I’m off to Christchurch later on today, to prepare for a little pingpong country action, as part of the Scape arts festival. I’m leading a symposium on art in the city, which should be good fun. As part of this I was asked to do an interview for RDU, the student radio station based at Canterbury down there. Assuming it would be about ping pong I was jazzed to talk about it. However, the first question was “Why did you choose media studies in New Zealand? I mean, we’re a small country at the bottom of the world, why would you come here when you’ve been to so many other more exciting places?” Well, I explained, I’ve always loved New Zealand, after coming here in the early nineties, and had longed to get back here somehow. I didn’t expect an academic job would do it for me, but it did and for that I’m grateful. I admitted that I’ve loved the music most. And I like Wellington more and more. Sure, it feels small and isolated sometimes, but that’s part of the charm for me. I can leave a couple of times year, get over to Aus, maybe to Europe, but I like it here and I’ve done the big cities for the time being.

The interview continued after that and hit on some ping pong and country issues. As we wrapped up, he asked me if I’d be interested in offering some sort of media commentary as part of their new breakfast show. I was flattered, naturally. He claimed, with some earnestness, that people with American or Canadian accents always sound like they know what they’re talking about. A shining moment of self-deprecating cultural anxiety, the kind that wants some sort of confirmation that they matter. This is another instance in which I make that analogy to Sally Field winning her Oscar for “Places in the Heart,” that point when she says “You like me, you really like me.” Sometimes someone says something that makes that seem so a propos.

Music is not thematic in any shape or form today, so here’s just a few rarities that I’ve ripped and have been loving lately.

Geval Trio - Psicosis (sic)
Amral’s Trinidad Cavaliers - Oye Como Va (sampled by the Beastie Boys)
S. P. Balasubrahmanyam and S. Janaki - Boochi Boochi (with a lovely Hi-NRG break a la Bobby Orlando/Divine)

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I’ve been contending, as long-time readers of this blog know, with chest issues for nearly two years now. I’ve seen doctors in three countries and have only recently been told what the issue is. It’s something called costochondritis. It’s not my heart, but rather an inflammation of the cartilage between the sternum and my rib, which just so happens to be near a nerve close to my heart, literally and figuratively. It’s a rather unpleasant sensation which at times feels like my heart is about to be punctured. Of course, once they found a name for it, and a list of symptoms, and the suggestion that it’s something I’m going to have to live with, it made dealing with it much easier. I just can’t sleep on my left side and should stay away from any heavy lifting or stress on my left side. I’m blaming shoulder bags and books for this.

That sorted, I’m dealing now with caffeine withdrawal as the old ticker was taking a, um, beating due to my intake (modest amounts really, just two lattés, sometimes just one). Seems like I had picked up arrhythmia and that’s just not a great sensation to have. I’m off the stuff now and will be for a while. I’ll miss it, of course, but then there are approximate substitutes I’m happy to deal with if it means a few more hours here. Chicory here I come!

For those academic friends of mine, here’s a story that might ring true for some of you. I’m of two minds regarding this, not least because I’ve met some of the people involved, think the project is a great and timely one, and applaud the award to our Media Studies colleagues. However, it reiterates my point below: that this is a small place sometimes and it’s just too damned hard to avoid these sorts of conflicts. It would have been nice, however, if the members of the committee who had put in the project had recused themselves for this year. Strange place this, sometimes.

Two songs, to follow from today’s themes.

Le G.

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Up until Friday night, I hadn’t purchased a single CD since I arrived in New Zealand. Not one. Sure, I’ve scoured the vinyl sections of the city’s two (sigh) record shops, Real Groovy and Slowboat, and they’ve got heaps of used material. It’s just that the cost is prohibitive (on average a new CD costs $35 a pop). Being conscripted to DJ an 80s night and having the bulk of that music in storage in Canada (hi Mom), mainly because the university only covers the bare minimum for moving expenses even when you’re moving half-way across the world and you require books and things like vinyl to keep you happy and allow you do your job (lecturer/DJ) properly, I needed some Prince pronto. I have this on LP, of course, but was reduced to buying the CD of “Purple Rain,” used.

Aside: this is not to say that I’m not hearing new (and old) music. I am, but let’s just say I do my “shopping” on blogspot these days (and I’m noting that the Brazilians have a lock on rapidshare).

