of course, be a long-term thing. Contrary to popular truism, Bush never suggested otherwise. But five years in, while things haven’t gone according to plan – name me a war that has – its progress is interesting to reflect on. The Taliban haven’t been rubbed out, but they’re back where they belong, scampering around in the hills fretting over how many bullets they have left, while someone connected to the real world runs Kabul. The Iraqis got to choose their own path. Sadly that path involved a harebrained sectarian conflict likely to destabilize the country for years yet. It’s hard to see how that’s America’s fault, but hopefully they’ll stick around and help to sort it out. And besides, Iraq, troubled and uncertain, functions. Elections were held. A government was eventually formed. And a country ‘consumed’ by civil war would not have time to go to the international community and, without even any help from Bob Geldof, successfully negotiate a massive debt-relief deal.

Meanwhile the public’s frankly morbid fascination with the war has provoked a hopelessly muddled public attitude towards the media. Last February I sat behind an American scholar at a conference presentation about political spin in ancient Rome. During the Q&A, he got up, complained with little introduction that because of spin he didn’t know anything about Iraq, then spouted a headache-inducing flurry of awful statistics about the war. Where’d he learn that? If Bush exercises Machiavellian control over the world’s media, why is the news from Iraq is always so bloody horrible? Partly, obviously, it’s because some bloody horrible stuff is happening there at the moment. Partly, though, I suspect it’s because muckrakers are basically just people. Chronicle something as serious and important as a war and you might avoid bias and misinformation, but you probably wouldn’t be able to avoid thinking of yourself as serious and important too. You’d feel a serious, important obligation to your serious viewers and important readers. And as such, you’d obviously have to use serious, important expressions, expressions like ‘massacre’, ‘escalating’, ‘innocent victims’ and ‘Vietnam’. But just try working them into a story about legislative debates.

And while Iraq’s organized crime syndicates provide John Campbell and Robert Fisk with a steady stream of things to sound serious and important about, their sympathizers and suppliers have lost traction across the Islamic world. Egypt has finally held elections worthy of the name. After seeing what Bush was actually prepared to do about nitwits trying to get nukes, Libya flushed its uranium and promised to play nicely. The military occupation that allowed Ba’athist Syria to play Lebanon like a violin for two decades was ended via popular referendum; one might just hope that those Ba’athists themselves do the same before America hits its real targets in Damascus. And recent activities by their patsies Hezbollah has provided useful intelligence on what Iran’s nuclear ambitions amount to . There are some notable exceptions – Somalia is one, Palestine another – but the most unsexy point about this most unsexy of wars is that we are winning.

The fact a lot of people refuse to believe this stems, I think, from the pre-existing idiocies that got me interested in the first place. To a large proportion of the population, especially those who, like me, were born between about 1975 and 1985, 9/11 had recognizable symbolic power. Pulp messiahs from ET to Peter Jackson primed us for insightful young outlaws outsmarting and overturning an overarching establishment, and here it was, we hoped, in real life. We loved it. It was “I don’t like McDonalds” with better special effects. Ever since, we’ve dedicated more intellectual and emotional energy to examination of the attack and its consequences than any other pursuit except getting laid.

That’s hardly surprising. Consider how much the generation of ‘Creep’, ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ and ‘I’m Not Okay’ enjoys bleating about how nobody understands us. Every one of us, without evident exception, is on the lookout for some way to demonstrate that we’re something more complicated than an unexceptional, chubby, cash-strapped, twenty-something suburbanite with bad eating habits and inappropriate designs on a classmate . The War On Terror ranked alongside Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar as an opportunity to do so. Being able to point to footage of dead Iraqis while sniveling about how awful life is has been tremendous and edifying fun. Even compared to taking Marilyn Manson seriously, however, loudly declaiming the War On Terror and suggesting that 9/11 was somehow justified is an obnoxious and unconvincing way of demonstrating personal depth. Anyone who’s ever thought about this, rather than just blogged about it, knows that the battle for solemnity must be fought within. Our alienation is real, it hurts, and it’s a product of many things – ridiculous expectations of adulthood, infantile self-mythology, unconscionable sexual license, booze, the irresponsible shit who walked out on Mum. Claiming it’s a product of the War On Terror is just emo with a minor in POLS.

