Robyn's Secret Passage

This is exciting. Gareth Shute has won the Montana Book Aware for Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture for his book “Hip hop in Aotearoa.” Having battled through a few misconceptions, like hip hop fans are illiterate and therefore the book would never sell, Gareth managed to produce an impressive volume of an important part of New Zealand’s music history.

But what’s this got to do with me?

Well, a couple of years ago when Gareth was writing it, he contacted me after seeing my track-by-track analysis of MC OJ and the Rhythm Slave’s “What can we say?” album. This album does play an important part in the history of Aotearoa hip hop, but sadly is hard to come by in record shops these days, so Gareth wondered if he could borrow my copy. I was happy to oblige and am pleased that I could play a smart part in such an excellent book.

I was mucking around with the speech-recognition software on my computer. It’s fairly limited, responding only to particular phrases that trigger particular commands, for example, “close window”, “paste clipboard here”.

I noticed that a few commands only seemed to work if I said them with an American accent. The New Zealand way of dropping Rs at the end of syllables didn’t sit too well with it.

Then I discovered the joke-telling function, which proved to be hilarious in a somewhat unexpected way.

Robyn: “Tell me a joke.”
Computer: “Knock knock.”
Robyn: “Who’s there?… WHO’S there? … Who’s THERE?… Who’s therrrrrrre.”
Computer: “Tsogonas.”
Robyn: “Tsongas who?… Tson- Oh, get rooted.”

Is this the futurrrrrre?

Just before seven o’clock this morning I was waiting at the pedestrian crossing outside Sky City Theatre when this fellow sauntered up to me and said- Well, I didn’t hear what he said because I had my iPod on.

I took one headphone out and said, “What?” “Did you win,” he enquired. He didn’t look dodgy. He was youngish, a little scraggly, but not dodgy. “What do you mean,” I asked.

“Didn’t you just come from the casino? I’m sure I saw you there.” I was wearing my winter coat, gloves and had a “I just woke up an hour ago, so don’t fuck wit’ me, fool” aura, not a “Whee-hee! I just spent all night at the casino!!!!”

“No, that wasn’t me,” I corrected, whilst simultaneously listened to the Stone Roses in my left ear.

“I’m sure I’ve seen you there. Do you go there all the time?”

I tried to recall the last time I went to the casino. A few months ago I’d taken an accidental shortcut through there after I left the theatre on the way to the carpark. Before that, it was probably 1997 back when the casino was new and novel.

“No, I haven’t been there for ages.” The pedestrian light went green. I started crossing Hobson.

“Are you going to the Albion? I’m not following you. It’s just that I’m going to the Albion too.”

I did not want to join in him his gambling wonderland. I did not want to piss away my wallet in the company of a guy who attempts to pick up strange women at traffic lights at 6.50am. I just wanted to get to work, out of the cold.

“Righto,” I said, heading off down Hobson. He disappeared into the bowels of the Albion.

On the other hand, he might have just been going there for their delicious cooked breakfast buffet.

I went to the New Gallery today.

Now, I once read a book about shopping behaviour. It reckoned that most people, when they first enter a shop, will turn to the right. But I always turn left. This may have something to do with me being left-handed, or perhaps it’s just an inbuilt contrariness.

So I arrived at the Te Hei Tiki exhibit and turned to the left. What I didn’t realise is that if I’d started from the right, I would have seen the exhibit in a kind of historically chronological order, starting with a giant rock of greenstone, to a collection of tikis, to European settlers impressions of them, to the first appearance of tiki in New Zealand culture, to the kitsch period (which surely reached its apex with the Beatles’ comedy-sized tiki), then concluding with contemporary artists’ take on the tiki.

But instead I saw it in reverse order, starting with the resin tiki lollipops and moving back in time through the tiki tea towels and ending with the video of the journey of greenstone.

So I think it ended up being not much of an exploration of hei tiki, more just a collection of things that incorporate tikis. It like like stepping into a Wikipedia entry on tikis rather than an art exhibit.

Downstairs was a selection of artwork from the Chartwell collection. I was initially repulsed by the really badly written descriptions on the information cards. It was written in a really slangy style, either by someone who was trying to sound youthful or perhaps by someone who just couldn’t help writing like that. In the end I gave up reading the cards because it just pissed me off too much.

But there was one piece I really liked. It was a giant cross-stitch work by Stella Brennan. She’d taken a screen shot of her computer desktop and used that as a cross-stitch pattern. Each pixel became one cross-stitch. It neatly captured a Mac OS 8 (I think) desktop from 2001, complete with a downloaded Big Brother video file icon.

I’m almost inspired to do a similar project with my desktop, but the resolution and all the anti-aliasing would make it a laborious task indeed.

I was thinking about dairy food today when it occurred to me that New Zealand might be the only place in the world to have dairy food.

I’ve been googling and indeed the only websites I can find that have “dairy food” associated with that stuff in the supermarket fridge near the yoghurt (not describing cheese and milk products) are to do with New Zealand. Calci-yum, Meadow Fresh and Vigueur appear to be it. They don’t even seem to have dairy food in Australia.

I’ve tried to find out what it’s called in other countries, or indeed if it exists in other countries. From what I’ve been able to figure out, the yoghurt-like thing for children tends to be either fromage frais or sweet yoghurt. Stuff that resembles dairy food is more likely to be called a custard or pudding, and sold as a dessert treat for adults.

So where did this mysterious dairy food stuff come from? Well, it just so happens I can remember my third-form home-economics teacher telling us about dairy food. She reckoned that it came about because once upon a time in New Zealand’s dark past, there was some goopy sweet stuff that was sold as yoghurt, but some concerned citizen took a look at it and said, “Hey, now! This is not yoghurt!” The relevant people investigated and indeed it was discovered that it was not yoghurt and was in fact goopy sweet stuff. A new law declared that yoghurt had to be that goopy less-sweet, slightly sour stuff made from a culture, while the goopy sweet stuff was renamed dairy food. Or so my third-form home-economics teacher said.

Interestingly enough, Calci-Yum has a flavour trio called “Kiwi”, which is milk chocolate, hokey pokey, and milkshake (as in those Milkshake lollies!). But if, as indeed appears to be the case, dairy food is unique to New Zealand, then surely any flavour of dairy food is a Kiwi flavour?

I’ve been amusing myself with the new world of things I can do with a computer that isn’t partying like it’s 2002. For example, I can surf the interweb and listen to music at the same time on iTunes. This means I can use Audioscrobbler, which will silently note down all my music choices before reporting them to the motherscrobbler, which then constructs a web page full of graphs and charts revealing to anyone who so chooses to look that I listened to MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” 12 times yesterday.

I considered writing about all the stuff I’ve been doing in the last few weeks, but all I can really remember was that I played lots of computer card games and watched all three episodes plus the Christmas special of “The League of Gentlemen” on DVD and to top it off, I saw “The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse” at the film festival on Sunday and it was marvellous.

So instead of recapping anything, I will leave you with this picture of my head in Darkanus’ bloody hole.

This was from the Oats exhibit at the Special Gallery on Customs Street. There was an all-star line-up of DEAN (Andrew Dean, Garry Dean, Stefan Dean, Nodrog Dean and Casio T Dean), who played in a corridor. It was, rumour has it, their 12th gig in 11 years.

Meanwhile, in another room, the Oats collective exhibited their art works. When I was about 19 I thought the Oats guys were the one of the coolest thing to come out of Hamilton. It was a little strange to see them being all old and parenty now, but the goodness was still there, as evidenced by Adrian Ganley’s giant Darkanus. Plus, there were free pies and free beer.