From
the edition of Thursday 28 January. This seems a very Waikato letter, and has perhaps the best-ever heading of any letter to the Waikato Times. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar
and logic are exactly as printed.
Hamilton is no Madrid
I was
kind of revolted to find that it now costs an average of $200 a week to rent a
one-bedroom concrete block flat in a block of concrete block flats in Hamilton.
You could
live in Madrid – or Athens, if you felt like slumming it – for less.
Perhaps
I’m the one at fault, but I can’t see how Hamilton stacks up quite so
magnificently next to either of them.
But,
apparently, it does.
At a
rental cost equivalent to 40kg of milk solids a week, the property farmers must
be doing something right.
My theory of magazines is that they live and die, rise and
fall, on the quality of their columnists. The NZ Listener has Jane Clifton, Diana Wichtel and Bill Ralston; Quote Unquote had Bill Manhire,
Kevin Ireland, Stephanie Johnson and Nigel Cox. Currently, the
Spectator has the best columnists of
any weekly: Jeremy Clarke, Rod Liddle, Tanya Gold, Martin van der Weyer,
Deborah Ross, Rory Sutherland and a bunch of others. I would read it for any
one of them. Writers like this are why one keeps reading a magazine. The
columnists are the spine, the structure; the cover story is the cladding.
I came across this book, pictured above, My Week: the secret diaries of almost
everyone (The Robson Press, 2013) by Spectator
columnist Hugo Rifkind. It is very funny. He started writing these pieces for The Times in 2006. Totally random – honest – sample:
Barack Obama 10 November 2012:
MONDAY
Today is a portentous day. For today is the day that may be
the day before the day that America decides, on a fine autumn day, that there
may be another day when the man who stands before you today as…
“Honey?” says Michelle.” You’re kinda raving again .”
Wouldn’t it be good if a New Zealand satirist could develop this
idea from 2006?
More on the singular they, as discussed here previously,
also here
and here.
I first heard it on The Archers, on
the wireless some time in the 1960s, when a character was trying to avoid specifying
the sex of the person she was talking about, and I thought: “That’s useful.”
What else matters other than usefulness? The American Dialect Society chose it
for 2015’s Word of the Year, for a different reason. Well, a different
usefulness reason. Quote unquote:
While editors have increasingly moved to accepting singular
they when used in a generic fashion, voters in the Word of the Year proceedings
singled out its newer usage as an identifier for someone who may identify as
“non-binary” in gender terms.
“In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have
generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly
significant element of that conversation,” Zimmer said. “While many novel
gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already
being part of the language.”
If you have been following the strange case of the Hollywood
actor Sean Penn interviewing
the Mexican psychopath El Chapo, aka Shorty, aka Joaquin Guzman Loera, here’s how
Hugo Rifkind described one of
them in 2012:
He’s a spoon-faced humourless self-loathing pseudo-socialist
twit, sure, but he’s not a moron.
This
by Gerard McBurney is the best piece on the late Pierre Boulez I’ve seen – love
his music, saw him conduct the Ensemble Contermporain in Wellington in 1988 (Birtwistle,
Boulez and Donatoni, from memory) but had no idea he was so funny. Quote
unquote:
I was escorting him to a restaurant. The rest of the company
had moved swiftly, but he was walking slowly, tired after rehearsal. Someone
had told me on no account to mention Messiaen. So I did, and he immediately
laughed, stopped and looked at me like a schoolboy preparing a whoopee cushion
for a grownup.
“Ah, Messiaen, he is for me a big problem … [dramatic pause]
The religion … [another pause, shrugged shoulders, and louder] The birds …
[louder still, hands raised and in tones of pantomimic horror] Aand … my God …
the ORGAN!” There was no doubt which of these three shockers was the worst.
I said I’d been inspired by his performances of Messiaen in
London. He looked at me sideways. “Yes, there are some pieces of his I will do.
But Turangalîla ... Never! For me this piece is … you know … a kind of Bernini
of the suburbs!”
Matthew
Sweet in Intelligent Life on the
Abba Museum in Stockholm and their one song in the past-modal perfect tense. Quote
unquote:
The sceptical eye might dismiss it as the unlovely detritus
of Europop – a subterranean fire-trap of hen-night kitsch. But this would be to
underestimate the semiotic thickness of ABBA’s art – and trust me, you really
wouldn’t want to do that. The artefacts on display evoke, sometimes painfully,
the band’s personal and artistic trajectory: the vanishing grins, the
collapsing marriages, the tour-bus melancholia, their progress towards that
bleak and clear-eyed final album, “The Visitors” – their Winterreise. It’s true
that ABBA lyrics sometimes exhibit errors familiar to EFL teachers around the
world (“since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in your hand,” says the
narrator of “Fernando”) but who else could have produced a song like their last
recorded work, “The Day Before You Came” – an account of joy measured in the
minutiae of depression, and possibly the only pop song ever written in the
past-modal perfect tense? (“I’m sure I had my dinner watching something on TV,”
reflects Agnetha. “There’s not, I think, a single episode of ‘Dallas’ that I
didn’t see.”)
So here are Abba with perhaps their saddest song, sung by Agnetha,
their farewell:
There have been no Waikato
Times letters of the month for a
while, because the paper hasn’t published
any over the holidays: normal service will resume shortly. So while we’re all waiting,
here is one from the 23 January issue of the Listener:
Celebrating End to
Tariffs
The Listener
wonders why New Zealanders are not dancing in the streets at the World Trade
Organisation’s announced removal of food-export barriers (Editorial, January 16). There are many reasons. […]
Economist Milton Keynes pointed out that exporting means
giving up assets of real value in exchange for unreliable money, so should be
limited by sensible domestic economies. […]
Gavin Maclean
(Cullerlie, Gisborne)
So here is a concert from Milton Keynes: two hours of
Metallica in 1993, kicking off with “Creeping Death”.
I wish I still had my poster of Hello Sailor in, I think, 1975 or 1976,
playing a benefit for Gay Lib in Auckland University’s cafeteria. It was a
great gig: the poster featured a louche young gentleman in a lounge chair
wearing a dressing gown and wielding a cigarette holder, beneath the legend “Relax
With a Fag”. This behaviour was illegal in New Zealand then and for another 10
years until, thanks to Labour MP Fran Wildse advocacy, 1986’s Homosexual Reform
Act. It is because of things like this that those of us who despair of today’s party
wish Labour well but…
From the Economist’s
Bagehot column
of 2 January on England’s Labour Party:
Mr Corbyn’s leadership should force his moderate MPs to take
on a reality that even Mr Blair ducked: Labour has always been two parties, one
social democratic and the other anti-capitalist. Over the years it has muddled
through, as concessions, feints and tactical battles have postponed a decisive
confrontation. No longer: as Mr Corbyn bears down on the moderates, they will
have to decide whether to push back, concede the party to him or quit—en masse,
not in a dribble, as did their predecessors in 1981 when Labour last swung
left—and form a new party.
Yes. One wishes Labour well, but…
Above we see, via Composers
Doing Normal Shit, the composer Peter Tchaikovsky relaxing with a fag. I
wonder if, by any chance, he could be related to Jeremy Corbyn, below:
So here are Hello Sailor at the Whiskey A Go Go in c1979
with “Blue Lady”. I had no idea this was on YouTube until reading pp 175-6 of Dave
McArtney’s memoir Gutter Black. The bandsound pretty much as they did at the
Globe Tavern in Auckland the year before, i.e. awesome:
