New Sensation, Old Hat

New Zealand Gerald has his own leaky Australian. Last week someone signing themselves “Australian Shane” emailed me a proof copy of Michael Hutchence: Original Sinner, purporting to be by one Pamela Hurst. I might as well come clean: I absolutely love Michael Hutchence – the man, the music, the Tiger Lily. Australian Shane must know this, but how? Until now, for reasons too numerous and salacious to repeat here, I have told no one of my Devil inside, of my adoration of the suicide brunet.

Some swift, goggling Googling determined that Australian Shane wasn’t in the business of playing practical jokes: Michael Hutchence: Original Sinner will be published next March by Gracenote Publishing, whose website describes the book as “so sensational that you will sin just by touching it”.

I of course devoured it in one sitting and could barely breathe as I read the final page – it was as if Sin, in the form of Hutchence’s leather belt, was strangling me for daring to read its secrets.

Bearing in mind the plight of WikiLeaker Julian Assange and fearing being extradited to Sweden on account of two unpaid parking tickets dating back to 1996, I knew exactly what I had to do: tell no one. Frankly, it’s more than my blog’s worth to reveal what’s in Michael Hutchence: Original Sinner. I can reveal, however, some of my own Hutchence discoveries – the products of decades of research – which I am proud to say Pamela Hurst seems to know nothing about. 

Behind Hutchence’s seemingly simple lyrics there is a rare, combining intelligence that, once recognized, changes your opinion of the man forever. Hutchence was obsessed with numerology – he was born in a fortune-teller’s tent in Luna Park – and even taught himself Hebrew and Ancient Greek in order to discover the full significance of the number 7 in the Bible.

By the time he was 27 Hutchence had developed an insatiable desire for numerology, discovering and digesting texts from every corner of the world. By the age of 30 his research had convinced him that it was in fact the number 3, not 7, that unlocked the secrets of the universe. Witness the opening verse of “New Sensation” (1988):

Live baby live

Now that the day is over

I got a new sensation

In perfect moments

Impossible to refuse

One could write volumes about these 30 syllables. Hutchence penned them on his 30th birthday, exactly 30 minutes after the time of his birth, which was exactly 3pm by the fortune-teller’s watch. The “baby” in the first line is clearly as much Hutchence as Tamara Nye, his then main squeeze (the letters of her name are divisible by 3). When on tour Hutchence referred to himself exclusively in the third person and only ever stayed in hotel rooms with a “3” in their number.

Close examination of the verse reveals Hutchence was foreshadowing his own death. Exactly 9 years, 9 months and 9 days after the release of the “New Sensation”, he filled his lungs for the last time. Prior to taking that final breath he’d spent 3 hours under the misapprehension that the Beck lyric “Loose ends, tying the noose in back of my mind” from the song “Jack-ass” (1996) was directed solely at him. Drug-induced psychosis takes no prisoners.

It should be clear by now that Hutchence’s “new sensation” and “perfect moments / Impossible to refuse” were heroin and incipient heroin addiction respectively. The chorus proves this beyond doubt:

Gotta hold on you

A new sensation

A new sensation

Right now

Gonna take you over

A new sensation

A new sensation

By the time Hutchence checked into his own Hotel California (he could never leave) in Sydney he was heating his “Judas” (a friend that betrays you) over 33 Bunsen burners using a specially commissioned spoon with the radius of a truck tyre. When not chasing the dragon, it was impossible to dissuade him from the belief that he was about to be squashed by a Godzilla-sized kangaroo. Amazingly, he had foreseen this ultimate chaos and sewn its desperate antithesis into the fabric of “New Sensation”:

Hate baby hate

When there’s nothing left for you

You’re only human

What can you do?

It’ll soon be over

Don't let your pain take over you

Love baby love

It’s written all over your face

There’s nothing better we could do

Than live forever

Well that’s all we’ve got to do

The bitter irony of the closing lines speaks for itself. There is nothing new under the sun and your new sensation is someone else’s old hat. Hutchence was sure to be found wearing nothing but his leather belt (around his neck) and the shabby pink Stetson Mick Jagger had given him in 1995 (a year divisible by 3).

The funeral was spectacularly interrupted by the well-known Australian lunatic Peter Hore, who shouted “This is how he did it, Paula! This is how he died!” before jumping over a balcony to which he had secured a 4-foot black cord, the other of end of which was tied to the dog collar he was wearing. Unfathomably, he was cut down before he was able to share the rocker’s fate.  

Hutchence’s “3 theory” did not die with its creator: his ashes were subsequently divided into 3: one third went to the UK with Paula Yates and his divorced parents argued over the rest.  

The Real Wordsworth

Dear A. S. Byatt,

While researching my forthcoming book Royal Flush: A Plumbing History of Buckingham Palace, I made a chance discovery that could shake the world of Romantic criticism to its foundations.

