from the morgue

Mooses for Hooses

Mezzy Xmas. Hey, off work! Like my job. Better, like my workmates - immeasurable benefit of two levels of damn good folk above me in management line, plus competent bodies left and right. Makes it all so much easier to be the shop of sanity in the institutional ocean of bloody foolishness.

Snow. Shopping. Yuck to shopping. Fed fed fed. Dancing kittens, well, cats. I have become a dog person although I distinctly recall once being a cat person. Still like cats though. Evil, wicked beastses that they are. Stupid fat hobbit! Snow on the roof, in the garden. Riding in the bus.

I still haven't watched Alien3 workprint cut. Am I cured? Answers on back of an envelope please. Please. Mind the antelopen.

Ready for winter

Lots been happening. Chuck gone. Saddam found. Alien 3 extended cut! etc.

But I've been concentrating on getting ready for the cold Scottish winter.

See, here's me before:

And here's me after:

Thanks, Brad-and-Cal, for your good clippering. Now the snow will slide right off my head!

Ceilidh pron. Kaylee

Kaylee was one of New Zealand's periodic 'pop ingenues' from our vast and booming 'manufactured pop music' sub-industry. She covered 'Broken Wings' and for about two weeks it was inescapable. Then it was gone.

I loved that track. Her voice was so damn fragile and unprofessional - almost fit to shatter in the high bits - that it communicated more than proper-singer-type Hayley Westenra ever could, no matter how much she furrowed her brow. Of course, Hayley would have been trying, whereas Kaylee couldn't help sounding like that. I didn't care. (Still didn't buy the single though.)

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So we took Chuck to a Ceilidh on Saturday night. Great fun. Held in an old stone church (NB in this country, 'old' and 'stone' are redundant descriptors for a church). You pay yer money to get in the door, and push through a curtain into the darkened shell of the church, with a stage up at the altar end and tables all around the periphery. The entire bodylength of the church is the dance floor.
The bar runs all night. A band strikes up the rhythms from the front, sometimes old-time traditional, sometimes (as this time) throwing in plenty of modern-rock/pop flourishes along the way. And everyone gets out in the dancefloor and dances.

The band usually call the dance in advance, walking everyone through it, but almost all the locals know almost all the dances. They're the traditional dances, handed down through generations. Usually you're in sets of four or five couples, sometimes all the couples are together in one big circle. The music strikes up and you're off, spinning and moving in and back, ducking under linked hands and through arches, whirling each other around, moving from partner to partner. It's awesome fun and great exercise.

If you watch the men in kilts carefully, the ones who *really* know what they're doing, you can answer the question of what they wear under the kilt. At least, that's what Cal told me.

And to finish, of course, Auld Lang Syne, all holding hands, starting sentimental and getting progressively rowdy until it's basically a giant folk-mosh. Then out, grinning and turning into the chill night, and away.

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Caroline/Cal is my girlfriend. Or, according to certain medical personnel, my "partner". Just by the way.

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My last ramble produced a lot of commentary. Which is always good. I'll try and make some sense of it here. As usual, thinking this up as I go, so I might contradict myself and be just plain wrong. All part of the fun. All of this in the full entry...

Lots of Kiwi 'folk'/trad songs are mentioned, 'Ten Guitars', 'Taumaranui on the Main Trunk Line', 'Now Is The Hour'. This isn't exactly what I was getting at. While wandering I've tried to stick my nose into local traditional music scenes - fado in Lisbon, flamenco in Spain, 'folk music' here in Scotland. This is the stuff I'm talking. It is older and more resistant to change and fashion than the examples cited. And there's an ownership of it, a widespread cultural possessiveness. It is a tangible cultural link to past times.

Svend comments "Still, I think that there's certainly a grain of truth to Morgue's observation; the "jigs and laments" of Irish culture seem to be much more intrinsic to Irish culture than "Ten Guitars" is to NZ culture; though perhaps that's just because there aren't such strong stereotypes of what NZ culture is."

Yeah! This is exactly the point I was trying to work out - the instrinsic nature is fundamental to the kind of thing I'm thinking of. If you asked New Zealanders to identify elements of NZ culture, music wouldn't feature very strongly, except perhaps the haka.

New Zealand doesn't have strong 'stereotypes' of itself. It's (as Pearce points out) very new. But the settlers from the UK came from strong musical traditions that haven't become strong in New Zealand - compare to the musical lineage of South American music, with such heavy currents of Spanish and Portuguese within them. I don't think New Zealanders have enough shared cultural consciousness that any one musical tradition could be called 'New Zealand's. (This is what I was getting at with "New Zealand's European-descended pakeha seem to be largely happy to let the musical traditions of their various forefathers fade to nothing.") It's part of New Zealand's nature as a hodge-podge of different cultural backgrounds that no one cultural background's music can really be adopted by the whole.

