Monthly Archives: February 2009

Last.fm knows all my secrets

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Last.fm is a cool web service that takes a feed from your music player (like iTunes) and figures out what you’re listening to and makes lists and graphs and shares it with your friends.

The only problem is, I listen to most music on my iPod, which isn’t hooked up to Last.fm, so it gets all the songs I listen to on my laptop. And I’ve come to realise that when I listen to music on my laptop, it tends to be something I’m currently obsessing over.

It seems like a rather teenage thing to do – you acquire a new song (or album) that you love and then play it over and over and over again because it is just the best song in the entire world.

As a result, my Last.fm top songs list is skewed to all these songs that I’ve briefly gone mental over in the last five years. And it’s a bit embarrassing because I don’t necessarily have the same feelings or connection to those tunes any more.

But I’m just going to live with it and present my top 10 songs, according to Last.fm, and exactly why it was that I listened to them so obsessively at the time.

1. The Cribs – You’re Gonna Lose Us
I was on holiday in Napier with my laptop but not my iPod. I’d just discovered the Cribs, so every night when I was hanging out in my hotel room, I’d listen to the Cribs’ first two albums. So now I have this strong association between rowdy pop songs with shout-along choruses and Napier. Better than art deco.

2. The Smiths – Back to the Old House
This is nothing more than my favourite Smiths song. It’s a bit sad and wistful and nostalgic, but it’s all about not wallowing in the past because “there’s too many bad memories”. I used to listen to this a lot in my old flat in Mt Eden, so it serves as a nice precaution for any attempts at pining after Auckland.

3. 1200 Techniques – Karma
This song reminds me of driving down a deserted South-Western Motorway in the middle of the night, smokin’ cigarettes, the warm night breeze coming through the window… yet this is an entirely false memory. Instead I’m left with some Australians rapping about karma over Hot Chocolate’s Brother Louie.

4. Van Halen – Panama
I think I can blame this on the Van Halen binge I went on after watching the “Freaks and Geeks” boxset. This song is awesome because a) it has nothing to do with Panama, b) “Panama-uh-uh-uh-oh-oh”, and c) Diamond Dave’s “sex in a car as metaphor for sex in general” monologue (“I reach down between my legs and ease the seat back”).

5. Scandal with Patty Smyth – The Warrior
There’s an episode of The Family Guy where one of the nonsequitor cutaways is of “Stewie’s iPod commercial”, which shows him doing the iPod silhouette dance to “The Warrior”. Just that little 15-second burst of the song was enough to trigger some long repressed memory, and before long I was obsessively listening to what is possibly the worst line in a pop song ever: “Your eyes touch me physically.” Literally.

6. Morrissey – Glamorous Glue
I saw this on a late night music video show and realised that somehow it had previously passed me by (as has much of Morrissey’s solo oeuvre). It’s got a lurching T-Rex-esque glam rock sound, but what of the lyrics? Apparently the song is about drinking, solvent abuse (which is not glamorous, kids), semen, the 1992 British general election, or all of the above. I just like the bit where he sings “everyone lies, nobody minds” and “London is dead! London is dead! London is dead!”.

7. Robbie Williams – Lazy Days
In the Britpop documantary “Live Forever”, this song is played near the end, when the guitar-based bands were losing popularity in the late ’90s to pop groups and solo artists such as Mr Williams. I scribbled down some lyrics in the darkness of the Rialto cinema to lead me back to it. It’s rather a Britpoppy song, with lots of chuggy guitar, but sadly the fat dancer from Take That went off in another direction when a later single, “Angels”, proved to be a massive megahit.

8. Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict a Riot
I believe “Never Mind the Buzzcocks” is to blame for this tune, with it being used in the Introductions round. And then that lead to me listening to the song, then buying the album, then becoming totally obsessed with it, until now I’m thinking, “Whoa, it’s five years old?”

