Category Archives: Northern Advocate Column

Northern Advocate Column

In a muddle over Facebook

27 June 2015

facebook1-1I’m all a muddle over Facebook. On the one hand I’m attracted to it, but I have big problems with it as well. To solve my dilemma I’ve been hoping it might just go away. So far, no luck.

Facebook can certainly be fun, empowering, informative, a way to connect with people you’re physically separated from, yet it’s also addictive, voyeuristic, a horrible time-waster, encourages narcissism, and is even anti-social thanks to smart phones. So conflicted am I that I’ve gone off Facebook, defriended everyone, and then a few months later friended people again. Hopeless.

Being someone who likes to communicate, preferably through the written word and images, Facebook seemed like the perfect vehicle. I’ve posted pictures of my children, shared photos of sunsets, attempted witty observations on life, bragged about the good things happening to me, shared articles that express my political views, and posted poems I’ve written (hoping they’ll go viral!). I’ve enjoyed seeing similar from people I cared about. All good, up to a point.

From my experience the relationships which existed primarily or exclusively online, no matter how much fun, flirtatious or intellectually stimulating, most often didn’t last. They burned brightly for shorter or longer periods of time, but there was an eventual fizzing out.

Facebook friendships may have the appearance of ease and conviviality, but lurking beneath are the same problems all human relationships have: unequal attractions and commitments, hurting people through a careless comment or not reciprocating in expected ways. If the relationship didn’t also exist face-to-face, there was a greater likelihood of it ending, with sadness, relief or disinterest.

The biggest mistake, however, I’ve made with Facebook is thinking I’d found a way to present my whole self to people. This is all of whom I am, everything I’m interested in and passionate about. But relationships are never based on the whole of ourselves―as much as we may long for that. Even with the person we share a bed with there’s still gaps you need to fill by being close to someone else who shares an interest or way of seeing the world. There’s no way, for instance, my partner is going to converse with me about the flaws in Brendon McCullum’s batting technique!

In friendships with people we are always presenting certain sides of ourselves, we know we should probably stay clear of talking about things that we have a strong difference of opinion. Prior to Facebook there were parts of my life which were virtually unknown to some friends, because those parts weren’t of interest to them. That didn’t negate the friendship, which had its basis in other shared experiences.

The temptation with Facebook is to present all of yourself to everyone. But that risks boring, angering or alienating people. We are different parts of ourselves when we’re with different people, as we should be. That’s part of being sensitive to who that person is. Status updates that go out to everyone don’t differentiate, they’re not sensitive to the individual person, which is surely the basis for an ongoing and evolving relationship. I can at least thank Facebook for learning that lesson.

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Northern Advocate Column

Shane Carter in Whangarei

30 May 2015

It’s clear to me that Whangarei has reached a cultural high-watermark moment. And it’s nothing to do with the Hundertwasser. It’s not the even the wonderful Hatea Loop Walkway, or indeed the Whangarei Growers’ Market. It’s not the many bustling cafés in this town, one of which I’m currently sitting in writing this piece. No, it’s the prospect of Shane Carter, frontman for the legendary Straitjacket Fits, playing live in Whangarei. I truly never thought I’d live to see the day that I’d be able to see my musical heroes in my own hometown.

The arts and music scene has been bubbling along nicely for a while now, thanks to the efforts of talented and dedicated local people. Many of whom might quite fancy living in the inner suburbs of a bigger city like Auckland, Melbourne or London. But oh well, if you can’t afford it, Whangarei will have to do. Why not try to create something of that big city vibe here.

I have to take my hat off to Jessica White and her team at The Old Stone Butter Factory for the music, performance, comedy, poetry and burlesque that’s being put on for our entertainment pleasure every week. The artists deserve to be supported, to encourage local talent and ensure those from other parts of the country (and overseas) keep coming back. Word is getting around New Zealand musicians that Whangarei now has a great live venue.