Last month I was in the University of Auckland (New Zealand) library checking the Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest recorded usage of the word “plumber” so spelled, with a “b” instead of a double “m”, which spelling had been found as early as 1387. The OED cited a line of verse, printed in 1797, by the otherwise forgotten poet Arthur Dewhurst, as the first usage of our modern spelling: “A plumber did my soup once steal”.

Now this line seemed somehow familiar to me, and I was convinced I had read it or something very like it before. There were, it transpired, just three surviving copies (one in the Bodleian, one in the Folger, and one in a private collection) of Dewhurst’s only published collection of verse entitled Epitaphs for Eatables, one of which (the Bodleian) had been used to create an electronic facsimile for a new database, POETBASE, which fortunately the University of Auckland subscribed to.

The Dictionary of National Biography has a very cursory entry for Dewhurst which reveals that the poet disappeared in mysterious circumstances in January 1798 and was never heard of again. The relevant poem was the first in a modest collection of twenty-four:

“A plumber did my soup once steal”

A plumber did my soup once steal;

He made real all my fears.

It seem’d something more than a meal;

Its bowl now holds my tears.

No potion have I now, no sauce;

No dregs or gritty lees;

Would that the plumber feel remorse

For my beef stock and grease!

I read and re-read this curio, this oddity of late eighteenth-century literature, growing more and more suspicious of its authenticity. And then I had it: the poem contained definite echoes of another poem of exactly the same length and rhyme scheme, a poem I reproduce below:

“A slumber did my spirit seal”

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seem’d a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

This poem, as you well know of course, was printed in 1798 in the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have since gained permission from Dewhurst’s estate to catalogue the never-before edited papers that were found at the poet’s Lake District residence after his disappearance. They make fascinating reading, but the following unsent letter in particular transfixed me:

19 December, 1797

Dear Charles,

I had marvellous revels at the Fawcett Inn with Danforth and Grimsby last night, who brought with them a young poetaster—Wordswithe, or some such name. My memory of the evening is by no means complete, due to (even for me) rather intemperate consumption, but I do recall regaling the party with a fine recitation of my ‘A plumber did my soup once steal’, and that Wordswothe chap continuously scrawling away what seemed like the whole blessed evening . . .

Looking closely at Epitaphs for Eatables I was astonished to find that every one of the twenty-four poems (the same number published as being by Wordsworth in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads), poems completely unconsidered by Romantic scholars, contained echoes of “Wordsworthian” diction and meter!

What had I stumbled upon? For millions around the world Wordsworth is the first Romantic, and my discovery has revealed him to be a plagiarist! His appropriation of the works of the unknown poet Arthur Dewhurst who disappeared shortly after their meeting is nothing short of scandalous. I am undecided what to do next, as you might imagine, and would greatly appreciate your expert advice.

Yours anxiously,

New Zealand Gerald

  

PS: I thought your Possession was a remarkably original achievement.

Musical Cars

There’s no end of songs about cars. To give you some idea of the numbers we’re talking about, there are over a thousand recordings with “Cadillac” in the title alone. Back in 2006 Bob Dylan dedicated an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour to songs about automobiles. This week New Zealand Gerald would like to narrow the field a little – or rather restrict the parking – for songs with “car” in the title.

Let’s get the total write-offs out of the way first. Van “Diesel” Morrison wrote and deformed “Who Drove the Red Sports Car?” in 1967. I find it very hard to believe that anyone takes Morrison’s post-Them albums of shapeless “jazz-inspired” tootling and caterwauling seriously. How can he not be prenant le pipi?

I once met an ex-roadie of Morrison’s in the Bomb & Duck pub in Belfast who told me that the working title of Astral Weeks was, right up until the eleventh hour, Gastral Leaks. In return for this gem I insisted on buying him as many Guinnesses as he had fingers: 4½. Thus began one of the best breakfast drinking sessions I’ve ever had. But back to Morrison: he has the dubious distinction of being the first person to get a degree in cultural studies, majoring in popular music.

One man who has unquestionably taken more piss than a hospital bedpan is Captain Beefheart. One of the briefer pseudo-hallucinations on his 1969 album Trout Mask Replica is called “Dali’s Car”. Promising title, wouldn’t you say? It certainly sounds more appetizing than its stablemates “Hair Pie” and “Bills Corpse”. But the track is a brief, disappointingly well-structured instrumental that gives the impression that the most notorious surrealist the world has ever seen drove a Prius. “Dali’s Car” is proof that the drugs don’t always work.