Perhaps this was Osama bin Laden’s intention – get us to stick our noses so deeply into Fahrenheit 9/11 that we won’t notice when he fulfills his own preposterous daydream of moving into the royal palace in Saudi Arabia. If so, he may have had one strategic victory. For every deluded patsy he’s got wearing a suicide harness, he’s got five of my idiot friends, classmates, colleagues and siblings wearing an I Hate America-type badge. The most noticeable downstream effect 9/11 had on my life was send my generation and its attendant aging hipsters – Rammstein, Te Radar, Helen – into a sustained fit of petulant, vapid, pointless self-dramatization from which a lot of us will probably never recover. Dispiriting and tiresome as that is, however, it’s a hollow victory. As whinging young idiots have been saying for fifty years now, nobody listens to us.

During the Reagan Administration, hawkish Americans coined a highly unofficial slogan – “he who fucks with the eagle best learn how to fly.” Twenty years later, and five years after 9/11, this has never been more true. Osama wanted to fuck with the eagle, so he sent some guys to learn to fly. They did something disgusting. But rather than changing the world, subsequent events reinforced existing truths. Losers don’t flinch from long, difficult, probably intergenerational tasks such as rooting out unacceptable, stupid criminal activity in the sillier parts of the world. And winners don’t hijack aeroplanes. Winners have an air force.

When it comes to computer games, I’m a member of an odd and seemingly very small age cohort – too young to remember Pac-Man, old enough to know where World Of Warcraft stole its ideas from. I grew up playing on computers, but I’m old enough to never have entirely accepted such play as a significant cultural property. In fact I don’t think I’ve played a new one since Quake. And that, in turn, is probably largely responsible for my position on the pulp literature that’s sprung up around the games – sympathetic enough to see the point of Alien Versus Predator, critical enough to know that there has never to date been a properly good movie based on a computer game.

It was in that spirit that I bought my ticket for Silent Hill, which is based on a game I’ve not heard of. One guy I know says it’s “cool”. His girlfriend says it’s “just awful”. In any the case, the adaptation doesn’t feel like a video-game movie at all to start with. It felt more like an M. Night Shyamalan movie; a couple are having trouble with their adopted daughter, who’s sleepwalking and drawing scary pictures. So after Googling her mumblings, the mum finds out it’s the name of the town where the kid was born and takes her there. Sensible enough.

It turns out that Silent Hill is a ghost town evacuated after the coal seam under it caught fire (a fate presumably copied from that of the real-life Pennsylvania mining town Centralia). The place is abandoned and there’s this constant rain of ash. As they’re exploring the daughter disappears. Then the zombies show up. There follows a considerable amount of roaring and shrieking before Mum and her incongruous policewoman sidekick discover the townspeople. Then things really turn to custard.

I don’t mean things get worse for the characters – except for Dad, Sean Bean, charging around outside town in an entirely superfluous parallel narrative. But this is where things stop making sense. The inhabitants of Silent Hill are god-fearing, witch-hunting ingrates intent on roasting passerby over a fire in the church. That’s fine, but what does that have to do with the first bit? These guys have rigged up a siren to warn themselves of the wedge-headed, cleaver-wielding ogre who seems to be leading the zombies, but that’s where any connection seems to end. For much of the rest of the movie we’re batted at random between three sets of villains – zombies, god-botherers and the standard horror-movie-issue creepy little girl – not quite interested enough to wonder exactly how they fit together.

