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.

Hot time in the city

Coming soon once more - Cirque de Soleil. Its latest incarnation, Saltimbanco, is bound to be flashy, bright and wonderful.
But it’s nothing new. Imagine the excitement in Auckland 126 years ago as Woodyear’s Electric Circus unloaded piles of crates onto the wharf downtown and got ready to stage its latest spectacular.
“Now, larger and better than ever – returning after an absence of 13 months of unabated success,” shouted the newspaper ads. The circus had 30 “lady and gentleman artists” from five continents, “a marvellous troupe of Japanese and a superb stud of trained horses and fairy trick ponies”.
Eyes must have goggled at the “monster marquee”, big enough to seat 5000 people, and – wonder of wonders – “brilliantly illuminated”.
Even Queen Street had no electric light in 1885 (it was still two years away), so this was some treat.
You can hear about exciting Auckland life in the 1880s next month when I give a couple of talks, A Hot Time in the Old Town, at the Auckland Library and Takapuna Library. It’s my way of contributing to the Auckland Heritage Festival.
Passion, intrigue, flirtation, murder, gossip – it sure was a lively place back then.
Come along and I’ll reveal the mischief your ancient rellies got up to, and you can ponder how similar or different your scruples are today.
It’s yours for only $5 to cover light refreshments. Auckland City Library, Sep 19, 5.30pm to 7pm (book at 307 7764), or Takapuna Library, Sep 21, 6pm to 7.30pm. Book at 486 8469 or by emailing Helen.woodhouse@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz
PS The lovely illustration is from an 1885 issue of The Auckland Star, accessed through that great digitised resource, paperspast.natlib.govt.nz

The air over there

Sometimes you hear news items that are so unbelievable you think you’re hearing things. For instance, last week’s newsbite that the United States is spending $20 billion a year on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, 20 billion with a ‘b’. Apparently it’s more than NASA's entire annual budget. Of course there are untold tents and buildings over there that need to be heated in winter and cooled in summer, many of them no doubt containing temperamental computers that need a stable, dust-free environment in which to work. It’s easy to scoff over this. The troops who sweated through desert warfare in World War II got by without air con, after all. But we’re all getting soft when it comes to climate control. Once you’ve had a car with air con you never want to go back. Shopping malls are popular right now not for what’s on sale but because they’re warm and dry. But $20 billion for air? No wonder America’s giving all the appearance of going broke.

Starry, starry sites

It’s a rare newspaper or women’s magazine that doesn’t include horoscopes in its mix of content. Sceptics will keep on calling astrology a load of old tosh, but most readers probably give their ‘sign’ at least a quick scan.
Astrology is a bit like the romance genre – people love it but will rarely admit to it. So it’s not surprising the internet is teeming with star-sign pundits.
Astrology.com, a lively American site, has of course long been established and aspiring newcomers must find it almost impossible to find a domain name not already taken, which is why clunky monikers like Astrogrrl, StarIQ and AstroPro are everywhere.
There’s a world of difference, though, between sucking up quick star-sign tips or celebrity snippets and ordering up a full personal chart. Professional astrologers take their art seriously.
www.astro.com As one of the earliest online astrology sites it was thus able to score the plum ‘astro’ domain name. Its content comes in considerable depth. Set up in 1996 by Swiss company Astrodienst, and founded by a physicist with training in astrology, it’s set up in seven languages and scores 6 million visitors a month. Browsers can access free short reports on current conditions in their lives by submitting their time, date and place of birth. But pay around $US50 and you can order a range of highly detailed documents. It’s also for professional astrologers seeking tools and software for different types of chart calculation.
www.astrologyzone.com New Yorker Susan Miller's site is mega-popular. She writes copious, free monthly forecasts pointing out the aspects and alignments that may light up or darken your life, somehow fitting her flood of entertaining words in between penning annual books and calendars and making public appearances.
www.jessicaadams.com This Australian writes for the Sunday Star Times, and Cosmopolitan, and has one of the prettier sites around. Heaps of freebies here, too with weekly, monthly and annual forecasts on tap – plus podcasts as well. Want more depth and detail and you can pay for extra info, such as a 30-minute MP3 audio report for $A5.99.
www.donmurray.co.nz For fearless predictions, look no further than the site of New Zealand astrologer Don Murray. Murray pulls no punches and writes site updates every few days (click on ‘news’ on his home page). He says there’s “definitely no cup in October” for All Black captain Richie McCaw, and John Key is also up against it later this year battling “Pluto-Venus negativity’.
There’s bad news for Obama too. Murray reckons that in 28 years of study he can’t remember a more demanding six months than the US president has in front of him for the first half of 2012. As for Kate and Wills…they’re okay for a few years, apparently, but then it’s not looking so rosy after all. Damn. Just when we thought there was something to smile about…