On Saturday 13th June when Shane Carter walks on stage with his electric guitar I’ll be very happy I didn’t have to make the trip to Auckland to see him, and that there’ll be people I know in the audience to share the experience with. I’m sure he’ll play classic songs from the late 80s/early 90s era of the Flying Nun label, when New Zealand indie rock bands were as good as any in the world, songs like Dialing a Prayer, She Speeds and Bad Note for a Heart.

As the global rock star he could have been, Carter had it all, good looks, a punk attitude and awesome ability on the guitar. It was the lyrics, though, that raised it to another level, sung by Carter in his sneering voice (think Elvis crossed with Johnny Rotten). Lyrically, he pushed and twisted the conventions of love songs, often dwelling on the darker side of love and obsession. Some songs were deeply mysterious and held together by memorable poetic images, like “No need to fight these things crawling inside/ Like slaters on dead wood/ Nothing’s forever so make sure it’s good” from Headwind, off the powerful and melodious 1991 album Melt.

On the night I’ll be calling out for a song I’ve never heard him play live, Brittle, a bluesy and moody number with a quirky guitar riff. This was the song Straitjacket Fits contributed to the 1993 compilation album No Alternative, produced by the US-based AIDS awareness organisation Red Hot. Other contributors were Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Soundgarden, Beastie Boys and Nirvana.   

But no matter what the setlist, I’ll be there dancing joyfully on the inside, imagining I could be in any cool inner city music venue in the world. And yet I’ll be in Whangarei, which will make the night even sweeter.

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Art, Northern Advocate Column

Window cleaning with Billy Apple

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16 May 2015

With the sun getting lower in the sky I’ve noticed how dirty the windows of our house are. The dust, grime and insect droppings are showing up marvelously, backlit by sunlight. I need to clean them.

Cleaning windows is something I actually quite enjoy. And each time I’m reminded of one of my favourite artworks by the New Zealand artist Billy Apple. 

In the 1970s, Billy Apple ran a gallery in New York that was a cutting-edge space for the emerging conceptual and non-object art movements. Artists like Apple were questioning every preconception about art. They were rebelling against the idea that art was a precious, crafted commodity, bought in galleries and displayed in homes or rarified museum halls. Part of this critique was the idea that art and life might somehow be fused in the creative act of the artist. The implication was that everyone could use their imagination to perform symbolic acts to re-shape and re-present their world. At the time it was an exciting idea. 

One work by Billy Apple involved picking up broken glass from selected streets in New York and displaying the piles on the floor of his gallery. What was the art experience here? Was it in the act of picking up the broken glass, often with the help of neighbourhood kids? Was it the piles of “beautiful” shards displayed in the gallery? Was it the photos recording the action that we can still look at today? Or was it just the idea that the artist had done such a thing? 

So back to cleaning windows. This was an act Apple performed in April, 1973. Wearing a striking yellow shirt, he was photographed polishing the inside of a window in his gallery. What the hell you might ask. But if you suspend judgement for a moment and think about the act and objects involved metaphorically, there’s something happening here. There’s light, colour and composition for starters.  

For myself, I think about the human desire to beautify and control our lived environment. In this case, to have windows which are clear and spotless. Often though our attempts to beautify or alter the world do not last. The window that Apple cleans will get dirty again. What’s more the glass surface on the other side, storeys up from the New York streets, remains dirty. As an individual we can only change so much about our world, so much is beyond our power to affect. Yet in the face of this, the individual creative act―the artist’s or our own―is still important, defiant even.  

After cleaning the windows of my house I stand back proudly and appreciate their shining clarity. I know, however, that almost immediately the car fumes, the dust and dirt, will start to build up again. There’s a tinge of sadness that comes with fragile beauty. It’s not too much of a leap to think of cleaning windows as a metaphor for our own temporal and fragile existence. It’s with a smile that I recall the mortal artist in his yellow skivvy reaching upwards to clean the very top part of the gallery window―it’s somehow life affirming. 

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Northern Advocate Column

Country music, the stuff of life

18 April 2015

The twangs and rhythms of country music were etched into my childhood. It was on the radio, on the large stereo in the lounge, blasting from speakers, which as a small child were taller than I was. And on TV of course―Dolly Parton, for various reasons, was fascinating, and Kenny Rogers with his immaculately trimmed beard. 

But mostly it was in the backseat of the car on family trips. I remember a six cassette tape set with a title like Country Greats. There was plenty of the polished Nashville sound, but also darker stuff like Johnny Cash’s I Walk the Line. And songs that told stories of another world, like El Paso by Marty Robbins, which was magic to a kid who loved watching the westerns that screened regularly on TV in the weekends. Here was a mythical America, which through exposure―and the lack of anything else very mythical―meant something to a boy growing up in suburban Whangarei. There was lots I didn’t like. A certain steel guitar sound (you know it) always made me feel a bit sick in the stomach―though that might be my musical memories mixing with my memory of queasiness traveling winding Northland roads.

As a teenager, country music was the antithesis of good music. Never-the-less when at university in Auckland, and delving deep into the alternative music scene, I still thought it would be a good idea to go with my father to see Johnny Cash and June Carter at the Auckland Town Hall. To my surprise it remains one of the best concerts I’ve been to. Great songs, slick musicians and the charisma of Cash and Carter had me hooked. Soon after I discovered Alt Country, with new bands like Uncle Tupelo and Wilco becoming passionate favourites.

The best country music is rooted in the combination of simple rhythms and melodies, with lyrics that are often about sadness, loss and heartache. It’s been said that country music is the blues for white people. It’s that balance between dark and light, joy and sorrow, that makes it sound true. 

So when I found out that New Zealand country music star Tami Neilson was playing at The Old Stone Butter Factory in town I had to go. There were three support acts whose musicianship was equal to the main act. They sung curious original songs that mixed a world and sound from a distant America with observations and experiences of life in this country in the 21st century. I guess love gone wrong is universal. 

Neilson, as one of her songs says, is a dynamite of a woman with a great vocal range. There were sad love songs, but also happy ones belted out to an infectious rockabilly beat that had people up and dancing. 

Surveying the mixture of ages in the audience I wondered how many of the younger crowd had grown up listening to their parent’s country music collections, who once knew all the words to Jolene, singing along in the back of the car on a dusty country road heading on a family summer holiday. The lyrics, a barely understood but intriguing glimpse into a complex adult world of jealously and desire. It’s the stuff of life that never goes away, like country music.  

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Northern Advocate Column

Planting trees for a Restoration Agriculture

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Plant trees, trees and more trees. That should be one response to climate change and the world food crisis according to Mark Shepard, the author of Restoration Agriculture (2013). This interesting book (available at the Whangarei Public Library) is based on Shepard’s experience of implementing permaculture ideas on his 106 acre farm in Wisconsin, USA.

The first chapters layout the problems with dominant agricultural practices, what Shepard calls “the agriculture of eradication”―the eradication of eco-systems, species diversity, precious water supplies and soil vitality―the result of an over reliance on annual crops and a global food economy that encourages monoculture farming.

To maintain profitability the trend around the world has been for larger farms and plantations that use a cocktail of chemical sprays and artificial fertilisers, and require extensive fossil fuel inputs. I recently visited a farm in South Canterbury. There was one farmer, plus at least five large petrol guzzling vehicles, along with numerous other mechanised technologies, including massive irrigators spanning the land.

Faced with the ultimate dead-end of industrial agriculture, Shepard says we should act now in our backyards, on our farms, in the abandoned spaces of our urban and rural environments, to transition to a perennial agriculture that he says can feed the world. He argues that extensive planting of fruit and nut trees combined with rotational livestock management can surpass the calorie returns of growing annual crops of rice, wheat, corn and other grains (large quantities used globally to feed animals).