9. Stevie Wonder – Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing
Nik sang this on series two of NZ Idol. The teens on the internet were all, “wtf iz diz old ppl song i do not no it!!!!”, whereas I thought, “Hey, that’s an uplifting tune I haven’t heard in a while.” It’s nice to be reminded of Stevie Wonder’s older songs that didn’t suck, even though it’s hard to listen to this one without being reminded of the “Sex and the City” theme tune.

10. The Replacements – Alex Chilton
See, I love the Replacements, but my love for the ‘Mats is mostly centred around their “Let It Be” album. Then one day I decided to let the internet guide me to the best songs off other albums, and that’s how I found “Alex Chilton”. It’s so cheerful and upbeat, and it’s really just about loving music, which seems like a good enough place to be.

The needles and the damage undone

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I showed up to Cuba Mall on Saturday. It was packed with people, but I found a small oasis of calm in the form of the Outdoor Knit area. It was manned by Knitsch and stiX who were hard at work knitting.

Outdoor Knit is the local variant of that international scene (also known as guerrilla knitting) where, well, people knit things and sew them around urban objects such as lampposts, park bench slats, rails and trees.

The little grove of trees outside the Bristol was getting well covered with colourful bits of knitting. One of the knitters asked me if I wanted to join in. “Oh, I can’t knit,” I said. I’d sort of learned back in the mid ’90s, but hadn’t touched a pair of needles for almost 15 years.

But the knitter wouldn’t accept that as an answer, cast on for me, reminded me of the basic stitch and – must to my surprise – I started knitting. I did a few rows before wandering off to explore the rest of the carnival.

Later in the noon I returned and thought it would be a really good idea to do some knitting. I was given a piece that someone else had started – a long skinny grey bit, about 10 stitches wide. I sat down and merrily started knitting.

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It’s rather satisfying to do. It’s one of those activities where you can just let your mind wander and start making up raps about public transport while you work.

As I was sitting there, lots of carnivalgoers passed by, including those who saw the knitting and wanted to join in. Quite a few older ladies were lured by the needles and quickly started firing off complicated patterns. One girl even started plotting out letters in her knitting, which seems to me like a very advanced move. And lots of people just wandered over and thought it would be fun to have a go, including a lovely young man who’d never knitted before, but soon he was churning out an orange strip, courtesy of some expert tuition from the crew.

Quite a few people stopped to take photos of the knitters and knitting. Seriously, everyone has a DLSR camera these days and everyone feels like they’re taking serious documentary photos that will capture a certain moment in the history of the early 20st century or something. But isn’t it a bit more fun to be most than a passive observer? Isn’t it just a bit more fun for your experience to be something you did, rather than just a photo of something someone else did?

Other people did stop to ask what was going on. I’d tell them it was knitted graffiti, which some people had trouble understanding. A lot of people thought it was some sort of organised knitting group and didn’t seem to realise that most of us had literally just walked in off the street. And the idea of knitting something that had no practical use also seemed to perplex people.

As I continued knitting my piece, it seemed to be getting wider. My 10-stitch-wide knitting had somehow become 30 stitches wide. Say what? Turns out I was stabbing my needle through the loosely twisted wool. But I as quite happy to have made a triangle. Soon enough I had finished off the small ball and sewed it around a tree.

I eyed my wonky grey triangle with a certain sense of satisfaction. It feels good to create something, and thanks to Knitsch and stiX, I did! Now all I need to do is learn to cast on and off, then if civilisation crumbles, I’ll at least be able to knit wonky grey trousers for trees.

Photo from Outdoor Knit’s Flickr stream.

I went to Webstock and I all got was a brown t-shirt

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I spent three days last week at the glorious Webstock conference. I was there as a volunteer, so I got to do such cool things as helping with the registration, showing speakers to the conference rooms, making sure the big doors in the Town Hall didn’t slam and looking after the Pleo.

Actually being on the rego desk was good. I got to meet some people I’d only previously known online, and a few people I hadn’t seen for ages. (It’s surprisingly low-key these days doing the online-offline meet.)

