Night Horrors

Are we witnessing the decline and fall of our civilization? Sometimes, when I look at TV, I think so.
Slowly, subtly – and not so subtly – the box has become a very scary place to spend time with. Oddly, most of the truly awful stuff comes from England. It’s an strange state of affairs considering that for years we idolised the UK’s quality dramas. They’re still there. I hear, for instance, that the recently screened Bleak House was great.
But most British fare is now pretty yucky. I couldn’t believe my eyes a week or two ago when I stumbled over something on Prime called Three Fat Brides and One Thin Dress. The idea of this ‘reality’ show is for three chubby women to diet furiously in the hope of squeezing themselves into a strapless, bejewelled slip of a gown fit for a princess. This show is really just another version of Cinderella, only there’s no need now for Cinders to be sweet or brave or long-suffering, but merely to be skinny.
We’ve seen lots of dieting on the telly, but this was the first time I’d seen the judge demand that participants bring along a fecal sample for discussion. The judge is, naturally, blonde and skinny and issues her orders like a trainer calling sheep dogs to heel.
‘Whose poo is this?’ she shrieked, picking up a plastic lidded box with a dark turd inside. A chart on the wall behind her indicated the look and shape of the perfect poo. Smooth and snake-like is how they’re supposed to be, apparently.
One of the brides-to-be confessed shamefacedly that in fact the lumpy offering had been produced by her fiancé, Gareth. Judge Lady thought as much. With an expression of disgust she lifted the lid and snapped it shut again. ‘It stinks!’ she shrilled, outraged that the bride-to-be had been too shy to produce a sample which might somehow have been more fragrant.
I could barely believe that this was going on in my living room. But still, I shouldn’t have been surprised as evening TV is now largely a swamp of nightly murder, mayhem and gooey forensics as floods of crime shows swallow up prime time.
Some nights I switch instead to the History Channel (uh-oh, soldiers being machine-gunned); Animal Planet (crikey dick, another animal-cruelty show); E! (how many Botoxed starlets can there be in the world?); the Documentary Channel (oops, it’s Fat Doctor with surgeons up to their elbows inside the torsos of the super-obese); and Fox News, where all the gals look like ex-Miss Americas and most of the men seem to hate Democrats.
And yet, every now and again, something wonderful shimmers on the screen. Just today I caught a brief documentary on Al Jazeera about South Africa’s Miagi Youth Orchestra, a classical-music ensemble of young and hugely talented players from right across the race and income spectrum. I watched a slender black boy lost in the magic of wringing music from his viola, his whole body trembling with the sound and passion of it, his face glowing with the pleasure and power of creating beauty. Aah, sometimes, even now, it’s really worth sitting down in front of the telly.

Green shoots you can believe in

We keep on reading about ‘green shoots’ of recovery as the world struggles out of recession. Some of them seem a bit illusory, but seeing real green shoots does your heart good.

I was in Melbourne last month, catching up with my old friend Mary, who took me, appropriately enough, to Marysville. The name sounds familiar? It should, because it was one of the country towns almost wiped out in Victoria’s terrible black Saturday fires last February. Thirty-three of its citizens died.

The disaster scene is still a surreal sight. You drive the winding road through miles and miles of blackened trees, along that stretch where, in the midst of hot panic, some people perished in their cars as they fled, blinded by the smoke, overwhelmed by the speed of the flames.

Now you can stop along that road, get out and listen...to total silence. All these months later, the stink of burning still drifts through the darkened forest. If you touch the black charcoal that coats a roadside trunk, it feels as fragile and brittle as the top of a burnt pavlova cake.

The town is a sad sight. There are just a few remaining shops and a grid of empty streets with blank spaces laid bare where bulldozers have been in and scraped ruined houses away. Oddly, there are some undamaged wooden signs still hanging between posts where front fences or hedges must have been, advertising the rates for cosy weekend accommodation in cottages that no longer exist.

But there are signs of new life. A big marquee fills the space where a hotel once stood, with two temporary cafes inside offering food and coffee. Workers in orange vests are busy as re-building gets under way around the village.