As much as possible―given the limits of climate and geographical location―Shepard believes we should aspire to replicate the savannah-type ecosystem: trees and shrubs, spaced with open areas of grass for a range of animals. Our main domesticated animals (sheep, goats, pigs, cows, poultry, are all originally savannah animals). Savannahs support more life by weight than any other environment.

The fruit and nut trees not only supply food, but also maintain water in the land. Rain falling onto trees hits leaves, where some water is absorbed, before dripping down through the canopy to a ground rich in organic material, which absorbs water rather than seeing it run off the land or simply evaporating. Combined with the animal manure that’s no longer washed away into rivers and creeks, you’ve got a living soil with essential minerals maintained on the land. And trees of course remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, vital if we’re going to prevent the worst extremes of global warming.

There’s a lot of detail in Shepard’s book, but the basic principle is that we need to revolutionise food production by striving to imitate nature and create living eco-systems.Shepard believes that we can’t wait for governments, and in his words “we can’t relinquish the revolutionary power of one and wait for a hoped for perfect organisation to form.” Planting trees is something most of us can do.

There’s still money to be made from “the agriculture of eradication”―but only for so long. Then the land, the communities, will have to be healed. That process, however, can start now with the digging of every hole and tree planted.

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Art, Northern Advocate Column

John Foster’s ‘Four Seasons on the Farm’

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4 April 2015

I actually chuckled. That was my initial reaction to running my eyes over John Foster’s large mural with many, many sheep.

How delightfully incongruous it was to see in the rarefied space of an art gallery something so seemingly mundane as life on a sheep farm. Sheep being sheared, drenched, corralled, giving birth, dying, and just milling about eating grass. 

Four Seasons on the Farm is currently installed at the Whangarei Art Museum. The artist, unsurprisingly, was also a sheep farmer on a property near Wellsford. Foster painted the work, which stretches 14.4 metres, from 1980 to 1984 in a farm shed converted into a studio.

There are 365 panels depicting events and scenes on the farm over the course of the year. Grey fence posts divide the mural into 12 months. The seasons flow from the ochre shades of late summer through to the greening grass of autumn, the greyness and mud of winter, and the rejuvenation of colour in spring and early summer.

Everything you could imagine happening on a farm is represented. It’s a narrative of life and death. In a prominently positioned panel a ram mounts an indifferent looking ewe. In the August section an extended sequence of panels shows the birth of lambs, painted a special golden yellow. 

Further on there’s a panel where lambs have bloodied ears and butts from docking and tagging. Grim, but visually dramatic, as are the pictures of sheep corpses amid scenes of idyllic rural beauty and ever changing weather.

Foster has successfully imbued life on a sheep farm with epic qualities. It’s a bit like Game of Thrones, the beauty and violence, and winter is always coming. The rain-jacketed man on the motorbike a craggy and heroic Warden of the North.

But what kept me engaged with this large work was the way it was painted.  It’s rugged and raw, as befitting its subject matter. The paint is smeared and plastered on.

The scenes are at turn cartoon-like and impressionistic. There’s no refined perspective and detailed shading. Everything is flat on the picture frame and pushing out at you. The influences of New Zealand painters Colin McCahon, Toss Wollaston and Pat Hanly is strong.

My delight in the work undoubtedly comes from the contrast it offers from the images we see on our screens. It’s got to the point that I’ve developed almost a nausea at viewing digital photographs. Such is the saturation that digital imagery has achieved over the last decade. The early 1980s seems like a distant and far simpler age.

And that’s the thing about art, sometimes it develops meaning and importance that could not have been envisaged by the artist. Times change, our experiences change and then shift the way we see things.

I recommend leaving your phones at home and taking the time to go and see Four Seasons on a Farm. Revel in a different visual experience that makes you want to touch, smell and hear the world.

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