My comment about even Aussie having a style of its own doesn't really fit with this. I think I'm confusing some other line of thought in there. But I'll leave it, because I reckon there's a style of music that's recognisably Australian.

Andrew makes several other points. He identifies the fact that 'traditional' music is a bit of a have, an attempt to label music into one 'proper' form while ignoring the fact that it is constantly changing. All I can say in response is a sheepish "I guess I'm not talking about that kind of music then", because he knows whereof he speaks.

I think the defining characteristic of kind of music I'm talking about is that which does have a 'proper' form of sorts - the kind of music where continuity to the past is direct, not generational. The kind of music your grandparents listened to, and theirs before them. I have an impression that this kind of music is seen as existing in parallel to what might be called current music.

Andrew also challenges my comment in the first entry that NZ's cultural music traditions are "bounded into particular spaces and contexts". What I meant there was that there are only limited circumstances in which such music is found - and, what I failed to say, because I hadn't thought it through to the end, was that those spaces and contexts aren't set up to encourage/allow the wider participation of the NZ community. Kapa haka is continuing on a decade-long upsurge in popularity, but it very definitely belongs to a subset of the New Zealand population. I'm not looking for a hypothetical fusion of our various musical traditions (that would defeat the point) - I'm just realising that a musical connection with our shared 'New Zealand' cultural history is not going to happen, because such a history doesn't exist.

And, for the same reason, traditional music in the sense I'm talking about will always be a point of division in New Zealand culture - not a point of unison.

Which all seems startlingly obvious, put like that.

(Ahhh, I can't be bothered reading over this. I hope I haven't been too boring. I hope, additionally, that I haven't made a fool of myself, but that's the old vanity talking, and I'll just pay it no mind.)

It Gets, um, *Chile* in Winter 'round here

I hate myself for that lame title. But it's a good, satisfying kind of self-hate.

So Chuck has arrived! Last night I took him out for his first good Scottish Night Out - 'Donde las papas queman!' ("Where the tatties are burning!"), Chilean traditional music performed by a group of Chilean ex-pats and one hairy Scot.

We met up with Jess, a Kiwi from Rotorua, and George, a Kiwi from Wellington. To paraphrase Chuck: "What could be more Scottish than listening to South American folk music with a bunch of New Zealanders?" And you know, I really don't know what could.

Made me reflect for a bit on the absence of a 'traditional music scene' in Wellington, and perhaps in wider New Zealand. Traditional/cultural music groups exist, of course, but they're pretty hard to find - I certainly never stumbled across more than one or two. (Although, now I think of it, the Cuba Street Carnival always seemed to summon them out of their shadowy corners.)

In New Zealand we have little in the way of local traditional 'folk' music that is shared with the community. Certainly, we have cultural music traditions that are strong - I defy any New Zealander's spine not to tingle when a waiata rings out - but they are bounded into particular spaces and contexts. The Pacific Island musical traditions are likewise heavily tied into their particular communities. New Zealand's European-descended pakeha seem to be largely happy to let the musical traditions of their various forefathers fade to nothing. The Asian communities are still a long battle away from being accepted as 'part of New Zealand' and their music likewise.

All of this adds up to a New Zealand with a quiet sort of multiculturalism.

Which is no bad thing. But it is odd - another distinguishing feature of the strangely half-formed New Zealand culture. Hell, even Aussie has a style of music (twangy guitar ballads often filled with filthy jokes) of its own. And as usual with NZ, it gives us a rare opportunity to have a foot in many worlds and construct a society with a 21st century mindset that is the Victorian humanist legacy of the nation's modern founders.

It's an interesting country, Aotearoa.

(Note: all the above is generalising from personal experience - I'm quite ready to believe that other parts of NZ have much wider-spread engagement in cultural musical traditions.)

(Note 2: I recognise the oddness of reflecting on NZ traditional music when Chilean music is hardly local to Edinburgh - but there is a connection, namely the fact that the hairy Scot of the players got chatting to us in Sandy Bells, local folk music pub. Everything connects, etc etc.)

I think the best example I can recall of engaging with traditional music and making it part of the community: the Pacific Island drumming that accompanied every home game for the Hutt Valley Lakers basketball team back in the early 90s. That was a beautiful thing.

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(skims back over entry)
Ah, so that's what I'll be using this blog for - long stream-of-consciousness rambles. Cool, I guess.