I like to think I have some patience for inane nonsense. I subscribe to livejournal.com. I eventually worked out that Deep Space Nine was a soap opera in space. I’ve marked undergraduate university essays. But I didn’t have the patience to keep track of Silent Hill's inordinately silly supernatural conspiracy. The belated explanation offers some ill-defined twaddle about a definitive historical atrocity, but nothing about the zombies, parallel dimensions or mewling anthropomorphic cockroaches. Computer games have come a long way in the last decade in some departments, but not plot. Exactly this problem – the plot of a game not sustaining its visual conceits on the big screen – sank Super Mario Brothers, arguably the first ever video-game movie. It’s not a problem unique to the genre, I appreciate, but it is characteristic of them, and Silent Hill is an example. It amounts to a heap of random, disjoined, re-write-esque gimcrackery sillier than any I’ve seen since Gladiator. In time even the writers give up and send us back to the church for a blood-soaked climax based on exposure of what little of the conspiracy they seem to understand themselves.

As a supporting character wades through ankle-deep human offal spitting curses at the witch-hunters, however, certain coherencies about this movie do begin to become apparent. The long history of abuse doings is, of course, a gothic trope, and forgiving the fact that Silent Hill’s isn’t remotely credible, it certainly has one. And depicting small-town hicks as foolish, tradition-bound loonies is a touchstone of American tradition going back as far as “The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow”. What’s interesting is that the ultimate villain here, the one the writers want dead, is the fire-and-brimstone Christian ringleader. Perhaps this is a reflection of current societal hang-ups – perhaps her bloodthirsty diatribes are what agnostic Californian scriptwriters think of when George Bush dares to use the term ‘prayer’ in public discourse. Perhaps Americans just need to get over the Salem witch trials. I don’t know. Just don’t tell me that a movie whose climax involves the destruction of a lay preacher in preference to a horde of zombies comes from a society ‘controlled’ by the Christian Right.

Silent Hill is the kind of drivel that makes one think fondly of the solidly-argued narrative integrity of Snakes On A Plane. It’s an abject reminder of the fact that the set-up for a piece of interactive fiction like a video game doesn’t necessarily stack up for something like a movie. You needn’t bother with it. And if the makers of this can’t decide what game to film next, I suggest Solitaire.

We like Shayne Carter and his music, so we thought it would be nice to post some audio commentary he recorded for the new Dimmer album, There My Dear. The commentaries cover the first four tracks of the album, and they are MP3 files of less than 3MB each. You won't hear them anywhere else on the Internet.

The first track is uploaded as the audio for this post. There's also Track 2, Track 3 and Track 4 to wrap your ears around.

And just to make it a total Shaynefest - a veritable Carterpalooza - below is something he wrote for his MySpace blog, on his favourite music. He's all MySpacey and down-with-the-kids and all with his no-capital-letters thing, and frankly, given that the record company's not evening paying us for this shit, we couldn't be bothered changing it into grown-up spelling.

Enjoy …
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i have time on my hands … so i am now going to write 1000s and 1000s of words on some of my favourite music which will probably take me 'til next month. you're probably not interested but it's my blog and i can write whatever the hell i want. besides -it gives me something to do today . i like writing. i like music too. it is a balm for the soul.

so in ipodic alphabetical order - this is some stuff i have occasionally thought...make of it what you will.....

10cc - "I'm Not In love" - this really is one of the great obsessional/denial tunes. it is also 6 minutes 4 seconds long. i've ripped off the stacked harmonies on a tune called "i won't let you break my heart again" from the forthcoming dimmer album - or should that be "alluded to". i like the woman with the speech impediment who does the "big boys don't cry " bit in the middle. she's so teasing and superior - just how we like 'em ....apparently ..

Al Green - Al's autobiography "take me to the river" is a really great read. you can hear the preacher in him. "simply beautiful" is one of the sexiest songs ever. al knew you didn't always have to blaze on the mike. singing quietly means there's more places for you to go. i really love the caught between heaven and hell vibe of the "belle" album that he did after his 'boiling grits' incident . "belle", "georgia boy" and "dream" are all top tunes.