And the marvellous thing is that all the tall black tree trunks in the forest are just beginning now to shed charcoal-coated bark to reveal bright, fresh, healthy timber. Springing from the vertical trunks are clumps of beautiful, bright green tiny leaves, like explosions of green feather dusters. Some of the trees, from a distance, look to be sporting a coat of green down, like new feathers on the skin of a baby bird. Tree ferns too, have somehow survived and are sprouting elegant new fronds.

And as spring arrives in Marysville, daffodils are blooming – dots of sunny yellow in otherwise empty gardens. Of course, when the fires roared over and scorched the land any bulbs still tucked underground from previous years slept safely on, untouched by the heat, ready to do their thing next time Nature sent out whatever subtle signal it is that motivates a daffodil to stand up and sing. So there they are, blooming like crazy, semaphoring hope.

Rain of terror

Oh, such care people are taking not to offend. So fragile have we become. How thin our skins are. How easy it is to wound with a careless word or two. It must be so, or we wouldn’t be scolded for using what seem to be essentially harmless terms. A friend who runs seminars for a living tells me she was berated recently for asking the attendees to do some brain-storming. A fine phrase, I’d have thought, full of the electricity and imagery that suggests the zipping and zapping of lively debate. But... no.
Brainstorming is no longer allowed less it be deemed to refer to the electrical disturbances that are a part of epilepsy. The approved phrase to use now to describe a hectic exchange of ideas is ‘thought shower’. How pallid. How wet that sounds. Let’s not get excited, folks. Let’s just sit and hear the drip, drip, drip of opinions wafting down from above.
Not long after hearing that, I noticed a couple of terms that are supposed to be now out of bounds in business circles, lest women be outraged. Surely, I thought, surely, after something like 40 years of feminism, there can’t be any ways left to get it wrong? But yes.
Be advised that it’s possibly offensive today refer to anyone as your ‘right-hand man’ (even, or maybe especially, if she’s a girl). And that something personally affirmed by two parties should not now be called a ‘gentleman’s agreement’.
Of course, because we get so much news in mere sound bites and headlines, clever manipulation of words is now mandatory in politics and business. Some people make a good living out of telling people how to do it. Thus we hear about oil companies benignly ‘exploring for energy’, not wantonly ‘drilling for oil’. Some expressions have become famous in themselves – and not in a good way. When we hear, for instance, of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ the phrase is no more appealing than ‘torture’ ever was.
I just read an article by one of America’s most influential word wranglers, Frank Luntz, author of a book called Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, it’s What People Hear.
Frank says that if you’re a leader of a country or a business, there are five words you should be using. They are: consequences (because people think there should be consequences); impact (because we want to know what’s really happening); reliability (because we’re sick of things not working); mission (because we want to know our leaders care); and commitment (because we care that leaders are personally committed to things, and are not just making empty promises).
Being on a mission, says Frank, is different from dreaming up some cold corporate mission statement. I remember those from my corporate years. What a crock they all were.
There are a few more words I’d add to the good-words-for-leaders list that. Like truth, authenticity, and honesty. Though if someone in charge says they’re giving us the ‘honest truth’ it’s just the sort of statement to make me imagine every shade of dishonesty possible. It’s got to the point where I hardly believe anything I hear on the news.
These days, I’m more interested in real, everyday people and their rich, juicy, tender, amazing stories of real life.
• Give yourself time out to write about your life. Do it for you and your family – for memories not kept are memories forgotten. I'm running workshops in Orewa and Auckland in October and November. All you need for an intriguing and uplifting day is a pen and your personal storehouse of experience. For info go to www.storyofmylife.co.nz