21st Century Thingness

This is a thing of the 21st Century. (Link courtesy the ever-wise Billy.)

I call it art, dammit. But that's another rant. (Don't get me started on Jake and Milos Forman.)

In other news, the fabulous Chuck Gillespie lands on Scottish Soil in about a half hour. 'ray! And I emailed Ella all the suggestions people made, and more besides. Should keep her busy.

Mad Home

Somewhat odd to be on the other side of the world while my home town goes completely wild...

(And if, four years ago, someone told me that in 2003 Seth Green would be hanging out in Lower Hutt but I would be in Edinburgh, I would have thought them a very adventurous sort of psychic.)

'Love, actually'

Went to see new Brithope ‘Love, Actually’ t’other night. (“Oh no!” readers cry, “he’s reduced to writing about movies already!” Well, shush. I’m going somewhere with this.)

‘Love...’ does what it says on the box - romance, Christmas, snow, public declarations of love, Atkinson Firth Grant Rickman Thompson Lincoln Knightley Neeson etc etc. The bad stuff is also pretty unsurprising - non-white characters are all in marginal roles (London, the whitest most-ethnically-diverse city in the world!), dumb bits with Comedy Americans, a gobsmackingly stupid portrayal of politics that could be overlooked if September 11 wasn’t explicitly referenced in the opening monologue.

But.

‘Love...’ does its po-mo po-faced, with characters taking their love lessons from movies (it ain’t over till its over, it all comes together at the last possible moment, you have to run across town and call out someone’s name before they slip out of your life forever). It even quotes about 10 seconds of ‘Titanic’ full-frame (I had a weird feeling that someone taped over the movie). The ‘Titanic’ riff is calculated. ‘Love, Actually’ has sold itself as the follow-on to ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ and ‘Notting Hill’, but that’s just to get you in the door. It has set its sights far higher than that. ‘Love, Actually’ is intended as the spiritual successor to ‘Titanic’.

(ASIDE: ‘Titanic’, of course, is the most recent adoptee of the Gone With The Wind Trophy for the Most Romantic Movie Of All Time. It’s also a nice barometer for comprehending movie criticism.

Now, I loved ‘Titanic’. I saw it three times on the big screen. I do not apologise for this. Sure, the characters are two-dimensional. Sure, it’s an unrealistic fairy-tale stapled on to a horrific historical tragedy. Sure. But if you buy into its desperate Mills & Boon-via-Tom Clancy logic, it’s one hell of a tale. And it isn’t that hard to buy in - this was the movie that broke records and made 3-hour films entirely mainstream, remember? (Another of Jim Cameron’s multitiude of sins. But I digress.)

Lots of smart people hated ‘Titanic’ but when they say why they hate it, most of the time at least, I can’t help but conclude they have missed the point. Second point of reference for the same thing: season 1 Dawson’s Creek was one of the best teen-romance tales I’ve ever come across. Lots of people hated the way all the characters talked in thirty-something therapy-speak. These people have missed the point. That’s what Dawson’s Creek is.)

‘Love, Actually’ is for *ahem* grown-ups. It doesn’t have the teen-daydream emotional logic of ‘Dawson’ and ‘Titanic’, but it does have a non-rational story structure where the real world is just a backdrop to the stories of people discovering and committing themselves to emotional truths.

The crux of ‘Love...’ is an idea, repeated over and over again, that Christmas is a time for telling the truth. ‘Telling the truth’, of course, is explicitly developed as code for biting your lip, being brave, and admitting to someone that you fancy them.

And that makes this a fascinating movie. It’s being mass-released all over the world. For every person in the audience who is trying to work up the nerve to tell someone that what they really want for Christmas ‘is you’, it lays down a path, hands over the tools, pats them on the back and makes encouraging noises. It does everything but tip alcohol down their throat and spray on perfume/cologne. This movie is trying to make all those people screw up their courage and go for it.

‘Love...’ is trying to change the world. Movies don’t do this often. Certainly not big, mass-release blockbuster type movies. (‘Fight Club’ and ‘American Beauty’ are the only big examples I can think of in the last few years.) I am somewhat cautious about movies that attempt to prompt real change in their viewers’ lives, but by my lights, the message of ‘Love...’ is a grand one. I hope it works. I hope, all over the world, people who see this movie then get their nerve steadied and tell that special someone how they feel.

The planet would be a better place for it.

(By the way, if you are already hooked up with someone, as I am, there is still great enjoyment to be had from the movie. Well, specifically, from Bill Nighy. And the Andrew Lincoln-Keira Knightley storyline, for that matter. But I’ve written long enough.)