Monthly Archives: December 2004

Alleged so-called summer

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I have this idea that somewhere in London right now there is a homesick New Zealander, desperately clinging onto an image of home. Yes, as they layer on their thermal underwear and button up their winter coat, they’ll be keeping in mind how they image things would be if they were back in Auckland.

They imagine a bright sunny day, the glistening blue waters of the Waitemata, the warm black sand of Karekare, parents and children playing the picnicking at Mission Bay, jazz in the Domain on a warm afternoon – nothing like the cold, grey winter of London.

Ah, but the great paradox is that at the moment many Aucklanders have that fantasy too.

I’ve given up the “if it’s December, if must be summer” logic, for trying to follow that would just end in misery. Instead I’m pretending it’s winter. As I sit on the couch with my heater on and all snuggled up under a duvet, I’m pretending that it’s a cold winter night and being pleasantly surprised by how my fingers aren’t numb.

I saw on the news tonight that there’s snow predicted for somewhere in the South Island on Saturday. The weather presenter made a comment about maybe there’d be a white Christmas. It sounds like it would be like the time when I was 19 and went to Palm Springs on Christmas day, went up this mountain thing and saw a bit of snow and was like, “Oh, snow on Christmas day,” but noticed a distinct lack of magic and wonder.

But Christmas isn’t about weather and getting in iPod or underwear or a book isn’t reliant on the weather. However, summer is usually about warm weather, so this alleged so-called summer had better get its act together quick-smart.

The ghost of the broken horses

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The Civic Theatre is celebrating its 75th anniversary and had open days all this weekend. I went along five years ago when it reopened after the massive restoration and I guess I was hoping for something better than that, but, oh no, I was disappointed.

Various rooms had displays set up with old photos and programmes on them, there was a video playing on one of the balconies, “The Mighty Civic” showing in the main auditorium, and an incomplete cabaret was performed in the Wintergarden. I was left wandering around all the rooms and corridors, looking at the all the elephants, tigers and golden decorations and wanting to know the stories behind them, but remaining uninformed.

The Civic historians seem obsessed with Freda Stark. It’s almost like the Civic Theatre served no other purpose than to host cabaret evenings where Ms Stark painted herself gold and danced for the GIs. A neatly sanitised golden lady was trotted out for this anniversary. The main difference being that at the end of the night she didn’t go off and smear her gold paint over some homesick soldiers. Of course, that side of things is much more glamourous than celebrating, say, the 2.30pm session of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie in 1990.

But it’s really disappointing that there is a noticeable gap in the history of the Civic. No one seems to care about the history of the theatre from its remodelling in 1975 until the restoration in the late ’90s. Yeah, it wasn’t the greatest thing to have that second Wintergarden theatre wedged inside the building, but it happened and it shouldn’t be forgotten. Ditto the all-over mud-brown paint job, and the succession of nightclubs in the basement.

I’ve also noticed that the since the restoration, the Civic doesn’t feel like an old building anymore. Everything inside is really nice and neat and new. Nothing creaks or smells musty. There are no dark corners any more where decades-old bits and pieces lurk. I remember once heading to some toilets off the side of the stalls. I got about halfway down this steep, dimly lit flight of stairs when I got the heebie jeebies and turned back. The Civic has no such spooky places any more.

The Civic needs to start going bump in the night again.

Civility

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Now that the Civil Unions Bill has been passed, the question isn’t so much who will be the first couple to have a civil union, but who will be the couple to later get the first civil union divorce.

And what about all those couples who haven’t got married because one (or both) don’t believe in marriage, only to now discover that one (or both) don’t believe in civil unions either?

Sex, Drugs, and Emotional Discombobulation

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I’ve just read Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography “Scar Tissue”. There’s a special place in my heart for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Back in ’92 when I sold my soul to rock ‘n’ roll, it was the Peppers who led me there.

And it was around that time that Mr Kiedis was on his newly-sober anti-drugs evangelism and that made a lasting impressing on me at such an early age that I never considered long-term drug use to be fun or desirable.

Ah, but then he fell off the wagon. In “Scar Tissue”, after detailing his childhood including his crazy dad, he gets stuck into the drugs. There’s a little pot and a shitload of cocaine and heroin. He details his drug use to the point that it ceases to be shocking or scandalous and just become another mundane detail of his everyday life.

