Snow White - armed and dangerous

How many little girls must have grown up on those old Disney cartoons starring pretty ladies in danger – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Well it’s time to forget all that sweetness, for new movies are demolishing the dreamy myths.
Epic action-adventure story Snow white and the Huntsman is due out next year. About all that remains from the old story is that Snow White is far too beautiful and the evil queen is out to destroy her. But what the queen, played with blonde menace by Charlize Theron, does not know is that the pretty one has been getting martial-arts training from the very man who’s supposed to be killing her.
So forget Disney’s heroine in puffy sleeves with the perky red bow in her bobbed black hair. Here’s the new Snow White, all grimly armoured up with sharp sword like some latter-day Joan of Arc, ready to hack her enemies to pieces. The archetypal sweet and helpless girl has gone, swept up in the new admiration for Kill Bill-style heroines. You could say, of course, that it was time those dippy Disney heroines toughened up a bit, but I'm kind of uneasy about easily we've got used to girls adept at shooting, stabbing and kung fu kicking.
There is still a prince in the new Snow White movie, though now that the girl herself is so lethal it’s hard to know what purpose he'll serve. Small men are in the cast too, but undoubtedly they won't have cozy names like Happy, Sleepy and Dopy.
The movie's bound to be technically brilliant but the trailer looks oh so dark and certainly not anything you’ll want your five-year-old to see. But given that the movie stars Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series, it's clear the movie's made for teenagers.
What's next, I wonder – a version of Cinderella where she’s water-boarded by the stepsisters, or a Sleeping Beauty being raped by aliens? Tell you what, audiences would probably lap it up. Especially if the heroine gets to wreak bloody vengeance in the end. And meanwhile we keep on wondering why schoolgirls are so ready today to start fights and punch people.

Eleven eleven eleven

Friday! Here it comes - 11-11-11. It's a date some people are slightly nervous about, and even ecstatic about if they're seeing it as a pivotal moment in the evolution of mankind, as is the case for lots of Mayan Calendar watchers.
Numerologists are excited about it too - check out this article by Christine deLorey for instance. She says, "we are at an important moment in time and there is more to it than meets the eye."
11:11 of course famously marked a huge moment in 1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was when the Armistice was signed, thus ending the terrible Great War.
Why does a gaggle of elevens have the power to grab us? Maybe it's a hangover from the past. The number eleven was apparently regarded with some dread in medieval times, when numbers were often held to have mystical significance. There's even a new horror movie called 11-11-11, based on a widely reported 11:11 phenomenon, which is all about people constantly noticing that time on digital clocks.
Behavioural scientists say that rather than feeling something special is going on we should put our 11:11 alertness down to something called apophenia, which is the brain’s tendency to look for meaningful patterns in the world around us. Example: When women are dying to get pregnant they notice other women pushing baby buggies in the street and think they're everywhere, when in fact there are no more than there ever were. Or, anyone thinking about buying a red Honda will be noticing them all over the place too.
There are positive aspects for the date. Because some people really like the idea of 11-11-11 there are lots of weddings planned for the big day (almost 4000 scheduled in Las Vegas). And in New York they've poured extra effort into organizing Friday's Corduroy Appreciation Day, that being of course the date that most resembles the parallel lines in corduroy fabric. At one big party the required dress code is anything in corduroy... and course there's an 11-piece band.
Once Friday's over we can, hopefully, relax for another hundred years until 11-11-11 comes round again. That’s assuming of course we get through 2012.

Flying in 1950s style

I wrote about Pan Am (the airline) in a recent blog, which prompted my brother to send me some great pics of old planes that he found on the website of Motat, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. I love this one, showing the dining set-up in a Solent flying boat. The aircraft - currently under restoration at Motat and the only surviving Mark IV Solent in the world - represented "the pinnacle of luxury flying boat airliners".
We all aspire to fly business Class today but back in the 1950s when the Solent took tourists over the Tasman to Australia and on the Coral Route to Tahiti, the whole plane was business class.
Check out the decor in soft lemon and dove grey, the tables spread with white linen, fine china and glassware. Look closely and you can see the TEAL logo on the glasses (TEAL being the forerunner of Air New Zealand - short for Tasman Empire Airways Ltd).
Elaborate meals were apparently cooked on board and it all looks like the 45 passengers enjoyed an elegance that's hard to find today.
Mind you, you'd have needed something to pass the time. There was, after all, no inflight entertainment, so if you forgot to take a good book there was nothing to do but wait to get there. They weren't quick, cruising at around 400kmh; the Auckland-Sydney flight took five and a half hours. And the planes could go no higher than 17,000 feet which must have meant they had to batter their way through some hefty weather systems. There must, at times, have been a whole lotta rattling of that china going on.
When I was a kid I lived at the foot of Upland Road in Remuera, quite a long way from Auckland harbour but still close enough to be able to hear the flying boats on their lumbering take-off runs, those four 2000 horsepower engines roaring like fury as the pilots pushed them to maximum power to lift the plane off the water. I can still hear them now.

Why world class?

You might have noticed, if you’ve read anything recently about plans for Auckland’s future, that our leaders yearn for us to be a world-class city. Over and over we hear about our world-class art gallery, world-class food, world-class coffee, world-class design, world-class just about anything you can think of. It’s the highest accolade we have. Who started this world-class talk? They need a good smack. World class sounds like a category of aircraft seating. It also makes us sound like a bunch of wanna-be’s. No-one in a major city like Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin or San Francisco, would ever use a tag like that because they already know who they are. They know they are indeed somewhere in the world. Do we think we are somehow not of the world? It reveals in us such a lack of self confidence. It’s like the old bragging we used to hear in New Zealand about things here being the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. It smacks of small-country cringe. Enough already! Time to stop being so try-hard. “World-class” needs to be banned.