Another crime against car songs is Big Star’s “Back of a Car” (1974). Only Big Star could title a song thus and then spend 2:46 whining about a love that cannot be voiced because the car radio is too loud and because the singer doesn’t know what to say to his would-be lover anyway. The song offers a kind of musicholia (is that a word? it is now) that would have been deemed naff even in the 1930s. Back then the narrators of songs like “In the Middle of a Kiss” got a lot further than Big Star’s tongue-tied hopeless romantic.

The narrator of The Divine Comedy’s “Your Daddy’s Car” is more experienced than that of “Back of a Car”, but no less nauseating. Frontman Neil Hannon thinks he’s a wit, but most of his songs reveal him to be only half right. I say “most” because he did pen one of the funniest original songs for a TV show ever: “My Lovely Horse”, which featured in the Eurovision Song Contest episode of Father Ted and contains the following immortal couplet: “I want to shower you with sugar lumps and ride you over fences / Polish your hooves every single day and bring you to the horse dentist.”

The instrumentation of the 1999 version of “Your Daddy’s Car” is typically, deliberately, “inventive”: acoustic guitar, pizzicato violin, and cello. Hannon sings as if he’s imitating Suede’s Brett Anderson. Indeed the song sounds like a drugless, flirty-but-not-dirty cleansing of Suede’s “Daddy’s Speeding”, which is sadly off-limits for this post.

Enough of the lemons already; time for the sweet runners.

When she was writing “Fast Car” (1988), did Tracy Chapman have any idea how career-defining it would be? The song is a masterpiece. If “Fast Car” were the only song that Chapman ever wrote and recorded, her place among the greatest singer-songwriters of the 20th century would have been assured – it is that extraordinary. It is also the saddest song I know.

Chapman’s delivery of “Fast Car” is one of the 7 wonders of popular music. Her voice – deep yet fragile, stoic yet vulnerable – is sincerity itself. The song contains one of the most authentic character portraits ever penned. Chapman’s performance dresses you in robes that feel borrowed at first but that somehow fit you perfectly by the end of song. Bruce Springsteen provides similar tailoring services on 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. But Springsteen would be the first to pay his respects to Chapman: “Fast Car” drives many miles further down Highway Authenticity than “Born to Run”.

Beth Orton’s “Stolen Car” (1999) is another extraordinary song, for very different reasons. The lyrics are wordy and syntactically complex, with subjects and objects oscillating wildly. They describe the unexpected return of a prodigal son of a bitch, who is keen to break and enter the narrator’s life once more without feeling. Listening to Orton’s vocal is an unnerving experience; her conviction is as inescapable as your confusion about who’s doing what to whom.

The song opens dawn-breakingly but the light’s advance is challenged by an angular, wheedling electric guitar that lurks darkly in the shadows of the verses and reveals more of itself in the bridges and choruses. The song’s core, which is distinguished both lyrically and musically from its surroundings, is the following quatrain:

One drink too many and a joke gone too far,

I see your face drive like a stolen car.

Gets harder to hide when you’re hitching a ride,

Harder to hide what you really saw.

“I see your face drive like a stolen car” is an exceptionally fine image. This is the only time “stolen car” appears in the song, and what a unique way to use it!

The lobotomizing riff of Gary Numan’s “Cars” (1979) made it one of the most iconic synthpop/New Wave singles. Inspired by an incident of road rage, the song is narrated by the original paranoid android. Despite the silliness of the lyrics, and the fact that Numan is shamelessly ripping off Kraftwerk, the world would be a decidedly lesser place without “Cars” – the myriad allusions to it in popular culture are pudding-proof of this.

Brooklyn band They Might Be Giants released their first, self-titled, album in 1986. It boasts an absurdly generous 19 tracks, all of which appear in 1001 Songs You Must Hear before You Buy Another Top 40 Album. The most deliberately arcane track is entitled “Boat of Car” and is 75 seconds long. The complete lyric is:

Daddy’ll sing bass
Daddy’ll sing bass
Daddy’ll sing bass
Daddy’ll sing bass

I took my boat for a car
I took that car for a ride
I was trying to get somewhere
But now I’m following the traces of your fingernails
That run along the windshield on the boat of car

Daddy’ll sing bass

Traces of your fingernails that run along the windshield
On the boat of car
On the boat of car
On the boat of car
On the boat of car

For reasons clear only to the song’s composers, “Daddy’ll sing bass” is sampled from the 1969 Johnny Cash song “Daddy Sang Bass”, which was written by Carl Perkins. As for the rest, let’s just say that Dali would have been far more willing to share a bottle of absinthe with They Might Be Giants than with Captain Beefheart.

 *****

Other “car” titled songs of a certain regard include:

“Used Cars” by Bruce Springsteen: appears on his superb Nebraska (1982) and is flawed only by the unnatural grammatical inversion of “Now, mister, the day the lottery I win”.

“Drive My Car” (1965) by The Beatles. A mostly McCartney composition that flirts (which is all McCartney ever does) with a blues euphemism for sex.

“Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” (1988) by Billy Ocean. Co-written by Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who also co-produced Heartbreak City (1984) by . . . The Cars. 

The Italian Gerald

Back in the 1930s, the English travel writer E. R. P. Vincent wrote that “Italia is not Italy”, making the then novel argument that “Italia” (the real Italy) was not in fact the same as the “Italy” experienced ­ by English tourists. Surveying his contemporaries’ travel guides, Vincent felt obliged to warn his readers that, try as they might, they would not be able to spot Botticelli’s models on the streets of 20th century Florence.

“Italia has a future”, Vincent wrote, “Italy does not, it only has a scant present and an immense past. Italia has bitter icy winds, Italy basks in perennial sunshine. Italia is a strange, hard, throbbing land, Italy is accessible, straightforward and very dead.” Apart from proving that whenever travel writers attempt to write purple prose the result is inevitably purple-headed – “strange, hard, throbbing” indeed – Vincent’s point is a valid one. Most 21st century visitors to Italy see little of Italia, but unlike Vincent, New Zealand Gerald thinks this is in fact a good thing.

Outside of the precarious precision of package tours, Italy is a shambles. Unless you’re willing and able to pay tour operators hundreds of euros to insulate you from the chaos, or villa owners thousands to rub you down with truffle oil under the Tuscan sun, the most lasting souvenir you’ll have from your Italian experience is likely to be post-traumatic stress disorder.

Italian airports betray unmistakeable warning signs of the chaos that waits beyond the arrival halls like a lion that’s been starved for two weeks ahead of Christian Night at the Coliseum. Unless you arrive on the very first flight of the day, you will see neither hide nor hair of a trolley at the baggage reclaim.

The Germans, by contrast, police their trolley stands with eagle eyes – you will never find one empty. Manned and womanned motorized collection vehicles insure that the average time a trolley spends abandoned is just 8.6 seconds. In Italian airports, not only is there no attempt to collect the trolleys discarded by the first arrivals of the day, many of those arrivals are stymied by the fact that they have to be in possession of a 1 euro coin before they can liberate a trolley from its stand.

After you’ve risked hernias and musculoskeletal injuries lugging your bags up and down what feels like Rome airport’s recreation of the city’s Seven Hills, the neon glow of the car-hire counters seems to offer some respite – but not for very long. In Italy, even if you can speak the language, “customer service” translates as “me ne frego” (I don’t give a shit).

When I visited 2 years ago and attempted to collect my hire car, the Europcar representative made it perfectly clear that she held me personally responsible for her having to be conscious at that ungodly hour (it was after 9 am). Italians don’t have jobs, they have inconveniences. Jobs are inherently unItalian, like poor dress sense – without slaves, the Roman Empire wouldn’t have made it across the Tiber.

Italians themselves have no illusions about how long things take to get done in Italy. Anything involving even the slightest amount of official administration takes between 6 weeks and 6 months longer than it does in any other country that claims to be civilized. Unless of course you are a member of the most notorious gang of cowboys in the West: the Italian government.

A friend of New Zealand Gerald’s who has lived in a small town in Tuscany for some years believes that the Italy of today cannot realistically be called a democracy – it is in fact an oligarchy. Corruption is so rife that even the espresso machines in the parliament canteens are paying protection. The premier, Silvio Berlusconi, treats the Italian statute book like his own personal Etch A Sketch, making and repealing laws to stay out of jail and in power.

As an example of just how beyond the pale Italian politics is, take the case of the “proposed” autostrada (intercity motorway) extension that would significantly reduce the time it currently takes to drive between Rome and Livorno. The route initially proposed by the government minimized the destruction of houses by allowing for tunnels to be blasted through inconvenient hills. Last month, however, it was announced that there was no longer enough money for the tunnels and that a new route, one that would require the destruction of thousands more houses, had been decided upon.

In fine Italian style, the minister for infrastructure is also the mayor of Orbetello, one of the towns that will be heavily affected by the new “proposed” route. In his ministerial capacity he appointed the head of the company that the government had chosen to build the motorway. Italian-English dictionaries provide no translation for “conflict of interest”.

A group of outraged Orbetello citizens have formed an association with the goal of forcing their mayor/minister to rethink.* Not only have their homes been marked for destruction overnight, the delicate ecosystem of the region is also under threat. The environment, they say, will be irreversibly damaged by the new motorway route. Their resistance is brave, but one fears it will be futile.

Orbetello’s many-hatted mayor is a symptom of the diseased order from which emanates the stultifying chaos of Italy. Only in a society that is so distracted by the chaos of everyday life could the leaders behave in such a cavalier fashion and actually be rewarded for it. A telling postscript to the tragedy of Orbetello is that the residents voted their mayor in after he had been appointed minister for infrastructure.