I got to met Derek Powazek and Heather Champ, both of whom have been doing cool things online for longer than I have. Derek founded The Fray back in the olden days, one of the first sites that brought together people to tell stories online. I tried not to go all fangirl when I met him, but I couldn’t quite hold it back.

As I was there as a volunteer, I couldn’t necessarily see all the sessions I wanted to. I found myself doing the timing for Matt Biddulph’s talk called “Hardware Hacking For Fun and Profit”. It sounded really lame, but within minutes I started remembering all the fun I had soldering when I was a kid. And I remembered the Vic-20 joystick my dad made out of a pineapple can lid, a kitchen sponge, a block of wood, some screws and wires. I left with a desire to pimp my clock-radio.

You know what I’m into right now? Dancing! Game designer Jane McGonigal had a cool theory of dancing that was behind her Top Secret Dance Off game. Basically, it’s really humiliating to dance in front of other people; if you see someone dancing badly in front of you, you sort of enjoy their humiliation; and if you dance badly with a group of people, you enjoy the shared humiliation. So lately I’ve been dancing badly quite a lot and really enjoying it.

Another unexpected Webstock pleasure was designer Matt Jones. He started off by mentioning Ken Hollings’ “Welcome To Mars” book, architect Richard Rogers, and that future cities book, which just happen to be three of my favourite things. He talked about the past’s version of the future and the present and the present’s version of the future and robots.

Just to prove how geeky everyone there was, there was a sort of hidden layer to the conference – all the discussions taking place on Twitter. Especially during Bruce Sterling’s controversial 2.0 buzzkill talk, I kind of tuned out of listening to him and instead followed the Twitter chat dissecting it.

Twitter tangent: It’s hard for new users to get Twitter because when you first create and account you’re face with a dull blank screen. You have to put in a bit of effort and just sit with it for a few weeks until you figure out both how it works and how you want to use it. And that is a bit of a hurdle, which in turns probably keeps out people who would be bad twitterers anyway.

Ze Frank. was the total rock star of Webstock. His presentation, summarising the projects he does online, ended up being really emotional at points and people cried and it was really beautiful and we are all so in love with the Ze right now.

Webstock ended with the closing night party, starring the Trons – the best band to come out of Hamilton.

I realised that while there were lots of smart, inspiring speakers, what I liked the best was just being around other people who get the web; people who know that a content producer is not an “IT guru” (whatever that is – oh man, I have stories). I came away from Webstock not just feeling inspired, but really glad to be part of the web.

Pleo photo by Keith Bolland
Webstock photo montage by kiwikeith

A weekend in the muntryside

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The warm night air blew down Victoria Street. As I crossed the road, I saw a giant penis waddling down Manners Mall, testicles jauntily lurching from side to side. It was Wellington Sevens weekend. I ducked down a side street and fled to the safety of my flat.

All I knew about the Wellington Sevens was that it was some sort of rugby tournament and spectators wore costumes to the games. Indeed, I hadn’t really given it much thought until a few weeks before when people started asking me if I was going to the Sevens. “Uh, no. Should I?” I’d ask. “Oh my God! It’s so much fun! This year we’re all dressing up as sexy pirates!”

Nothing could quite persuade me to go, but I thought I’d check out what life was like on the streets of Wellington around Sevens weekend.

Over at the Wellingtonista, the Masked Barfly had given fair warning of the munter component that Sevens attracts, with his/her Waitangi Weekend Venn Diagram, but I just didn’t realise how extremely muntery it would turn out to be.

Friday was the first day of the Sevens, so I went for a stroll along Cuba Street. Already I spotted Afro wigs and women in slutty dresses. Oh, hang on – let’s paraphrase that quote from “Mean Girls” about Halloween costumes:

Sevens is the one time of year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.

So Cuba Mall was full of Sevens-goers in their costumes. There was also a group performing a bit from a Fringe Festival play. Someone dressed as a road cone walked up to the performers and sat down, attempting to bring some hilariousness to the performance. When the performers acknowledged the road cone and started to incorporate it into their stuff, the road cone seemed to freak out and rapidly waddled away.