A woman's heart explained

I have to thank Maria Popova, curator of the wonderfully curious site, brainpickings.org, for this lovely Victorian illustration. Popova scours the web constantly looking for interesting things. This "Map of the Open Country of a Woman's Heart" is the work of one DW Kellogg and was drawn some time around the 1830s. You can find more beautiful maps here.

But this map - how intriguing it is to me, especially after spending so much time lately in old newspaper archives as I researched social life in my home town, Auckland, in the 1880s. It was so much a man's world then. At least by the 1880s activism was starting to show its face. By then a few lady doctors were touring the world giving lectures on health to female audiences who were probably completely ignorant of the workings of their own bodies. Some women were beginning to call for the abolition of smoking. There was even an Anti Plumage League, whose members were outraged at the killing of birds so their feathers could be used as hat adornments.
But 40 years earlier, a woman's heart - at least according to this fanciful map - was a morass of sentiment and vanity. The largest font sizes are reserved for her vanities - love of dress, love of display and love of admiration. There are lands labelled Coquetry, Selfishness, Sentimentality, Affectation and Fickleness.
The lower right quadrant goes give the woman's heart a little praise. It contains (if in small letters) Hope, Enthusiasm, Good Sense, Discrimination and Prudence, close to the border of the Country of Solid Worth. It does tend to balance up the opposing border marking the Land of Oblivion. Too much laudanum, perhaps?

When flying was fun

Out of America’s TV factory comes the latest hot show, Pan Am, inspired by that long-ago time in aviation when flying was glamorous and people dressed up to get on a plane. Pan Am, just launched in the US, is a drama series set in the 1960s about aircrew members’ lives.
Retro themes are big right now and viewers are loving stories set in more confident times when Kennedy was in the Oval Office, America ruled the world and the future looked assured. Even if they were clueless about ending the Vietnam war.
Pan American Airlines was all over the globe back in the ‘60s, and flying deep down to the South Pacific even earlier than that. Here’s a New Zealand newspaper ad from the 1950s.
The words give you a taste of flying in the piston-engine age. The Boeing 707 was still a far-off, jet-fuelled dream when the Strato Clipper was the queen of the air – its “four giant engines” boasting a range of 4000 miles, “more than double the average non-stop flight”.
But even so its power wasn’t beefy enough to get you to Hawaii in one leap, so if you flew Pan Am across the Pacific and the United States to London, you had to island-hop with Fiji as the first stop. Crossing the world took at least five days and cost a lot of money; in that era long-distant travel usually meant going by sea.
Perks available in business class today were standard back then – “superb meals” with complimentary champagne, and “a choice of individual sleeping accommodation to the USA at no extra charge”. The Clipper even foreshadowed the 747 in having two decks connected by a spiral staircase.
The ‘stewardesses’ wore pale blue suits, white gloves and polite smiles. Captains were veterans of World War II. Passport control was casual. Security was a breeze.
No-one was x-raying your suitcase, taking your fingerprints or demanding you carry lip balm and eye drops in a plastic bag. It seems like a sweet dream to us now.
How impossible it would have been for Pan Am staffers of those days to imagine the day in 1988 when a jet in that familiar blue livery would lie smashed to pieces in a village called Lockerbie, brought down by a terrorist bomb.
Dear old Pan Am, founded in 1927, was an icon of the 20th century but, bankrupt and struggling, it was forced to close its doors in 1991.
Makes you realise it’s smart to enjoy life’s good things while they last.

HOT HISTORY COMING UP

ONE WEEK TO GO before my Auckland talks on what a humming town this was in the 1880s. Your ancestors flirted and laughed and gossiped when they weren’t being outraged and appalled. Some things were just too “utterly utter”, as they used to say back then.
You can hear more about this from me during the upcoming Auckland Heritage Festival.
I’m giving two fun presentations (see dates below) at the Auckland City and Takapuna Libraries about the era when women could be jailed for wearing trousers, men could be called cute, opium dens and brothels thrived and cosmetic surgery was the talk of the town. Yes, truly. Way back in Victorian times a few people were already using surgery to improve their looks
We often have the wrong idea about our ancestors. We look at their stiff old portraits and think they look so grim, but there was plenty going on in Auckland’s early days. In the 1880s the town was barely 40 years old and brimming with ambition, big dreams and large egos.
And Aucklanders were already looking for weekend getaway places like the big hotel at Waiwera, which an editor of the era called “awfully jolly”.
I love how the past is just a mirror of today. We’ve got satellite feeds and social media now, but back then people adored their newspapers. Murders, robberies and romance – it was all in the weekly rag. And Auckland had a beauty – an acerbic little journal called the Observer. I’ve unearthed lots of old Auckland secrets from its pages – and the sweet illustration you see here is also from there.
Researching this has taught me that in many ways our issues aren’t so different from the way they were 130 years ago. Of course, technology has changed radically but human nature hasn’t. We still laugh and cry over the same things.”

* I’m speaking at Auckland City Library, 5.30pm Sept 19, and at Takapuna Library, 6pm Sep 21. Tickets $5. That includes a welcoming glass of wine and lovely live opening music from clarinetist Yvette Audain and two talented friends. To book: Ph 307 7764 for the Auckland event or 486 8469 for Takapuna. .

* The Auckland Heritage Festival runs from Sep 17 to Oct 2 and offers more than 200 events all over Auckland.