 * You can increase their chances of achieving this goal by liking their Facebook page: NO all'Autostrada su Colli e Laguna di Orbetello

B. J. and the Bear

Two weeks ago an Italian friend made me an offer I could have refused, but didn’t. She needed help with a story she’s writing for Tavolo, one of the world’s premiere food magazines. Tavolo shocked the Italian food writing establishment in the 1960s by consistently linking the pleasures of food with those of amore. It could not have declared its intentions more clearly with the cover of the first issue: Sophia Loren was pictured with pasta sauce all around her mouth. She was wearing a wig-cum-brassiere made entirely of spaghetti. And nothing else.

Simonetta (the Italian job) writes a column in Tavolo that showcases Italian restaurants outside of Italy. She’d already covered the UK, the US and Australia, and wanted me to send her the good oil on the NZ scene in return for a few gallons of her family’s very good olive oil. I was engaged.

My brother was conveniently directing the children's play Thumbelina in Wellington and as I was already flying thither I decided to investigate one of the city’s best-known Italian restaurants, Scopa. This audacious “caffé cucina”, I reckoned, would tickle Tavolo’s fancy for carnal cuisine – in English its name means – wait for it – “fuck” (I ought to declare at this point that my Italian is passable). While scopa can also mean “broomstick”, every Italian over the age of 3 knows what it really means.

For years this restaurant has been getting customer reviews that suggest it’s a case of Scopa by name and Scopa by nature. Interestingly, while none of these reviews betrays any awareness of what scopa means, most of them complain about the staff’s “fuck off” attitude. The following unedited, semi-literate excerpt is typical of the negative reviews:

After going to this restaurant with about 7 other people i must say the food was good but the staff are completly rude. when i first walked in i wa waiting to get to my table as it was very busy and people standing around the waitress completly shoved me out the way with no excuse me or anything....not only that when we booked the table we originally had ten and went down to Seven and the waitres didn’t seem to be happy about this and asked very rudly why we booked for ten we advise that we did change the amount of people and then there was a bit of wine in the bottle and the waitress asked “can you finish this” and then last but not least we were asked if we could leave as there was another booking at 10pm after we were told when we booked that you couldn’t book after 8. 

My Scopa experience was by no means as traumatic – the food was the typical approximation of authentic Italian one tends to be presented with in NZ, and the staff, though obviously very much aware of the place’s filthy name, were by no means filthy themselves. Their attitudes wouldn’t have been out of place in the majority of Auckland and Wellington restaurants.

Back in Auckland, I knew exactly where my next Italian dinner would be: Me Ne Frego in Epsom. What is it about Italians moving to NZ and opening offensively named restaurants? The best translation of me ne frego is “I don’t give a shit”.

The Italian joker behind this restaurant has also been lambasted online. Despite knowing what the name meant, this patron nevertheless felt obliged to complain about the service:

 . . . if you don’t mind waiting for 55 minutes for your main course, & get verbally abused by a non-civilised, non-professional, hippie, dishevelled Italian guy, then by all means you should definitely check out the place, as i heard the food is actually quite good....

i didn’t get passed the appetizers, because i couldn’t wait any longer for my main course...

it’s just being told to f*** off in front of your family simply because you asked when the food would arrive after almost an hour waiting, well, it just didn’t go down well with me. 

To be fair, the owner/chef certainly can’t be accused of false advertising. What’s more, his food has been praised just as often as his service has been panned, and it is unquestionably autentico. My cautious attempts at the lingo defused his desire to tell me to vaffanculo and a very pleasant evening was had by myself and the one other customer who was cowering in a corner.

At this point I had two juicy morsels for Simonetta, but I really needed a third course to round things off nicely. I scoured the directories for another restaurant that might somehow fit into Tavolo’s theme of carnal cuisine. Things were not looking good. Try as I might, I could not read sex or offence into the names of the other Italian restaurants in Auckland.

I once had a student who made pizzas at Gina’s and who was learning far more interesting things from his Brazilian co-workers than he was from me. It was he who taught me the Brazilian slang for lesbian: “Velcro”. It was a lopsided exchange: all I taught him in return was bad poetry. This anecdote, while charming, was more Brazilian than Italian, and I was beginning to despair.

But then Dio smiled on me. I was driving through Kingsland intending to dine (reluctantly) at Papas Pizza Café when I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a sandwich board saying: “Pompino Ristorante”. I simply had to check it out, for reasons which will soon become clear.

