Just created a little homepage for The Hi-Aces on nzmusic.com. Global domination awaits, clearly...

This is a proposal for a piece of writing which will hopefully one day end up, in print, in National Grid...


Beyond their obvious kitsch appeal, boring postcards have stories to tell about notions of national identity. Such stories are all the more valuable for their apparent lack of calculation, their naive sincerity.

Reviewers of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards books have observed distinctive 'types' of dullness: staid British self consciousness, brash American self-belief. Similarly, New Zealand boring postcards have a unique character, reflecting our own post-war experience and offering an visually rich resource of Pakeha identity construction.

They betray a taciturn Protestant culture, still content for the most part to follow Britain, gradually loosening up and enjoying the summer sun during a period of prosperity and burgeoning independence. In these cheap commercial colour reproductions, the nation is ascendant, proud. Predictably, we are presented with a boosterish images of agriculture (dairy cows, lambs with daffodils), natural beauty (mountains, beaches), civic pride (clock towers, war memorials, municipal marigolds), great public works projects (dams, bridges, power stations), and tourist ventures (model villages, marine theme parks). More than the landscape, however, it is representations of indigenous culture which identify these images as distinctly and unmistakably 'of New Zealand'.

Despite its ongoing reluctance to devolve power in negotiating the colonial exchange, Pakeha society has nonetheless from the earliest days of its existence sought to define itself through the appropriation of Maori visual culture. Typical of such appropriation is the use of images of indigenous species. To this end, it has been proposed that the 'uniqueness' of Pakeha visual/cultural identity lies in the distinctive combination of environmentally modified agricultural landscapes on one hand, and 'wild', 'natural', and 'untamed' indigenous flora and fauna on the other. This combination is so familiar to us, so much a part of our psyche, that the inherent contradiction within it seldom registers.


In this image, a kiwi and a kowhai branch are posed in front of a wire fence on a closely cropped lawn in the Napier Botanic Gardens. The kiwi tentatively nibbles on raw minced beef. As a text, the postcard offers an economic, elegant precis of these key symbols of Pakeha identity: agricultural fertility (grass, beef) and distorted images of indigeneity (nocturnal kiwi in daylight, dismembered kowhai blossom).

Beyond the content of the images, the compositions commonly reflect a prosaic late colonial Pakeha mentalite. Behind the plain geometry and lurid colour, lies a suspicion of sophistication. These are beautiful, boring postcards for a beautiful, boring country.

Maybe I'm not gonna get any more CDs from the newspaper? It's been two weeks... Have I been punished for being rude about major label faves? Surely not - I was never that rude. Whatever the reason, it feels like perhaps my run of 'big time' music journalism is at an end, no more voluntary work for Rupert Murdoch. I'll have to go help sick children and refugees or something, to fill the void.

Nevertheless, in the interests of contributing something positive, here are a few recent acquisitions (things I picked up after trading in my review copies). I'm too lazy to say anythign about them, but they're all fine, fine albums:

Electrelane - The Power Out - Too Pure
Life WIthout Buildings - Any Other City - Tugboat
Optimo - How To Kill The DJ Pt 2 - Tigersushi

Also I saw the three Agnes Varda short films this morning - first festival experience for me - and they were bloody great. Too braindead to say more...

Approximate track list for my radio show last night:

Michael Mayer - Speaker - Kompakt
Skatt Brothers - Walk the Night - ???
Koop & DJ Boon - N20 - 1st Decade Records
DJ Tal vs Tiefschwarz - Digital World - Art of Disco
The Human League - You Remind Me of Gold - Virgin
3rd Face - Canto Della Liberta - Classic
Kraftwerk - Europe Endless - Capitol
The Juan MacLean - Dance with Me (DFA E mix) - DFA
Ricardo Villalobos - Fools Garden (Black Conga) - Playhouse
Metro Area - Caught Up - Environ
Falco - No Answer - A&M
Leroy Hanghofer - Bathroomboogie - Gomma
Tussle - Disco D'Oro #2 (AB Mix) - Rong Music
Bangkok Impact - Fear of Your Eyes - Viewlexx
Was (Not Was) - Out Come the Freaks - Ze

They're really sending me sh*t now...