“Hey bro, hey bro. That place has $3 tequilas, so we should go there later.” – Papa Smurf (or at least someone wearing a lot of blue paint).

I took a walk along the waterfront and witnessed the following:

  • Guantánamo Bay prisoners (orange overalls and – oh dear – a teatowel on the head
  • A Buddhist monk peeing in a bush, while having his photo taken by a Buddhist monkette.
  • A man in a white lycra tights who had adjusted his crotch so much that the green paint on his hands had left marks all around his groin.
  • Sexy pirates, sexy Marmite jars, sexy beer cans and sexy Taranaki residents.
  • A man wearing only shoes, socks and an Afro wig, who’d just jumped into the harbour. Something about the water being quite cold.

As I looked around all the costume-wearing Sevens fans, I started to realise something. While people were wearing fancy dress costumes, they weren’t wearing costumes as individuals; they were wearing costumes as part of a group.

It seems that there’s some sort of unwritten rule of Sevens that you have to wear exactly the same costume as your whole group of friends. So it’s not just one woman dressed as a sexy pirate, but a dozen sexy pirates, all wearing the exactly the same tartan skirt, the same billowy shirt and the same sexy pirate cutlass.

So there are all these groups of people where everyone is wearing exactly the same thing. Just like school, just like the armed forces.

I tried to figure out why this is, and I came up with a theory. New Zealanders have a slight aversion to standing out. So the group costume lets you dress up but not stand out. A bloke can dress as a fairy princess, but because all his mates are also wearing exactly the same fluffy pink tutus, no one will pay any attention to how he is dressed as an individual. It’s like, I am Spartacus, and so are my nine other mates who ordered these hilarious Roman slave costumes off the internet.

By Saturday, the clones were starting to freak me out a little. I walked around a corner and found myself in the middle of a group of blonde beauty queens, yet their blondeness and sameness reminded me more of “Village of the Damned”. Oh, I had to get away from it all!

I headed to the train station, fighting my way through Tangy Fruits, SWAT team cops and sexy nurses, and took the train to Porirua. Sweet Porirua. I visited Pataka – the local art museum – and went for a walk along the harbour. It was nice to be out of the city.

Back in Wellington in the early evening, I realised the neighbourhood was soon going to be swamped with boozed-up munters. So I hunkered down in my bedroom, while the sounds of drunken people (“Nrrrrrgh! Fuuuuck! Maaaaaaangh! Fuuuuck!”) and a Led Zeppelin covers band echoed throughout the city.

This morning I found broken glass everywhere, a street sign bent at a 45 degree angle and a hearty puddle of spew – and that was just down my street.

Next year, I swear, I’m going to leave town during Sevens weekend.

25 things

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It’s that “25 things about me” list. Back in the olden days, the days of LiveJournal, these used to go around all the time and I’d never do them. But now it’s on Facebook, which is social media and cool, etc, so I’ll do it too.

Incidentally, this has taken me over six hours to write.

1. I can write backwards almost as well as I can forwards. I taught myself how to do it when I was 20, after seeing “The Last Seduction” and being impressed that the main character could do it (among other things).

2. Auckland suburbs I lived in, in chronological order: Parnell, Grey Lynn, Mt Eden, Newton, Mt Eden, St Mary’s Bay, before finally settling (ha!) in Mt Eden. All are within 5km of the city centre. I like to be within walking distance of the city and not reliant on a car.

3. My mother’s mother’s side of the family was dead posh Devonport stock, but my morphine addict great-grandpappy ended up drinking away the family fortune.

4. The first boy I had a crush on was Adam Ant, circa “Goody Two Shoes“. Sadly it didn’t work out – I was 8, he was 20 years older than me, lived in England and didn’t know I existed. I grew up disappointed at most men’s refusal to wear eyeliner.