Alice Coltrane - "journey to satchidananda" is a beautiful album. sitars, harps, sleighbells and pharoah saunders all slow burning and dreamy. alice coltrane suffered from the yoko ono syndrome in that she was dissed by the critical "establishment" for having a famous husband and for actually having the audacity to be a coloured woman with something to say . but that's only because so many critics are misogynistic and fucking stupid. i'd say the last laugh goes to alice.

Angelo Badalamenti - The soundtracks he did for that david lynch stuff. music that's kind of like the aural equivalent of that opening shot in "mullholland drive " - red tail lights flickering woozily in the gloomy near distance. ..

Aphex Twin - i would say this guy is one of the few true geniuses to emerge from that whole electronic movement. it's not easy doing music that can range from meditative ambience right thru to complete obnoxiousness - but that's what he did . i'd say my two favourites would be the "richard d james album" and the "come to daddy' ep. the "little lord faulteroy" mix of "come to daddy" kind of sums him up for me. it is completely fucked up, kind of worrying, yet you can still tap your toe(s) along to it. the videos for "come to daddy" and "windowlicker" are top too..

Arthur B Rubenstein - this is the soundtrack for "blue thunder", that roy schneider helicoptor cop movie from the 80's, which is probably a far better encapsulation of the coldness and alienation of l.a than something like "heat" could ever hope to be. ("the long goodbye' with elliot gould is a far better l.a movie than "heat' too. so is "chinatown".) but you can hear the chooka chooka whirl of rotor blades all thru this.

Autechre - one of their really early tunes "second bad vibe' was the one that really made me realise something was afoot with this electronic stuff. they made records that actually Tried Something which is a rarer quality than you'd think. even if their later records did become kind of these unfathomable exercises in completely rooted mathematics, i admired their invention, their bravery and the made up words they employed for album titles.

Basehead - this guy made a really great, overlooked album in the early 90's called "playing with toys". slacker guitar over basic hip hop beats and these mumbly vocals that could barely be bothered trying. basehead tells stories that don't involve much beyond drinking beer, smoking pot and hanging out with your equally sex deprived loser mates. it makes it sound like a really cool thing to do.

Beatles - it goes without saying that i am a lennon man. george wrote "something" and you can't sneer at that. macartney played brilliant bass and he also wrote some great tunes but i could never bear his rooty--toot -toot music hall shit like "ob le da" and "maxwells silver hammer" . it was like he was trying to prove some point about "range" in "songwriting" and the "timelessness" of it all. "helter skelter" is blistering but it's also contrived like he decided he needed to write a song like that. lennon always sounded like he just sat down and did it.

Beethoven - "moonlight sonata" is one of the saddest and most unbearably poignant pieces of music i've ever heard - i can hardly bear to listen to it.. i can't read music but someone who can once showed it to me on piano. it killed me that someone's soul can be transcribed and linger on and resonate like that 100's of years after the fact.

Bic Runga - i think bic's latest album is the best thing she's done. it's honest and it has depth. i sang backing vocals on it and loved the experience, especially being flanked by two pure songbirds like anika and anna. they've both got such beautiful voices even if in reality they are basically these two maori bogans.. bic is a friend and i like the way she is always staring vaguely into the middle distance and the cute way she always says "sorry". don't be sorry lil bic...

Big Star - i saw alex chilton play live once but at that stage he seemed mainly content to churn thru this kinda flat barroom boogie. but i love those completely wiped out tunes on the third album -"big black car", "kangaroo", "holocaust' , "dream lover" - timeless tunes like a broken man barely able to sweep himself off the floor.

Black Sabbath - black sabbath totally kick arse. i even like the tunes on their early records where they get it all wrong cos they're basically inventing heavy metal and as we all know all invention has to involve some doofus experiments along the way. black sabbath certainly had those but they also wrote "paranoid", "war pigs" and "sweet leaf" which are dumb but so dumb that they couldn't possibly be dumb. they're actually pretty smart.

Bo Diddley - bo diddley had one rhythm and all his songs were called "bo diddley". but it was a damn good rhythm and bo diddley is a damn good name. in fact i think i wrote somewhere else that one bar of bo diddley pretty much laid to waste an entire decade of metallica - and i would still hold this to be true. he also is the only human to make wearing a rectangular shaped guitar look cool.

