happy tree, originally uploaded by Rhesus1.
Orongorongos, NZ
14 June, 2009
Sounds Historical
Had the good fortune to catch National Radio’s tremendous Sounds Historical programme tonight. It’s been too long.
This is what I imagine the study of history was like before it got all post-modern and mixed up in French theory during the 1990s.
Sounds understands that history is best approached over a nice pot of tea, served in a cup commemorating the 1953 Royal Visit, followed by a late night port or two, and finally being tucked into warm flannelette sheets.
People get a bit carried away with their analysis. Things just happen, but if you’re delving about for grand themes, you can make sense of most of it in the light of 1) European settlement, 2) the two world wars and 3) the aforementioned royal vist.
Sounds highlights tonight:
- The metric system appears to be here to stay. Better get used to it.
- A DVD is a playing device of some description.
- Not all “classic” kiwi songs are really that “classic”, although Shona Laing’s 1905 probably deserves the title.
18 January, 2009
Back on …
No chance (nor inclination) to write anything recently, but I did get something published in the DomPost. It’s about Upper Hutt (the NY Times has not yet indicated interest in running it).
If I can trust Wikipedia on anything, I hope it’s that Upper Hutt is the nation’s smallest city by population but the second largest by land area. That’s 540 square km of suburbs, rivers, pensioners, metalers, young families, a mall that limped in from somewhere else to die, and quite a bit of stunning scenery. Green is what one thing I remember about growing up in the southern suburb, Silverstream.
The hills around Silverstream, which are actually more blue than green towards the Pinehaven end, were an excellent place to read Commando comics and plan for the next Japanese invasion. We spent years up there searching for the mythical route through the bush to the Stokes Valley dump. It exists, and I hope Silverstream’s young never give up that dream.
I went to the local Catholic college, St Pats. There were day-boys from all around the Hutt Valley. The boarders were usually from the various Catholic farming dynasties or the Tongan royal family. The entrance to the school was once used in a car ad featuring Gordon Jackson from The Professionals. In the corridors the smoke of Port Royal rollies would trail after priests in cassocks.
The farm out the back, where we did our own smoking, looked like fertile and valuable land. It ran up to pine forests on the hills which would sometimes burn, turn the sky blood red and rain ash on the classrooms.
I could never work out what sort of actual agriculture was took place on the farm, but once a year half a sheep would turn up in the common room fridge, the result of something probably assessable under School Cert. Various mysterious and possibly mystical Brothers would tend to chores in the field. One, a small anxious man with a pointed face, looked like someone taking a permanent bollocking from the Holy Virgin.
I enjoyed St Pats after about the fifth form, when I realised that it was a supportive and surprisingly liberal place to be young. Seventh form was particularly good as the arts started ranking with sport (to many it’s the academic arm of the Marist Rubgy Club) in the curriculum. There were some bone fide, Jesuit-strength intellectuals among the priests. I liked to think I had entered a battle of wills with a couple, and felt they would not do well before the coming revolutionary tribunal, but I think it was one way. They knew who spraypainted “Red army faction” on the wall of the Silverstream public toilets but never mentioned it, assuming some sort of spiritual struggle was taking place that had to run its course.
I was back in Upper Hutt recently and met an old woman at the library there. She was a font of local knowledge, most of it about her cats and her personal nemesis, the Possum Man of Kingsley Heights. Somewhere in it all she mentioned the “Silverstream school of painting”, which I looked up when I got home. And yes, based in the now-demolished Pumpkin Cottage and working from 1892, painter James Nairn and many talented regional artists developed the world’s most Upper Hutt-influenced body of art.
In those days apparently it was all farm and bush and people flirting with each other under watercolour trees. I like to think of all the wild absinthe parties and bohemian intrigue taking place just 20 metres (and 116 years) from what’s now the McDonalds, the panel beaters and the BP.
Moving away at the end of the seventh form demonstrated to me that not everyone understands the allure of Upper Hutt as well as did James Nairn. Every large city needs a supposedly backwards neighbour. Outrageous Fortune, Ewen Gilmour, Upper Hutt. If Wellington is New York, which is it isn’t, Upper Hutt is New Jersey. We import someone else’s intercity relationships and make them our own. A big city needs an uncool smaller sibling which it patronises but also gives an outlaw glamour.