And I think, in a way, that’s what any kind of addiction ends up being like. The addict uses their substance not to feel wonderful, not to get high, but just to feel normal, to be able to function normally.

So throughout the book he goes in and out of rehab, writes songs about it, had revelations, and just when it seems like he’s got it all together, he’s back in some seedy motel with a needle in his arm. Oh, but he’s ok now, kids.

The other common theme is all the laydeez. It turns out he’s a bit of a serial monogamist. He appears to not really have been all that interested in one-night stands with groupies, and more into long-term relationships with beautiful women (and he’s always banging on about how beautiful the women are), though he seemed to end up with ladies about as messed up and chemically inclined as he. But it all makes for a good read.

And, of course, there’s the story of his band. But very little of that was new. It was interesting, though, to see that story told from his perspective and to marvel at how a band can stick around for over 20 years with all the problems they’ve had and still keep moving forward.

The book is written with the help from another author, but Mr Kiedis’ voice is unmistakably the one telling the story. The book is full of sentences that are just so cool I will a few here:

“I had been reading a lot of books about whales and dolphins, and I had always been aware of social injustice.”

“Could you please inform the Dalai Lama that Anthony Kiedis is here? I know he must be busy, but I’d like to say hi to him.”

“We piled into Flea’s multicolored Mercedes clown car, which exacerbated the absurdity of my surroundings.”

“Another manifestation of my emotional discombobulation was the Slim Jim episode.”

“I was up all night with visions of Jack Nicholson smoking a doobie with my girlfriend. Arrrrggghh.”

But finally, the most fun bits for me were his observations of my sweet home of Auckland, New Zealand:

“As soon as we set foot in New Zealand, I fell in love with the place. It seemed like a home away from home. There was more plant life than I’d ever seen, and towering majestic mountains and very few people.”

After buying a million-dollar farmhouse on the Kaipara Harbour he gets it dead right as he observes:

“It turned out that I saw the farmhouse on one of the few days of the year when it didn’t rain. Three hundred days out of the year, the country just poured precipitation. It was cloudy, rainy, chilly, blustery, England-on-a-bad-day kind of weather.”

On Auckland’s drug supply:

“I remember being in Auckland on New Year’s Eve and seeing amateur party people on the streets doing cocaine and champagne. It looked so appalling to me. I was glad I wasn’t in their place. The truth of the matter was that there probably wasn’t enough cocaine in a small country like that to keep me satisfied for any length of time.”

And that sums up quite nicely why Auckland is good.

Golden, olden

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In two weeks, that is, Wednesday, December 22, I shall turn 30.

Crikey.

This comes as something of a surprise because I’m sure that at my last birthday I turned 24 or something like that. I mean, I don’t really feel almost-30.

30 seems so old. 30 is, surely, the age at which I should be a wife, a mother and a homeowner. And yet here I am with none of the above and not feeling at all mature and grown-up.

Getting older doesn’t particularly scare. But the one thing that does kind of annoy me is how when we get older we find it a lot harder to get into new things.

There’s this interesting article by researcher Robert Sapolsky about our “windows of receptivity,” that is, the moment when we no longer are open to a particular kind of new experience. He discovered that “for at least one particular fashion novelty, the window of receptivity essentially closed by age 23; for popular music, it closed by 35; for an alien food type, by 39.”

This is why my mother doesn’t have a tongue piercing, why “Flashbacks” on C4 is so popular, and why I never see senior citizens picking up a tray of sushi for lunch.

Of course, as he concludes, there’s nothing really wrong about not dressing like an 18-year-old or still listening to the same music you liked when you were 12. But it’s just a little sad to think that, whether I like it or not, my palette is going to narrow itself.

But it’s not all that bad. In googling for that article I stumbled across this one by Carl Elliott, which references it. It’s also about the changes that happen with aging, but he notes that “in most fields, the golden years for creative work fall between 30 and 40.”

Yay! So now that I’m approaching 30, does this mean I’m about to embark on my golden years, and will be producing magnificent creative works? Damn, I hope so.