I parked near Winehot and walked a little ways up New North Rd to where the sandwich board teepeed the pavement in all its hand-painted, red-white-and-green glory. I opened the restaurant’s door, bells tinkled, and the ugliest woman I had seen since leaving Wellington materialized from behind a beaded curtain. She must have been Simon and Garfunkel’s biggest fan: she had the height and impishness of the former and the hair of the latter.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a voice that was so uncannily like John Key’s I was momentarily at a loss for words. As I regained my composure I had time to note the two Davids above the till – Michelangelo’s and Posh’s. The place reeked of new paint, had six tables, no muzak (not even Andrea Bocelli), and far too many empty Chianti bottles in straw baskets.

“Table for one, please.”

“Anywhere you like,” John Key ventriloquized and left me alone with the sound of silence.

I seated myself and began to peruse the menu. After a few minutes I was approached by the second-biggest man I have ever seen. He all but shattered the beaded curtain and lurched across the few feet separating us. He was unquestionably several over the otto and Italian as Barilla pasta.

“Calla me Orso, ita meansa ‘bear’ in Italian!” he boomed in such a way that I thought he was somehow channelling an aftershock from the Christchurch earthquake. Gondola-like, his right foot collided with my table and made leaning towers of its Chianti bottles.

“Piacere, Orso,” I replied after the table recovered. “Mi chiamo New Zealand Gerald.”

“You speak Italian!” he rumbled, in Italian (the ensuing dialogue has been translated).

“Yes, sort of. Excuse me, but I have to ask you – why did you call your restaurant ‘Pompino’?” Orso, who indeed resembled nothing so much as a grizzly with a third-rate full-body wax job, bared ursine teeth and smiled from ear to ear – a good 12 inches at least.

“Ah, of course, you know what it means, eh?”

“Yes, I do,” I smiled back.

“Well it’s like this,” he said. “My wife, she’s always breaking my balls. She won’t learn any Italian and my English is not good. And she’s no oil painting – you saw her yourself.”

“She seemed nice,” I lied.

“She isn’t. She never lifts a finger in the kitchen – I have to do everything.”

“But why ‘Pompino’?” I persisted.

“Like I said, I have to do everything. She’s never given me a pompino and she never will – but the joke’s on her now, eh?”  

The End Is Nigh

Yesterday I bought the October issue of Metro magazine. If Dante was right, my purchase will have condemned me to his Seventh Circle of Hell, where I shall suffer eternally with those who were violent against themselves. But I have already paid dearly for my sin in this life – Metro now costs $9.75.

The current incarnation of Metro is clearly suffering an identity crisis. The advent of the cannily conceived MiNDFOOD in 2008 must have knocked Metro’s minders silly. “It’s like six magazines in one” claims MiNDFOOD’s advertising. It’s really more like six half-arsed magazines in one (giving it three arses?),  but its owners know exactly what they are doing, unlike ACP.

In March this year it was reported that Metro’s circulation was just 9,680 and that it was likely running at a loss. Former editor Bill Ralston wondered whether ACP would soon be forced to combine it with North & South. Meanwhile MiNDFOOD was described as one of the few titles that were not haemorrhaging readers, and its website puts its current circulation at 30,758 (NZ Audit Bureau of Circulation data). Based on the same data, MiNDFOOD is the fastest-growing magazine in the country. Ralston’s speculation could well come true, sooner rather than later.

But one certainly doesn’t get the impression that Metro’s current editor, Simon Wilson, can hear the wolves baying for his publication’s blood. Reading one of his editorials is like having your brain rubbed with an oil called “Essence of Smug”. Wilson was presumably on holiday for most of September; his October editorial certainly reads like it was written while he was out to lunch.

Just how little effort Wilson puts into his editorials becomes obvious when you read Nicola Shepheard’s excellent cover story, “Shark Attacks Granny”, in which she expertly covers The New Zealand Herald’s tabloidization under the deputy editorship of Shayne Currie, NZ’s tinpot William Randolph Hearst. Wilson doesn’t feel under any pressure to lead from the front in his editorial: he simply rehashes Shepheard’s best lines and steals some of her considerable thunder. On the rare occasion that he actually tries to write something off his own bat, he falls flat, just like this sentence, which has too many rhymes for “prat”. How about this for a paragraph, which begins with a relative clause, no less:

    Which means if you want to blame anyone [for the tabloidization of the Herald], blame all of us. We’re the ones buying, or not buying, the paper.

This kind of blarney makes a Woman’s Day editorial look profound. We’re all to blame; we’ve all sinned. Thanks for that, Simon Magus. In the rest of his editorial Wilson tells us who his heroes are, like a 5 year old listing his favourite superheroes. Along the way he manages to misspell the surname of one of them twice, “as you do” (to quote him on Steve Braunias’ taking of his daughter to the races).

Mention of Braunias, who has been peddling his unique blend of Scroogery and schmaltz for so long that he has become a national institution (surely a fate worse than death for a writer with subversive pretensions), brings me to the issue’s special feature, “One Big Day in Auckland”. Braunias headlines “24 other top writers and photographers” who together attempt to chronicle the events of Saturday, September 4, 2010 in Auckland, “the city we love”. It’s hard to describe the result.