I like to remind friends that the current trend of suburban patriotism, with its $120 “Island Bay” t-shirts and “Lyall Bay” badges, began with one iconic, non-ironic black t-shirt, on which was written two words: “Hutt Valley”. In an AC/DC font.
15 May, 2008
shaolin, wellington, new zealand
shaolin, wellington, new zealand, originally uploaded by Rhesus1.
10 April, 2008
Thistle Hall, Wellington.
Thistle Hall, Wellington., originally uploaded by Rhesus1.
Thistle Hall, Wellington.
10 April, 2008
Thistle Hall, Wellington.
Thistle Hall, Wellington., originally uploaded by Rhesus1.
Thistle Hall, Wellington.
10 April, 2008
Kung fu training, Wellington, NZ
Kung fu training, Wellington, NZ, originally uploaded by Rhesus1.
Thistle Hall, Wellington.
5 February, 2008
Einstein on science and God
This opened up a lot of possibilities for me, coming from where it did.
It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which [I] lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal,’ from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.”
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism …
I don’t try to imagine a God; it suffices to stand in awe of the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. …
I don’t try to imagine a God; it suffices to stand in awe of the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.
In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_einstein.html
4 February, 2008
Origami upgrade
John’s let me photograph his latest hell-unleashing peace crane. It’s a much larger model, with the twin tail turbines of the A-10 Warthog, which he considers by far the most impressive aircraft that ever tried to kill him during the first gulf war. Click on the pic to enlarge. Real thing here. (Original post: An Iraqi ex-soldier does origami.)
2 February, 2008
An Iraqi ex-soldier does origami
On the right is a paper crane transformed into a F-22A Raptor by the addition of four cardboard Aim-9 Sidewinder missiles and a nose cannon. It was made by my one and only Iraqi Assyrian Christian Gulf War I veteran friend, John, who I teach English. Keep reading →
2 February, 2008
dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip: Thou Shalt Always Kill
Faultless … the excellent vid’s down there at the end of the lyrics …
Thou shalt not steal if there is direct victim.
Thou shalt not worship pop idols or follow lost prophets.
Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Decker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barret in vain.
Thou shalt not think that any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a peadophile… Some people are just nice.
Thou shalt not read NME.
Thall shalt not stop liking a band just because they’ve become popular.
Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.
Thou shalt not judge a book by it’s cover.
Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover.
Thall shalt not buy Coca-Cola products. Thou shalt not buy Nestle products.
Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend’s best friend, take drugs and cheat on him.
Thou shalt not fall in love so easily.
Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants. Use it to get into their heads.
Thou shalt not watch Hollyoakes.
Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave as soon as you’re done just because you’ve finished your shitty little poem or song you self-righteous prick.
Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar week in, week out just ’cause you once saw a girl there that you fancied but you’re never gonna fucking talk to.
Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were.The Beatles – Were just a band.
Led Zepplin – Just a band.
The Beach Boys – Just a band.
The Sex Pistols – Just a band.
The Clash – Just a band.
Crass – Just a band.
Minor Threat – Just a band.
The Cure – Just a band.
The Smiths – Just a band.
Nirvana – Just a band.
The Pixies – Just a band.
Oasis – Just a band.
Radiohead – Just a band.
Bloc Party – Just a band.
The Arctic Monkeys – Just a band.
The next big thing – JUST A BAND.Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those that occur in English speaking countries.
Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be.
Thou shalt not make repetitive generic musicThou shalt not make repetitive generic music
Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music
Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music
Thou shalt not pimp my ride.
Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster.
Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness.
Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit.
When I say “Hey” thou shalt not say “Ho”.
When I say “Hip” thou shalt not say “Hop”.
When I say “he say, she say, we say, make some noise” – kill me.
Thou shalt not quote me happy.
Thou shalt not shake it like a polaroid picture.
Thou shalt not wish your girlfriend was a freak like me.
Thou shalt spell the word “Pheonix” P-H-E-O-N-I-X not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you.
Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Bradley at the club last night by saying “Is it”.
Thou shalt think for yourselves.And thou shalt always kill.
13 January, 2008
stellar nuclear, wellington, nz
stellar nuclear, welington, originally uploaded by Rhesus1.