Boards Of Canada - "music has the right to children" is a great record. it's mysterious and elusive and it gets you right in the guts. like a lot of the electronic artists i've liked tho' it's kinda like all the output afterwards seemed like repeats or diluted versions of what had already been . but it can't tarnish this one.

Bob Dylan - i never used to like bob dylan. my dylan joke used to be that joan baez went out with bob dylan but so did nasal whining and protest songs. but my little brother - who is 21 and a huge dylan head - played me "blood on the tracks" and "time out of mind" both of which went way beyond "folk" and both of which delivered unto me this little epiphany...

Boredoms - i saw the boredoms play live once. they were like a full on oriental head-on highway pile up. their latest album is really good.

Brian Eno - all of eno's "vocal" albums in the early 70's rule. he always worked with great guitarists too. things like phil manzanera's work on something like "the true wheel' . i can remember i once came across this sound on my guitar involving an e-bo and filtering thru a wah pedal. i had been working that day with some stonemason friends trying to make ends meet and the sound was like the sound of the machinery we'd been using while wearing ear muffs. anyway - i thought i was really onto something but then i heard "no pussyfooting' with robert fripp and i realised just what a deluded little boy i am. i love eno's ambient stuff like "thursday afternoon" and "ikebokura" too. i fell asleep to that music for a year. it's ambient but uptight all at the same time.it's funny too - turn it up loud and it becomes totally heavy metal.

Buzzcocks - were one of my favourite bands when i was a kid. my first band, bored games, were basically buzzcocks jnr. i think the first album still sounds great and i always liked "a different kind of tension' too... songs like "i believe in' and "you say you don't love me". pete shelley was a top songwriter and one of the few people from that era to be directly influenced by can...speaking of whom..

Can - i fuckin' love can. their music is kinda like primal funk music with germanic stiff knees. holger czukay's bass change halfway thru "mother sky' is right up there as far as My Favourite Musical Moments go. "you doo right" is a monster of a song. i always loved michael karoli's guitar sound as well. keith levine from public image ltd. totally ripped that off but i love his tone too. i once sung this one dimmer tune with a vague japanese accent in tribute to damo suzuki. in various points in my career i have also sung with germanic, american and english accents tho' as i get older i can hear an increasing, and rather authentic, new zealandese seeping in..

Canned Heat - like the title says "on the road again' is one of the great all time "road" songs. voodoo,unwavering, and straight on down that long old line.

Charles Wright - and his band were this r n b/funk band from the early 70's from los angeles. N.W.A sampled their tune "express yourself" and made it famous. they had better tunes tho' like "keep saying" (which curiously was never released and only found it's way onto their greatest hits record) and "doin what comes naturally" - which is one of the all time fuck you i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do tunes. they were kinda in that otis/ sly / jb mould but rougher. it's probably what stopped them from becoming more "successful" but it's also what made them real real good.

Chris Morris - makes me laugh. he did "the day after" and "brass eye" and best of all this later series called "jam" which is black comedy that goes way beyond black- tumbling instead into this dank hole known as completely without hope . there's this skit called "unflustered parents" about these unflustered parents who are totally unconcerned about the fact that their six year old hasn't come home from school yet - after two weeks. sorry. it cracks me up.

Chris Watson - is a former member of cabaret voltaire who became a field recordist with, i think the bbc. i have a record he recorded on an african plain which is basically the sound of approaching storms with panicky animals , rain and thunder and people slopping about in the mud . it is strangely musical, strangely soothing, and...well.. strange.

Cinematic Orchestra - i really like that "everyday" album. at first it kind of drifts over you like so much of that coffee house schlop but eventually it gets in ,until one day you wake up and think "hey, that "everyday' album is kinda deep!"

Cramps - i always loved the cramps. i'm sure the cramps were one of the main reasons why me and my mate wayne elsey formed our band the doublehappys with two guitars and no bass. "psychedelic jungle" and "songs the lord taught us" - what about that song "under the wires" and the way lux interior sings "what colour panties are you wearing ?" it's way more steeped in genuine debauchery and sleaze than anything some bunch of bozos like motley crue could imagine.

Crude - is this south island chap called matt middleton. he makes pretty much an album every week and is a genuinely talented freak. he once drummed in the dimmer band early on before quitting and, i'm sure, slagging my name off all over town. but you should track his stuff down. it is jazzy/electro/hypno/low fi/unclassifiable shit. he should get out of new zealand as his ideas are probably too much for these fair and temperate isles.

Cypress Hill - i don't think i have ever listened to any of their stuff apart from that tune "illusions" which is full of pot infused dread . i like tunes full of pot infused dread.

D'Angelo - "voodoo' is also one of my favourite albums from recent years. "devils pie" roolz the school kiddleywinks. i don't care whether it takes him a million years to make each album -probably cos i appreciate the feeling. but if outkast are the sly stone of the new millenium then d'angelo is it's marvin gaye.

but that video he did for "untitled" makes me feel...well...funny...

Damned - "new rose" is one of the best punk rock tunes . it is one of the first tunes i ever learnt and what an extremely good place to start that was. i played third guitar with the d4 at some party last year and that was one of the songs we did. we had to play it over and over in the practice room ,even when our arms were dropping off, cos it was fuckin' exciting and Still Crazy after All These Years. it is basically one of those songs where you hop on at the beginning, go along for the ride and hope like fuck you can make it to the end.

David Kilgour - i have nothing but the utmost respect for my fellow dunedinite. "here come the cars" is still a classic. i can take some credit for the title track in a very obscure and tangential way. this scientist dude once gave me a bottle - i said a Bottle - of pure lsd. i couldn't even handle being in the same suburb as it, because it was like sitting on a nuclear bomb, so i gave it away. david took some and then sat in a park for two days and then wrote "here come the cars" because that was all he had pretty much been thinking all that time. david is a great guitarist, a great songwriter and a pure musical soul. that "feathers from the engine" album from a couple of years ago is really good too.

Derek And Clive - crack me up too. it's so fuckin' stupid that it is probably genius. the first two albums "live" and "come again" are best cos "get the horn" is when it all starts to get a bit sad and bitter - even if it does have great skits like "the horn" and "endangered species". i love how it's all improvised like a really great jam. i mean who'd ever bother writing that kind of stuff down ? as i said - probably genius.

Destiny's Child - i was really impressed by the fact that beyonce wrote "bootilicious". beyonce is cool. all the shoe gazey, droney bands in the universe would be hard pressed to come up with a better one note song than that.

Donna Summer - georgio moroder's production on "i feel love' is virtually the template for techno music. that tune is psychedelic, woozy and pretty much gone... much like the topic donna discusses so heartily therein..

Donny Hathaway - those fat freddy horn dudes put me onto that live album of his - the one with that version of "you've got a friend" that is oh, a zillion miles beyond old limp ass james taylor's version. it has the best audience singalong in the chorus. there's one woman who screams in pure ecstasy when the chorus kicks in - it sounds like she's pissing ,or coming, in her pants - but it is also one of the best crys of unbridled joy i have probably ever heard.

Dr Dre. - the chronic instrumentals album 2001 - all his clean, clear beats minus the talky bits. really fucking good. dre is a champion of space, economy, minimalism and all those other terms every music writer in the world filches from the thesaurus.

Dusty Springfield - "Dusty In Memphis" is fantastic. what a collection of tunes and what an amazing singer. i really love "i can't make it alone"

Ed Cake - ed's album "downtown puff" is a great album - so far ahead of all that piffy- so- what? that litters the airwaves every new zealand music month . it was the soundtrack to one of the saddest holidays i ever took. in fact a lot of this record sounds like it Should be the soundtrack to the saddest holiday you ever took. a toast to sir ed.