All shopped out

I think that in future we’ll look back at the designer carrier bag as a symbol of the era just past. Think of every TV ad you ever see that reflects city lifestyle or tries to promote the joys of destination shopping. Every one features at least a few seconds of some babe sashaying along with bags swinging from each hand.
There’s an ad on New Zealand TV right now (for Tower Insurance) where two guys are standing talking outside a house while, in the background, a woman is unpacking a shiny SUV. She lifts up the rear door to reveal a sea of bags like the one I’ve drawn here.
Her man looks on glumly as she carries them into the house. They are rectangular, sharp edged and prettified with logos – because, of course, that’s the whole point of these bags. They’re not just for putting stuff in. As you carry them along, they also turn you into a walking, free advertisement for the store or designer to whom you’ve just handed cash or card.
Thus encumbered, you are proclaiming, ‘I shop. I consume with a capital C. I am playing my part by buying stuff that others make, therefore ensuring enduring employment for everyone involved in the manufacture, packaging and transport of these consumables. Not only that, but I’m smart and I’m loaded and can afford the latest gear and am therefore to be admired.’ There’s a whole lotta snobby yada-yada embodied in every paper carry bag.
There’s been a feeling abroad for a long time that not only must you tote shopping bags to keep the economy spinning, you should also see shopping as leisure because everyone knows (don’t they?) that shopping is fun, fun, fun. Tell that to someone who’d love to buy lovely things that nestle in bags like that, but can’t afford them. For them it’s yearn, yearn, yearn.
We forget about the newness of shopping culture for the masses. Time was when those with the money to enjoy top-ending shopping would never have consented to carrying their own purchases. Things were delivered. At the tradesmen’s entrance – if you had such a thing.
More recently, stores would let trusted customers take things home ‘on appro’ so you could try on clothes in the privacy of your own home, or check if those cushions really did match the drapes. There was no deposit, no taking of credit card details. The merchant would know the customer would return them in good order if they were not wanted. The customer would know that if they failed to do that, or failed to pay on time, their name would be mud. The system worked on trust.
But now we have little trust. Now it’s, ‘Show me the money’. Or at least, ‘Show me your gold card’. Only then can you walk out with that thousand-dollar suit wrapped in tissue in a loopy-handled, ego-booster bag. Which you’ll chuck away as soon as you get home.
As the world struggles to climb out of recession, economists everywhere are desperate for us to go back to the mall with the same old devil-may-care ease. But I think the mindless-shopping era is over. We may not be going back to brown paper parcels, wrapped up in string. But all of that just-put-it-on-the-card, got-to-have-it attitude? It’s feeling very 20th century.

THE CHARMED OR UNCHARMED LIFE

I’m having trouble thinking about blogging and all things digital right now because my head is back in the 19th century. I’m writing a new novel set around 1880 and the more I read letters from that era that end in flourishing signatures, preceded by phrases like “I am, your affectionate brother" or "yours very truly”, the harder it is to wrench myself back into today.
Look at this signature by my great-grandfather, Joe Buddle, laid down by him in Tauranga in 1879. It’s so elegant and practised that it would seem it was obligatory then to develop a ‘hand’ that said something about you - assuming you could actually read and write.
We don’t care now. Who’s writing letters with a pen? People aren’t even bothering to say “Hi Joe” at the start of emails, let alone “Dear Joe”. We just launch right into the message. Our sign-offs are just “cheers”, or “regards” if we’re being extra polite. Affection doesn't get a look in. And business emails don’t even carry a name as a sign-off because the automatic signature does it for you. Texting requires no goodbyes at all, except perhaps a CU.
Perhaps it’s all this impersonal communicating that is making big events seem much more profound now. Half the planet must have stopped to watch Michael Jackson’s memorial service, with all of its tributes. When Michael’s brother Germaine sang Smile, and his daughter Paris showed us her breaking heart, they revealed how important it is in this crazy world for us to stop, listen and feel.
We’ve come in 130 years from a world where it was important to write 'very truly’ to one where we care mostly about speed and instant fame.
Michael’s life may have been all too speedy and a bit manic, especially in his later years, but in his going he’s somehow touched a lot of lives.
His whole career was all about exposure and visibility (and the opposite as well - made up of secrecy and shadows). In a way, he was a human example of the power of advertising, that peculiarly 20th century art form.
The entire world knew his music and his moves and his face. Whether admired or despised, he was a massive global brand.
But I’ve found that advertising’s power began to get a hold on us much earlier than the 20th century. In reading old issues of the Bay of Plenty Times I’ve come across an 1880 ditty that was already shouting to the world that if you wanted to be KNOWN, if you wanted to SUCCEED, then you had to advertise, you had to be SEEN. Here’s how it goes – read and ponder:

THE CHARM OF LIFE
Tell me not that advertising
Is at best an empty dream,
For its charm is more surprising
That its base traducers deem.