The birth of twins (who problematically didn’t arrive until the 5th) is documented in graphic detail. There are two poems, the less said about which the better. Tessa Duder goes for a sail. Emily Perkins makes lamingtons. You get the idea.

Apart from Nicola Shepheard’s cover story, which shines out like a light when all around is dark, the October Metro will do nothing to improve the mag’s ailing circulation. Utterly ignorant of Dylan Thomas’s sound advice, Metro is going gentle into that good night.

The "P" word

There’s no shortage of problematic “P” words in the English language  – "pope", "paedophile", "patriot", "psychotic" . . . the list goes on. But the most problematic of all is “poetry”. It’s fair to say that the word “poetry” – what is it? what does it mean? – strikes more fear into the hearts of both the general and particular populaces than the thought of Anne Tolley in the nip. But how can this be?

This woeful scenario is too often blamed on Poetry (the verbal art) or poetry (examples of that art), when really it is the Western Poetry Establishment that is committing the most heinous crimes. Now most of you will have seen a poet before – some of you may even have met one – and for most of you the kind of “establishment” affordable by the poetry industry would look more like a trapper’s hut than an ivory tower. Alas, if only it were so. The Poetry Establishment is actually housed in a luxuriously appointed and heavily guarded fortress, whose only claim to supporting good poetry is the graffiti sprayed on its walls.

I am about to show you the kind of thing the Poetry Establishment tells us is Poetry; if you don’t like it or don’t understand it, the fault unquestionably lies within you, not the Poem, because this Poem has been written by a Poet, whose claim to the name in this case has been endorsed by that peerless arbiter of literary taste, The New Yorker. The following appeared in the issue dated 30 August 2010:


“Men at Work”
 by Julie Bruck

I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich.
                                                            —“Down Under.”

We middle-aged sense them immediately:
four brittle pop stars sprawled across
the rigid fibreglass chairs at the airport gate.
It’s not just that they’re Australian, that gorgeous
thunk of English, the stacked electric-guitar cases
draped with black leather jackets, or their deep
tans on this Sunday night in midwinter Toronto

that holds everyone’s attention, drawn as we are,
pale filings to their pull. Even their rail-thin
lassitude attracts us, as it must Doug, the portly
Air Canada gate manager in his personalized jacket,
who arrives to greet the band, cranking hands
and cracking jokes. Doug, who must live in

Mississauga with the wife and a couple of kids

and who insists the boys come back to play Toronto

next year, when we clutchers of boarding passes
will have abandoned our carry-ons for tickets
to a midsized arena and a resurrected band
whose lyrics never did make sense but
which are laced to a beat that won’t let go—
propelling us down the carpeted ramps
of late-night flights on feeder airlines, hips
back in charge of our strange young bodies,
now shaking down runways in rows.
Answers on the back of a Men at Work album cover to . . . seriously, yes seriously, this is Poetry in the 21st century. Julie starts well by using the name of an exotic Australian (imagine!) band for her title and filching a couplet from their most famous song. You would think Julie would be somewhat deferential to both the band and their work after such shameless appropriation, but no. Julie is a Poet, which means she can say with impunity (except within the pages of New Zealand Gerald) that Men at Work's lyrics "never did make sense". Speak for yourself, dear.

And so we come to two more problematic "P" words: "patronizing" and "pretentious". The New Yorker seems to go out of its way to publish the most patronizing and pretentious poets practising  (lots of "P" words there, aren't there?) – they've been doing it for years. In this example, Julie can't seem to stop herself from condescending to everyone she populates her "poem" with.

How about "portly" (now that's a poetic adjective, isn't it?) Doug, who has a personalized jacket (bless) and "crank[s] hands" as if he's trying to start a Ford Model A. He does this because he's "cracking jokes" at the same time – if you look carefully both verbs begin with "cra", a sure sign that this is Poetry (not The Electric Company). Julie feels particularly superior to cuddly Dougly: he "must live in Mississauga". Why? Is Julie clairvoyant as well as condescending? But wait, her crystal ball is clearing: "with the wife and a couple of kids" (my emphasis). Whatever this is, it isn't poetry. It's pretentious, patronizing piffle.

The rest of "Men at Work" is heavy-handed "observation" on middle-age, lost youth and – wait for it – resurrection, all couched in the tritest "poetic" language imaginable. If you're still with me, I hope this little exposé has helped some of you realize you have nothing to fear from Poetry. And remember: if you're having trouble understanding poetry that's printed in esteemed literary publications like The New Yorker, the fault is more likely to be on the side of the so-called poets than yours.   