Elvis - if you can't dig elvis then sorry, you're sad and i don't want to talk to you. i prefer the later 'adult period' myself. has anyone looked better than he did in the 68 comeback special ? i would have kissed him - and i'm this really really Really butch guy. the memphis record is fantastic - i can even handle the schmaltzy stuff cos you can tell he really means it. i love his gospel records too cos that was the music he was genuiinely committed to - it was mummy's favourite genre don't you know ? - but i find it sad and haunting - songs of redemption and hope when he never found either. his early vegas band kicked ass too. their version of "suspicious minds" is like the apocalypse.

The Fall - mark e smith is one of my favourite sour old cunts, like that grumpy great uncle who always ruins your christmas. i really love all the early stuff like witch trials and grotesque - they were soundtracks to...sigh...my teenage years. funnily enough the fall were always a great singles band too.."totally wired", "the man who's head expanded", "lie dream of a casino soul"...

Flaming Lips - played one of the best gigs i've seen for i don't know how long at the big day out a couple of years ago. it was like being on e without being on e - ask anyone who was there. i know everyone says it but "do you realise" is a great, great tune. they really nailed something there . to that one must tip their hat forward - like this -110 degrees..

Frank Sinatra - i only recently got into frank but frank is cool - like champagne cool and martini dry. i like his lyrics and his delivery and even if he dosen't get the girl it dosen't mean he'll ever stop trying. frank is easy listening and easy to listen to. frank hangs out at cool parties where everyone is witty and knowing and decked out in tuxedos with just a slither of lemon slice on the lapel.. i like the songs where he sings to ava gardner. it's good to know that even a swell guy like frank gets his heart broke too..

Fugazi - i saw fugazi play in l.a once. we had just come from this gig by that band tool at the scientology centre and fugazi splatted big time all over that lot. dinosaur jr, nirvana (just before they blew up) and hole were all on the same bill. in fact it may even have been the gig where whatshisname met whatshername. but fugazi were brain splittingly good. they had that whole quiet/loud thing down way before everyone else hooked onto that tack. even when you knew the quiet bit was about to get loud it didn't make it any less exciting when it did. they were probably one of the best live bands i've seen.

Funkadelic - people go on about "maggot brain" but i think the first two albums "funkadelic" and "free your mind and your ass will follow" were best. they were kinda like the records they made when all the drugs were still working. the bass change in "free your mind" is probably second only to that holger czukay bass change i talked about earlier. eddie hazel was a blistering guitarist too. i really think he was floating around those same rarefied airs as hendrix.

well that is A-F and these are some of my favourite things.

tune into the next exciting instalment soon time kids !..

meantime my hands are about to fall off and the world will reach it's natural conclusion before we ever find zed.

ciao ...

A week ago I went to my book agent’s no-reason-but-anyway party at the Groucho (the first, and in many ways the least pretentious of the London media clubs) – it was a hot night, the wine was nicely chilled and the canapés were very good. Miniature smoked salmon bagels. Yum.

And there I was chatting perfectly happily to my agent and her husband and her husband’s mother and a bunch of other writers, many of whom I know well, others less well, all of us shouting to some degree as the room filled up and the alcohol flowed and we all got noisier and harder to hear. It was all very pleasant. Until …

I was talking to a man I’ve met a couple of times before. I don’t know him well, have talked a little more to his wife, they’re both writers, I always thought they were perfectly nice people. Then, halfway through something one of us was saying to the other, he interrupted either me or himself to say - "It's hard to hear your New Zealand accent, it's high-pitched ... Can you talk lower?"

As I said, it was very noisy. We were all shouting a bit. This bloke – my age, 40’s, London, (not obviously the kind of upper class twat who thinks it’s fine to tell people who aren’t like him that they’re shit), not obviously anything other than a perfectly nice enough ordinary bloke - thought it was a normal request. He didn't know he was being massively feminist-ly AND Antipodean-ly offensive.

And for the first time in all these (twenty) years living here, I made it clear. I was hurt. It was an astonishing thing to say.