The night I was DJing was itself a deliciously sordid affair. A former student of mine had asked if I’d be interested in playing their end of year ball, which was 80s themed. I was told that it would be me spinning for two hours, then a band for an hour, then me for the last hour. My first two hours went well enough, with a few local hits thrown in for good measure. The band, however, was something else entirely. They weren’t quite prepared, had not done a sound check (although they had plenty of time before the night started), didn’t have the right patch chords, and were aggressively not inclined to keep people dancing. Instead, the guitarist opened with a Godspeed song, yes, droning guitar line with echo reverb and all. Now, I appreciate the avant-gardist gesture as much as the next person, but you gotta know your audience, especially if you have to face them in the cafeteria queue the next day and some of them are serving you your food…. I was asked by the organizers to go back on after the band had played for a fifteen minutes. They were not happy, but then the audience wasn’t either. Shame really, because they did sound pretty tight.

It’s been many years since I’ve seen anything quite like what I saw from my perch. A combination of bad dress sense (not the night to wear heels, ladies), subsidized booze (binge drinking anyone?) and wanton desire (snogging, snogging, snogging) provided quite the spectacle and made the night a memorable one for me. That and the two boys who spent a good portion of the night dry-humping my turntable rig. Kiwi masculinity at its best. Charming.

A sample of the NZ music I played, from the Swingers and their song “Counting the Beat,” featuring one-time Split Enz member, Phil Judd. When I did the odd set at Jupiter Room in Montreal on L’Eighties night (RIP, thankfully I think), I always wanted to play this but figured it would have fallen somewhat flat as it’s relatively unknown outside of Australasia (though it has sonic qualities that clearly locate it in that era).

Le G.

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So, there you have it. The blog has been done over, using a great new theme (WuCoco - details in the footer), which I’ve modified ever so slightly. It’s certainly a lot easier on your eyes now and has lovely curves to it.

I’m busy attending a postgrad conference here at Vic at the moment and will put something longer up in the next day or so.

A shout out to my sister whose birthday it is. I have the luxury of noting it twice due to time zone differences, which is very nice for both of us. Time differences, however, meant I could only really call her the day before her actual birthday and could only leave messages on her phone.

In other news, I’ve been somewhat alarmed by the recent spate of posts on this flickr photo of mine. The debate about corporal punishment here in New Zealand has reached a fever pitch as of late, and it makes me realize many things about this place. The scale and scope of the country comes into sharp focus in moments like this, where national newspapers, magazines, radio shows and now posters, weigh into the debate and give it more heft than it warrants. Moral panics flourish here as a result. New Zealand feels very much like the epitome of the global village times like this, where domestic issues get aired regularly and become part of a public debate and discourse, aided and abetted by the media. These flare up every few weeks and plenty of people opine from various political perspectives with little or no advancement, waiting only until the next issue appears (text bullying, boy racers, etc.), which it does almost like clockwork.

In other news, the “orientation” of Prime Minister Helen Clark’s husband, Peter Davis, has become front page news. A photo has surfaced of the PM’s husband seemingly engaged in a kiss with Ian Davis, a gay, Labour Party candidate, celebrating his wife’s election victory. As part of a muckraking political climate that’s dominating the scene here as of late, this is yet another well-rehearsed moment in which the political fortunes of a leader of a political party are seen to hinge on their ability to address publicly what should remain a private matter (and there is considerable debate as to whether anything “untoward” actually occured). Cynical to say the least. The same can be said of Don Brash’s latest extra-marital dalliance, an allegation which was raised by a member of Labour in Parliament, regarding his affair with a woman not his wife. (I don’t have much respect for Don Brash, not least because of his ties with the rabidly religious Exclusive Brethren and the links they have with detectives hired to spy on Members of Parliament, not to mention their dodgy anti-social, anti-same-sex marriage, bring-on-the-Apocalypse, bent. That said, I really don’t hold a torch for Labour either, as they continue to ignore the plight of members of what used to make up their constituency, such as the employees of Woolworth’s and other stores who are mired in a nasty lockout. They also completely destroyed any shred of dignity and respect they might have had when they screwed up the foreshore and seabed issue, such that disaffected Maori in the Labour Party formed their own political party, as Labour drifted further and further toward the centre and beyond into decidedly conservative waters).

I weary of these things because they make this place seem so petty, insecure, and small-minded, upright and uptight at the same it wants to come across as morally stringent. Prudish, even, but a prudishness which must be beaten into people at a every stage of life, of course.

The moral rectitude expressed in response to that poster, and with regard to personal affairs of political figures, makes me shudder. All of this makes me think of the appearance of Mitterand’s mistress at his funeral. But then, you might hear people muttering, “You know what they say about the French…”.

Music with sexy beats then.

Le G.

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Otherwise known as spring cleaning (for my Up Over friends, it is that time of year here).

Yes, things are changing, ever so slightly here. I’ve been tweaking my blog’s css for the past couple of days in order to see what colour schemes work. I’ve been told that some IE users couldn’t load the images, which I wasn’t aware of as I’m a Safari/Firefox user and there were no issues visible on my end.