Headlining Acts

Anyone who's ever been published, whether in print or pixels, has striven long and hard for the perfect headline or title. We've all had our precious handfuls of pregnant words aborted by an uppity editor convinced they can do better -- and herein lies the peculiar attraction of headline coining.

Every writer's quest for the perfect headline is the equivalent of the hole in one in golf. The odds against them achieving it are huge, but it can be done. Some headlines are so good that they render the actual article utterly redundant. Their small, perfectly formed punning perfection is the story; the rest is silence.

Grail-questing journalists often spend just as long formulating a headline as they do writing their stories, sometimes even whiling away the hours before deadline coming up with fantasy headlines. I once met an obituary writer in the QF Tavern who, after bumming a cigarette and the 50c he needed for another pint of Guinness, exclaimed: "I can't wait for that Maggie Barry to kick the bucket, I really can't."

This not being entirely apropos of our foregoing charity-based conversation, I pressed him to explain, but he blustered on with: "But she's got to have a heart attack or a fatal stroke . . . " His sentence ended in a deep draught of Guinness, leaving me none the wiser. After an equally deep drag on my too mild cigarette, he said: "And it's got to happen in a park, or even better, in some botanical gardens . . . "

After another Guinness and smoke coupling, I attempted to recap: "You can't wait for Maggie Barry to die of a heart attack in the botanical gardens?" "Zigackly!" was his response. "Why?" was inevitably mine. "Because I have the perfect headline for her obituary!" he triumphed. "'Live by the sward, die by the sward'!"

*****

But there is one publication that seems not only to have abandoned the quest for the journalistic Holy Grail but also lost all self-respect. The best measure of any publication's self-respect is the quality of its proofreading. The New Zealand Herald's proofreading has been a joke for so long that Aucklanders accept the paper's daily errors as a fact of life, like Auckland's high humidity. 

One would be hard pressed to find a high school newspaper with more incompetent proofreaders than the Herald's. Below is just one of the more recent fiascos to have slipped through the newspaper's proofing net (if such a thing exists):

As one of my colleagues quipped: "It takes forever to get there . . . but when it does, it's terrible." For God's sake, Herald, grow some coglioni!

Re: "Lyrical Poetry in Popular Music"

Popular published collections of poetry in the modern age are not as common as they were a century ago. But we are still finding a way to express ourselves, and to enjoy others' poetic writings through the medium of music. Timeless tales of love, longing, betrayal, and electric passion are woven into lyrics of the songs we listen to on the radio and download onto iPods.

So true, stephhicks68 from Bend, Oregon, so true. This opening paragraph hits all the buttons prescribed by the more reputable how-to-write guides, and its sentiments, while dabbling in human conditioning, are scarcely objectionable. No doubt 16th century balladeers were the poetic rock stars of their time, writing timeless tales of wenching and quaffing with a profligacy more than equal to Messrs Jagger and Richards'. stephhicks68 is indeed weaving timeless truths into her own writing -- but what comes next?

Obviously, the most successful artists and the songs that climb the charts are those that provide insightful observations of human nature that connect with the audience on an emotional level.

Whoa Nelly! Leaving aside the fact that our author goes on to profile the lyrical genius of Alanis Morissette, Sir Elton John (despite acknowledging that he doesn't write his own lyrics), Sting and Sade, what's all this about the most chart-dwelling artists and songs all "provid[ing] insightful observations of human nature"? Presumably stephhicks68 has in mind the lyrics of Des'ree's chart-topper "Life", which includes the oft-slammed, all-too-mortal lines:

I don't want to see a ghost
It's the sight that I fear most
I'd rather have a piece of toast
Watch the evening news

Of course it was this lyrically poetic song's ability to "connect with the audience on an emotional level" that saw it reach No. 1 in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain in 1998. Hopefully most of Des'ree's fans in those countries were not cursed with enough English to comprehend her timeless insights into human nature. Equally hopefully, the notion that all popular (i.e. widely read/heard) poetry (what this is exactly will be covered in 100 subsequent posts) is insightful (this adjective has been misused so often that it should be proscribed) will one day be abandoned, instead of blithely evangelized by the likes of stephhicks68.

In principio erat Verbum . . .

. . . and then the Word was mutated, all too commonly in The New Zealand Herald. But enough about that would-be rag; I've seen her face and now I'm a believer. Whose face, I don't hear you ask? The face of Bloggea, Goddess of Blogs, which looks something like this lassie's (no sculptor has yet dared to represent Bloggea's features; should she deem it a poor likeness she could ruin their reputation via the blogosphere in seconds).

This small offering to Bloggea aims to provide remedial reading for a sick age -- there has never been so much to read and so little worth reading. Identifying and diagnosing this sickness is New Zealand Gerald's mission and he'd be delighted to have you along for the ride.