It was rude. It is rude. Maybe (some) NZ women have a generally higher register than (some) UK women. And MAYBE (check it out, I think I'm right) the NZ women who are more successful in NZ TV and radio and theatre have a generally lower register than some of the rest of the NZ women, but there's something very sexist in assuming a 'deeper' voice in a woman (ie. more masculine!) is of more value and therefore easier to listen to. It happens here too, all the time. The plethora of women presenting UK TV news and docs with low Scottish accents, as opposed to a higher range Liverpool accent for example. The deep and dulcet tones of Jenni Murray who presents Radio 4’s flagship programme Woman’s Hour. All these women with lower voices than most women. Why? Because it’s better to sound less female? Because even now, in 2006, we STILL prefer male tones to female ones? Ah, that Women’s Lib was such a nice idea …

So, that’s the feminist point dealt with (we never had it, post-feminism came too soon, we’ve got a bloody long way to go yet), but what about the Antipodean one? What about being told my NZ accent is ‘hard to hear’?!

In fact, the aforementioned nice man was politely embarrassed when I pointed out how rude he was being. He didn’t mean to be, he was a bit pissed, it just came out. He thought he was being funny anyway. And in the old days I might have just gone along with him, but I'm bored with that. It's the UK. Now. I’ve been here twenty years. This country is full of accents, scores of its own and hundreds from other countries. And I know I have (according to most listeners, a good many of them who’ve heard me on the radio, which always picks up on individual foibles) a fairly middling hard-to-place accent, a bit London, a bit NZ, a bit general-Antipodean for most UK listeners, who can’t usually tell the difference between New Zealand and Australian voices anyway. (And in truth, after all this time, I get it wrong sometimes too.) I know most of my NZ mates think I sound like a poncey Englishwoman until I’ve been with them a few hours and had a few wines and my now-rounded vowels un-round themselves. It happens, voices change, I’ve been in London a long time, I live with a woman raised here, accents rub off on us.

And yet that (nice) bloke STILL thought it was OK to be have a go about an Antipodean accent when he would NEVER be rude about ... I don't know, almost any other accent (other than Texan) on the planet. Because our voices are who we are. Because my voice is ME. And that’s why it hurts when someone criticises or mocks my voice. Because it’s how we communicate on the most intimate level. We speak, we whisper, we are – hopefully - listened to and understood.

I think one of the main reasons they (the rest of the world) think it’s fine to be rude about our NZ/kiwi/Aotearoan voices is that they assume our NZ/Oz-ness means we're classless, that our voices don’t define us in terms of class or income the way they perceive theirs to do. I’ve noticed, especially in Britain and the rest of Europe (not in the US where they often still don’t know who we are!), there is an assumption that we all had Brady Bunch family lives, and our childhoods and upbringings were all sweet and simple, with a lot of spare cash for barbies thrown in. Except that certainly wasn’t my Tokoroa-in-the-70's experience, and I doubt it was the experience of very many other NZers from anywhere other than the wealthier parts of the main cities. But hey, the night after this party I had dinner with a woman from an enormously successful Sydney family who was telling us that Australia and New Zealand had "no class structure" and we’re all the same and all come from a level playing field. Yeah. Sure we do. And that probably is what you believe if you grow up with a view of Sydney harbour from your back yard. But it’s not quite how I felt when I arrived in Wellington in 1981 and was (for the first but not the last time) laughed at by the well-dressed, monied girls from Fendalton and Remuera and Khandallah for my 'kiwi' accent.

We judge, they judge, everyone does it the second any of us open our mouths. The British and mainland Europeans with their regional and class variations, and ‘at home’ with our urban/rural and Pakeha/Maori/Pacific divides. But just because we all do it, doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous, and doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. And it also doesn’t mean there isn’t still something horribly insidious about suggesting that a male northern hemisphere voice is easier to understand than a female southern one. (Yeah, that Tony Blair, rather listen to him than Helen Clark any day …)

© Stella Duffy 2006