And whichever way thou turnest
Thou wilt find upon the whole,
Those who advertise in earnest
Soonest reach the wished for goal.

Wouldst thou save regret and sorrow
For good prospects thrown away?
Never wait, then, till tomorrow;
Always advertise today.

Advertise then! Time is fleeting!
All the wealth this side the grave
That is ever worth the meeting
It will bring if thou be brave.

Try the charm of advertising,
And avert a meaner fate;
Be ye ever enterprising,
Learn to advertise and wait.
(Author unknown)

Feeling a touch of grumpy coming on

I guess the time may come for all of us to get to the grumpy old woman (or man) stage. Women have menopause to contend with, of course. And Dr Frances Pitsilis told Paul Henry on TV1’s Breakfast show that male menopause really can happen. It’s all because a bloke’s testosterone levels drop throughout life.
At 70, your average guy apparently has only half as much of the t-hormone as he had at 20. And as it wanes, from middle age onwards, men can lose their potency and enjoyment of life – not just in the sexual sense but also in terms of general perkiness, curiosity and liveliness of thought, possibly leading to glumness, depression and even a shorter life span.
Not to worry though, she said. Once your GP has ascertained your testosterone status through blood tests (and you might need more than one as the results aren’t always exact), he or she can prescribe hormone boosters. One such little helper comes in the form of a cream.
“Where do you apply it?” asked Henry innocently as he picked up a jar of the wonder ointment. ‘Behind your testicles,” said the good doctor, thus perhaps becoming the only person to ever utter the word on Breakfast. Henry dropped the jar so fast it was as if she’d told him he was holding a scorpion.
It was just about the best chuckly moment of the morning. But as a grumpy old woman in the making, I’d already had my share of droll moments. One was hearing a Newstalk ZB newsreader inform me that the recent loss of an Air France jet may have been partly caused by a “fierce equilateral storm”.
“Equatorial, you fool!” I said into the early morning darkness, feeling guilty that I could find any humour at all in anything to do with such a ghastly event. Perhaps it was that very earliness that addled the brain of the journalist who wrote the sentence for her to read.
And perhaps it was the same only-half-awake person who put a piece of paper in front of Kate Hawkesby recently, requiring her to read in another bulletin that the Pope had beatified someone (thus proclaiming that the person was blessed and worthy of veneration). Only the word that came out of Hawkesby’s mouth was “beautified”.
But even the grand and the famous can have foot-in-mouth moments. British PM Gordon Brown dropped a lovely clanger in a speech about D-Day when he referred not to Omaha Beach, but Obama Beach. Just one more reason for the beleaguered PM to feel like a total grumpy old man right now.

The instant book machine

I'm intrigued by this video, showing the workings of a newish gizmo called the Espresso Book Machine. It's not exactly mass production, but in book shops you can use it to order up out-of-print or hard-to-find books, if you can find what you want in the retailer's database. I am not sure how this will work in terms of author's copyright. This is becoming a very complicated world.
However, self-publishers are intrigued by this idea (print your family history,with pictures, for instance), though if you want a thousand copies of something, getting it bulk-printed is still far cheaper. It is of course a great way to make instant books look good, no matter how tedious or unreadable the content may be.(Yay! The world still needs editors, designers and proof readers.)
This video shows the machine in action with book retailer Blackwell's UK, and Angus & Robertson are also doing it in Australia, with eventual plans to put 50 of these machines in shops across Oz and New Zealand.
It's funny, though, that while it's undoubtedly clever, there's something about this machine's whirring noises and moving parts that make it seem kind of steam age - a throw-back rather than a step forward, and more akin to Gutenberg than Digital Age. It takes 15 minutes to print an average book, and costs the same as buying one ready-made.

Check it out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIq0VqF0MnA