5. I don’t like beaches. This probably makes me a bad New Zealander. It’s mainly the sand, but also the wind. Sand is, as a wise man once said, just dirt with better PR.

6. I grew up in a rural area on a “lifestyle” section. I don’t know what kind of lifestyle it was supposed to be – all I remember was feeling oppressed by its emptiness, and having an eternal longing to live in a city. I didn’t want a pony; I wanted concrete and public transport and people.

7. I’ve always like the culture of writing and photography around surfer and skater culture, even though I’m a complete outsider to surfing and skating. Dude.

8. I’ve never really had a nickname, possibly because Robyn is itself a diminutive of Robert (ugh!). But someone once called me Bob Marley, which was funny in a not-actually-funny kind of way.

9. If I travel overseas, I want to explore. I could never be satisfied relaxing by a hotel pool.

10. I received news of the 9/11 attacks on 11 September as I was in Melbourne. I was in bed, reading David Sedaris’s book “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, and was actually more interested in reading that than hearing about, woteva, some guy who’d flown a plane into a building.

11. I am a published poet, though under a pseudonym. I have also performed poetry in Newcastle, Australia, and spoken word in Melbourne. I am evidently depriving New Zealand audiences of my talent.

12. I really like living in Wellington. It feels like I am actively living here, rather than it just being where I happen to reside. I should also note that my 11 years in Auckland were splendid, but in a different way.

13. I’m a bit superstitious, which annoys me.

14. Best present – the Walkman I got for my 11th birthday. Suddenly music became more complex, lyrics clearer and so much more enjoyable. I eventually moved on to a CD Walkman, then an iPod. It’s portable pleasure.

15. The first building that thrilled me was the Beehive. On a family holiday in Paraparaumu in 1983, we got the train to Wellington. Straight out of the train station, I looked up and saw the Beehive and I got chills – moderne classical brutalist chills.

16. I left Hamilton in 1997 after I realised I just didn’t want to live there any longer. The last straw was when I was walking home along Clyde Street and someone in a car threw the slushy remains of a McDonald’s Coke at me. That did it.

17. I have Trinity College London’s level eight certificate in choral speaking. This consisted of performing an abridged version of Janet Frame’s short story “The Reservoir” (without the bit about condoms) and Keith Thorsen’s poem “Chit Chat“… for what good it did me.

18. I once lived on Karangahape Road. One night when I was walking home, a crusty old drunk asked me if I’d have sex with him for money. I got a bit depressed, thinking “Is that really the kind of clientele I’d attract if I were a ho?” Cos, you know, I’d always envisioned myself as one of those high-class prostitute types.

19. I’ve been thanked in the acknowledgements for a book that won a Montana Book Award, after lending the author my MC OJ and the Rhythm Slave CD. Though the book I was thanked in wasn’t the book I helped with, because the author forgot.

20. When I was in Paris, I chose to visit Disneyland over Notre Dame. I threw a euro coin into Skull Rock Cove and wished for a messy, complicated love.

21. Growing up in Hamilton in the ’80s, my two favourite weekend outings were visiting the Building Centre – especially for the fountain of taps, the insulation demonstration and the Fanta machine – and going to the liquor store with Dad. Again, I stress “Hamilton” and “’80s”.

22. Someone once described me as screwball. Initially I resisted the label, but then I realised I wouldn’t be resisting it if it wasn’t true.

23. I’ve only wanted to be married at one point in my life: in 1998 I decided it would be good to be married so if a fellow hit on me, I could get all outraged and say, “Excuse me, but I am a happily married woman!” Otherwise, (conventional) marriage doesn’t appeal because it would involve me being a wife.

24. I’ve been to one polytech and two universities, but I never got around to completing any degrees. I have, however, had some of my writing used as course reading for a first-year English paper at the University of Auckland. I’m going to hold out for an honorary degree.

25. I’m a great believer in self-mythology and the ability to alter the past, present or future simply by writing down how you remember your story.