As you can see, the category headings are still wonky, but I’m trying. And hey, it’s been only a few days since the last post, which indicates It’s Alive.

Keep your eyes peeled for a few more changes, and some more regular posting.

Amuse yourself.

Le G.

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Briefly: For the past two years, I’ve been posting heaps of pictures up on Flickr. I recently surpassed 20, 000 views, which is not bad by my standards (though I don’t know what other peoples’ counters are like, to be honest). I’ve been particularly interested in the way in which my skill as an amateur has been affected by comments posted there. I never really had the photographic bug before this, and most of my pictures always seemed to be rather simple, dull things (I generally have a proscription about people appearing in my pictures, for which I’ve been chastized many times. I call what I do, however, post-humanist humanism, to be trite about it). Having an audience has meant I’m conscious now of what I’m doing, although being told “You’ve got a good eye” helps as well. All this said to lead into a story about one of my Flickr encounters.

One thing I’ve not referred to earlier on the blog is how Flickr put me in touch with someone from my old highschool, a woman named Sakura. When I first started using Flickr, I occasionally poked around at various groups and read the boards associated with each (I say that in the past tense because I’m less and less inclined to do so now, for all sorts of reasons). Here I found one of her images, before I knew it was her. Struck by it, I then went to her profile, to find out it was the same Sakura I’d grown up with, but had lost with over time and distance. We reconnected briefly, with her telling me about her impending move to Ohio for an academic job. I checked her blog out and posted a couple of comments and we chatted. I had always thought that she was a bit of an outsider when we grew up and only really got to know her after we had both left highschool. I know she was bitter about that experience and I wanted to ask her about it, but never got the chance. A month or so after reconnecting, she made the move from Toronto to Ohio, driving down. She posted on her blog her excitement and nervousness at the big change. She took pictures. She posted when she got to Ohio, from the public library about how smoothly everything had gone. And then silence. It took a few days to find out what was happening, but eventually someone posted to her last Flickr photo that she had died. Shocked, I tracked down her blog, where I had to sift through the best wishes to see that the first “RIP,” then gradually an explanation. She had died in a car crash moments after she’d left the library where she’d made her last post to her blog.

There have been, of course, various websites dedicated to people who’ve disappeared from myspace and other sites. I can’t say anything more to this really, but I often think of Sakura and the lingering photos and her blog, virtual testaments to her skill and humour and the cipherspace she left for her many friends, acquaintances, and her family.

I felt it needed to be said.

To my friends in Montreal, I know what’s happening there. Memories of other horrific shootings come to mind, when I was there as an undergrad and those that came later. That all these incidents happened in places of higher learning is frightening. The so-called ivory tower looks less and less like it’s beyond the pale when it comes to hate, anger, frustration, and explosive murderous rage.

Blog note: I’m still in the process of tidying up here, getting the header right, etc. Time permitting, I’ll do that at some point in the next couple of weeks. Don’t take that as any kind of promise. Just be glad I’m posting again.

Meantime, music….

Le G.

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Okay, okay. It’s been a while. The time slipped by really, and things just went mad here at work, start of term, middle of term and more of that. Apologies all ’round for that. I will try to be more on the ball with this as the few readers I do have have wondered where I’ve gone. I’ve not been far, er, well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been to various conferences, one in Sydney and another in Istanbul. I was asked to write a blurb on my travels in the latter, for the Association of Cultural Studies’ newsletter. I wasn’t particularly taken with the conference, for a number of reasons which I’ll not get in to here. However, Istanbul this time around was great and it was nice to have friends to share it with. So without further ado, here’s the review (I chose a Perec quote to start things off, a bit I have cited here before. You can see where my blog life and academic life blur occasionally).

Thoughts on Istanbul, the city that happened around the conference.

To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory: out beyond the railway stations and the roads, and the gleaming runways of airports, and the narrow strips of land illuminated for a brief moment by an overnight express, out beyond the panoramas too long anticipated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art.

George Perec
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1997)

This was my first Crossroads conference and my second trip to Istanbul (my first visit came while I was based in Berlin, which has its own “Little Istanbul” in Kreuzberg; the second after a move to New Zealand, which has its own “Istanbul” restaurant on Cuba St.). As there are no doubt many other conference reviews, and at the invitation of the editors of this newsletter, let me take the liberty to give a brief glimpse into my perambulations around the city before, during, and after the conference. My meandering was not done without reference to the conference however, as my motivation was to do my own informal study of the city’s cultural life.

