Category: Things I’ve Seen

*** EDITED – SEE END OF ENTRY
So I’ve been listening the heck out of Shihad‘s new album, Beautiful Machine. (You can listen to much of it over on their MySpace page.) It’s good, and occasionally great, and I think over time will settle comfortably into “second best” in their album catalogue, right after the unbeatable Killjoy.
The ‘had are a funny wee band. A Welly high school metal covers band that grabbed its own sound and then never stopped evolving. Going through their catalogue and every single album debuted a new sound for them. They’ve never hit the big big time, but they make a living from their music and they’re pretty much entrenched as NZ’s favourite band. Their reputation as a live act is deservedly big. There’s apparently a band biography on the way that I’m really keen to read – squaring the circle on their many contradictions will make for some fascinating content.
So, nice album. But that isn’t what this post is about.
—
When they started out, Shihad were managed by Gerald Dwyer, himself of seminal Kiwi hard rock band Flesh D-Vice. (Is that even the right label for Flesh D-Vice’s music?) This new album reminded me of a Flesh-D-Vice oddity I’ve had sitting in my drawer for a while now.
In ’06 I picked up the hardback ‘The List of Seven’ for a couple bucks at a book sale. This is a fun riff on Sherlock Holmes and pulp action by Mark Frost, co-creator of Twin Peaks. When I went to read it, a postcard fell out of the pages.
On closer inspection, it turned out it wasn’t a commercial postcard – it was a photo that had been used as a postcard. The photo showed a wee girl wearing a hand-knitted Flesh D-Vice jersey. The postcard on the back had a Wellington 1990 postdate on it, sent by “Jennie & Ian” to “Sue and Gerald” in London. The writing mentions getting back from a Faith No More gig and that “Shihad played really well”.
(Shihad’s 1990 support for Faith No More was one of their earliest big moments.)
As I looked at this card, eventually the penny dropped – this was likely a postcard being sent to Gerald Dwyer. Why else the Shihad mention + Flesh D-Vice knit? (I tried to check out some facts – was Gerald in London at the time of Shihad’s big gig? Was Sue his partner? No luck.)
Further realisation – the book it was in as a bookmark is a ’93 release, so at the time it was being used as a bookmark it was already three years old. The photo was a keepsake for someone, and should properly be returned. But to who? I didn’t have the first idea where to look. Dwyer himself died over a decade ago. I traded a few emails with Karl from Shihad, but he couldn’t figure it.
So I now hand over to the internet. Maybe someone will Google Flesh D-Vice or “Gerald Dwyer” and find this post. Maybe a reader will know someone who knows someone – everyone knows everyone in NZ. I’ve got this photo/postcard that someone might care about, and it’s easy enough for me to pop it in an envelope.
Here’s the card (click for big version):

EDIT: The postcard has been returned to its rightful owner!

Since we were talking about Cory Doctorow the other day, I want to plug the man’s new book.
Important bit first: it’s free. You can download it in a variety of formats, including html and pdf, here. Doctorow practices what he preaches around this stuff.

What is it? It’s youth fiction with tech smarts, street savvy and one hell of a political kick, as you would expect from a conscious followup to Orwell’s 1984. Check out the blurb:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works-and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Go download it. Then read it. I’ve done the first, plan on getting to the second real soon now.
(But I’ve got the busy. Blog may fall silent for a day or two.)

I don’t get it by paying for it, nosirree. (Largely because I don’t have any money.)
I get my music now from teh bloggery*.
Pearce does a regular Friday music slot, providing mp3s of stuff as it takes his fancy.
Gareth Michael Skarka has been doing his Friday music series for years now, and there’s usually one or two tracks I’ll pull down from him each week.
Warren Ellis does his The 4AM podcast specifically to bring the new music to the huddled and adoring body-modified masses.
And just now Mike has launched a weekly MP3 feature.
The music is in abundance. The old ways are already dead, even if they don’t quite know it.
* Also from the partners of my two sisters, who regularly send odd mix CDs my way, but they aren’t webpages so I can’t share the bounty I’m afraid…

I watched The Beach on DVD a few days ago. I wasn’t expecting much. I enjoyed the throwaway pleasures of Alex Garland’s novel, but had steered clear of the film – I didn’t think the unmarked Leo DiCaprio was a good pick for limit-pushing backpacker RIchard; Danny Boyle’s ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ was unrelentingly terrible; and the bitterly ironic story that a genuine natural paradise had been wrecked by the production turned me off.
Turns out it’s quite good. The expected nadir, where DiCaprio gurns and cavorts as a live-action Super Mario character while hallucinating the video game around him, is just as ridiculous as I’d been warned, but I wasn’t ready for it to recover from this and deliver a climax that I actually found more genuine and more powerful than the one in the novel.
DiCaprio doesn’t convince as the world-weary backpacker, either, and he plays Richard as a bit of a goofus at all the wrong moments so its hard to see why all the ladies swoon over him, but in general his undoubted charisma carries him through.
The film and novel both dig around in fertile ground, the line between ‘authentic traveller and exploitative tourist. Relatively unexplored in fiction, but urgently at stake in every backpacker hostel you find on the road, where travellers play sincerely-meant status games establishing who is more authentic than who. The truth, of course, is that the traveller culture we have today inevitably changes everything it observes, just as it did when Dr Livingstone went on his journey, only faster and more profoundly. There is a profound moral dilemma in travel at this time on earth, and The Beach is a grotesque exploration of the consequences of ducking out of this dilemma; and the film version is worth a look if any of this resonates with you at all.