A confession, but certainly not one I harbour alone, I’m sure: one of the reasons I go to conferences is, whenever possible, to bookend the trip with opportunities to survey a locale’s uncharted pleasures, inspired as I am to seek out those nooks and crannies that get me off a well-worn path, the wilful search for the promise of some element of surprise and wonder (couple this with the fact that it’s a forty-hour flight from New Zealand, the urge to wander, if only to work off the jet lag, seems necessary to sorting myself out). I’m driven in part, nay mostly, by my desire to collect odd and/or unusual local music and ephemera, as well as an insatiable need to photograph all sorts of buildings, alleyways and assorted urban fragments (I’ve collected many of these photos here).

I could indulge in Istanbul’s musical and cultural detritus this time because I’d scoured many of the tourist sites and learned to manage and navigate through the sea of hustlers who cluster around the Blue Mosque and other sites in Sultanahmet during that first visit. This second visit allowed me a chance to witness the city unfolding through other daily rituals and encounters. I admit that I weary easily of museums and galleries, fatigue befalling me after an hour or so. Instead, give me cafés and restaurants, bars, shops and the vital artlessness of street life that keeps me alert and primed to wander for hours. Sitting among backgammon players, game boards squared up against teacups full then empty then full again; I’ll take this over the still, pallid air of yet another museum. I’ll happily indulge instead in soaking up a street scene where the atmosphere is heavy with the smell of fresh food and sharp with the tang of cat urine, knowing that this is the city. I’ll spend hours perched on a stool, reading, writing, editing, distracted now and again at the sight of some curiosity, architectural or otherwise, savouring precisely those vestiges and incidentals of which Perec writes, miniature affirmations of the city’s character, its tenor, and its tempo.

A story: I was roaming again, strolling through the city’s many alleys, past brothels and crumbling tenements, mosques and pensions, serpentine passages and dimly-lit arcades, the latter filled with reams of Turkish tabloids, style and fashion magazines, 70s movie posters and tawdry daybills, a treasure trove of trash, the forgotten and the forlorn massed in piles well over a metre high. It was clear to me that since last in the city, only a year earlier, things had changed, but only incrementally, thankfully. The old man who ran one of the tiny little curiosity shops that stole three too many of my afternoons, floor to ceiling as it was with books and vinyl, had passed away. It was run now by a young woman with tattoos coiled around her forearms, who indulged me (and with me) as I sifted through a mountain of chipped and dusty Turkish 45s and LPs, she explaining to me the titles, the lyrics, and divulging, with occasional salacious glee, the sordid or tragic life of the artist. As I placed them on the turntable and played them over the shop speakers, she was sometimes wistful, sometimes smiling, but genuinely pleased to see someone taken with so many different sounds, Western, Eastern, caught up in the pleasure of fossicking around in, to these ears at least, the unheard archive of arabesque pop housed there.

I revel in these more mundane pleasures, not bent on spending my day in awe of Istanbul’s monumental grandeur, which always feels so abstract and distant to me. Rather, I was keen to give in to the minor rapture found in the immediacy, the tactility, of these etched slivers of pop culture, hearing the patina of age and their travels, from who knows where, in the pops and crackles of once-loved 45s, seeing the smile of the shop owner as I put on another song that transported her elsewhere, and witnessing the delight she clearly had in telling me stories of growing up with this music.

Another affirmation: At the Grand Bazaar, away from the carpet salesmen and knock-off jean stalls, I watched as a gramophone repairman, a fastidious septegenarian, toiled furtively in his shop, tucked down a less-trodden offshoot of the bazaar’s main laneways. Dwarfed by a wonderful floral display of antique horns, flanked by walls filled with old 78s from East and West, Europe and Asia, shelves piled high with crank phonographs, greasy gears and cylinders, here he was with soldering iron in hand, meticulously attending to the metal innards of what must surely be the last of a dying breed. He seemed oblivious to my presence, although given the close quarters, there was only a moment of silence. He asked if I wanted a photograph and pointed out some wonderful blue-tinted horns, as well as the window display of gramophone needle tins from around the world. I took a moment and set up my tripod, watching him turn to work again, and began snapping away. I thanked him in my very broken Turkish, he smiled and then greeted a man carrying a wounded phonograph into the shop. The cycle continues….

These two encounters, about the pleasure of music, the tangibility of history, the local and the global, and the many resonances of popular culture, are what I’ll forever remember about Istanbul, vignettes that affirm once again that culture is ordinary and its multiple pleasures are always to be found in the nuanced grooves of the everyday.

You can find out more about the conference here

More soon, but not before I leave you with some music. Three Turkish tunes which I found the first trip there. Some more to come, but I have to rip those still. Patience, as you’ve not doubt learned to exercise already….

Ilham Gencer - Istanbul
Cici Kizlar - Delisin
Siluetler - Lorke-Lorke

Le G.

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