As a white person, of course I like The Wire, the Baltimore-set depiction of a city struggling against the drug trade and its own systemic inertia.
The show’s title is a reference to the phone taps that the police unit use to crack cases. It’s also, more importantly, a reference to the ethos of the show. The Wire is itself a wiretap, letting us listen in to the conversations that happen behind closed doors, so we can see for ourselves how the business of managing power creates our society.
Also it’s compulsive, thrilling, and often hilarious. Add it to your Netflix queue or whatever.
(Props to my brother for steering me to the Wire. Thanks Nature.)
(Please no spoilers in the comments.)

Malc has put up some amazing photos from our trip through the North Island in Jan.
A taster from my morgueatlarge email:

We set off Jan 11, stopping at the Army Museum in Waiouru before circling Mt Ruapehu and setting up camp in its shadow. It was a rare clear day, offering unfettered views of Ruapehu and its companion mountain, Tongariro. Next day we pushed up to Whangamata in the Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland. Had a lovely swim at the beach there, a wonderful golden-sand curve. Didn’t see any sharks…

Read the rest if you so desire, but the real joy is those photos.

Finished off my Writers/Readers week presence Friday night, seeing former World Bank head Joseph Stiglitz at the Michael Fowler Centre. Mostly the same old crowd – anti-globalization hippy types were thin on the ground, although Ed of Ed’s Juice Bar fame was a few rows in front of us.
After a painfully overlong introduction by the moderator (he actually got heckled by this most genteel crowd for taking too long), Stiglitz got into it. He was great to listen to, avuncular and friendly with a sharp turn of phrase, and while he’s obviously aware he just needs to drop a dig at BushCheney to get a crowd applauding he didn’t go to that well too often.
Mostly it was standard stuff from him – the IMF and World Bank and G8 are part of the problem, not the solution, because they are dogmatically applying economic models that do not work on the ground and make life worse for people rather than better. Good to hear him say it but nothing eye-opening. He talked a bit about the New Zealand context, and how our economy is so small that we’re stuck in globalisation now – even if we wanted to control our trade borders to the extent China and the US do, we couldn’t, because our economy would fall over.
In question time, audience questions quickly got on to the subject of the environment and climate change and didn’t look back. Stiglitz didn’t go into heavy detail, just wasn’t enough time for it, but generally weighed in behind full-cost accounting where atmosphere and water (etc.) are codified into the economic system so there’s some representative cost when they are despoiled. He made a point of saying that he believes we’re going to have to change the way we live, sooner rather than later, and that preparedness means ceding power and resources to the developing nations – somethng the developed nations are reluctant to do.
It was a great session but far too short. We could have sustained another hour, easily. Oh well.
So that was that. Thanks to the parentals for the gift of my WritersReaders week experience, and respect to my brother for going to all three with me.

Garry Trudeau was Thursday night. My expectations of the Doonesbury creator were dashed – his reputation as reclusive and publicity-shy did not match up to the slightest bit of reticence or awkwardness, indeed he was incredibly comfortable before the audience and downright effusive. Sean Plunket would ask a question and he’d skid off on long, winding replies full of well-practised gags and insight. He had well-worn anecdotes for everything that was thrown at him, but there’s no cause to resent that – the guy’s a legend and just seeing him was neat.
Still, not much of note to report. Much more fun to be there listening than to read about it afterwards, I expect.
I was pleased by his opening words, where he said yes, he was a satirist and social commentator and even soap opera writer, but most importantly he was a comic strip artist.
Was even more pleased that almost the first question from the staid, politics-minded 50-something crowd (one always gets such a crowd at Writers and Readers week) called back to this, by asking him what other comic strips he enjoyed. No surprises in his response (Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side and currently Dilbert) but it was nice to hear. Classic newspaper strips are enjoying a surge in legitimacy with lots of well-assembled archival collections on release, such as the Complete Peanuts and Complete Popeye; I would have liked to hear more on that, but to be honest I’m a politics-minded dude like everyone else in the crowd so I was delighted with what we got.
For more on Trudeau, Grant enthuses here.

Writers/Readers Week @ Festival of the Arts: New York Stories
Three authors spoke about their novels, each responses to the events of 9/11. Of the three, I’d only heard of Mohsin Hamid, whose recent book The Reluctant Fundamentalist has caught my attention if not my reading commitment. He proved to be the most compelling guest, despite being present only by voice linkup from London.
Hamid spoke about 9/11’s cause and consequence as “a catastrophic failure of empathy”, on the part of the Muslims celebrating when the towers fell (who were, like the character in his novel excerpt, “caught up in the symbolism of it all” and at a remove from the human cost); on the part of those in the US and UK who turned to war.
Empathy also in his answer to Terry Eagleton’s recent broadside at Martin Amis et al, (“I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners.”)
Hamid suggested that what novelists bring that others don’t is empathy. Through story and characterisation, good writing can deliver empathy. And empathy is crucial.

“Last Friday’s episode of “EastEnders,” the popular British soap, took a slight detour, as one of the characters spent three minutes extolling the virtues of the “Preacher” comics.”
(Rich Johnston)
“Then on Thursday Stephen (“I was a womb-shooting nutcase last year but I’m all better now.”) spends one whole minute discussing the popular but unpleasant comic Preacher with Stacy. The way he described it was clear that is was written by someone who’s read most of the Preacher story-arch.” (LJ of “Skitster”)
About Preacher.
Heh.