Caribou, "The Milk of Human Kindness" (Leaf/Rogue Records) - 3/5

Under his Manitoba moniker, Canadian Dan Snaith has been staking out territory in the no person's land between indie rock and so-called 'intelligent' electronica for a number of years now. Despite having been forced for legal reasons to change his name to Caribou, 'The Milk of Human Kindness' stays true to this formula. While the album features its fair share of programmed drums and freaky digital sound effects, beneath the beats, beats the heart of an indie rocker. In its faithful referencing of krautrock and sixties psychedelia, the album also plays like an folkier, but edgier, cousin to DJ Shadow's Private Press LP.


Nathan Haines, "Life Time" (FMR) - 2/5

There's little trace of the sophisticated urban hip of Haines' 2003 'Squire for Hire' album on 'Life Time'. Instead, the album sees Haines - backed by the NZSO, father Kevin (bass), and brother Joel (guitar) - perform jazz standards (Porter, Bacharach, et al), and a number of Nathan's and Joel's excellent originals, with elegantly lush orchestral backing. The quality of the arrangements, performances and recording are outstanding. However, neither the Haines family nor the NZSO is playing to their strengths here, and ultimately much of the album comes off like easy listening lounge schmaltz. But if that's your bag, 'Life Time' will prove a rewarding listen.


Over The Rhine, "Drunkard's Prayer" (Back Porch/Virgin) - 2/5

A Cincinnati husband-wife act, the spectacularly-named Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist have performed rootsy folk-pop as Over the Rhine since the early nineties. The overall sound of 'Drunkard's Prayer' is nice enough - mellow, reflective, and slightly country. The focus of their sound, however, is Bergquist's delicate voice, a slightly gravelly Southern drawl. While it sometimes calls to mind Lucinda Williams, OTR completely lack any of the honesty and grit that makes her music great. The playing is too perfect and geeky, the arrangements and production too sterile, and the songs - wholesome and homely as they are - simply don't ring true. There's just not enough devil in the music, it's all Jesus and apple pie. Detweiler's piano playing is particularly noxious - he's so purple on opening track 'I Want You to Be My Love', he actually detracts from what would otherwise be a fine, if insipid, love song. Great country music should reflect the reality of the human condition, in all its desperate, morally ambiguous glory. What we have here, however, is bad poetry and squeaky clean musicianship - an overabundance of musical talent, but a poverty of artistic intent. Try giving Lucinda or Gillian Welch a go first.

Enjoyed the New Zealand Argument thing last Thursday - RB was a great communicator (much as you'd expect), and the Lange footage was pretty hilarious. Funny that the whole nuclear fear thing sounds so eighties now, but it's sobering to think that despite the fact that the escalation of Cold War nuclear arsenals has slowed (halted? noone really talks about it anymore) - which was a basic goal of the nuclear disarmament movement - the ground has shifted to proliferation and the world hasn't gotten any safer.

The panel discussion on New Zealand identity was quite good, but I thought it could've benefited from a little more focus and/or maybe more a little audience questioning. As it turned out, the intergenerational dimension was probably the most interesting aspect - Jim Traue is a forthright old skool left winger. A 'bolshy' character, you might say. Actually I don't think that much of his Pakeha Whakapapa/Ancestors of the Mind piece, it's little more than a roll call of western thinkers and NZ literary figures. In other words, the intellectual heritage (or 'baggage' as he termed it on the night, by way of deliberate understatement for effect) of many (educated) NZers - Maori and Pakeha.

I Am Not A Maori, but - I don't think that meaningfully relates to the idea of whakapapa. The point Traue makes about literate cultures (and it's a bit of a no-brainer) is that they 'store' their knowledge in books, and as individuals growing up in such cultures, we are exposed to and (mostly unconsciously) absorb everything from Plato on. That is, contemporary western culture is in part the cumulative product of all the thinking and arguing and writing and publishing that has gone before it, and we all benefit from this. And that's perfectly true. But that knowledge has nothing to do with bloodlinks, genealogy, or a connection to the land, which, it seems to me, are all key aspects of the whakapapa. So, Traue is not really describing Pakeha whakapapa - possibly 'Pakehatanga' might be a better term, if you really wanted to appropriate a Maori concept... But that's just the problem - there's absolutely no need to appropriate a Maori concept for this - there are already perfectly good concepts/terms for this in English - one of which is 'intellectual history, another - the one Traue uses - is the 'inheritance of the written and printed words of our culture'. Actually, 'Pakehatanga' isn't an appropriate term. The point and the power of free, literate cultures is that knowledge is open to anyone who cares to access it. So, in New Zealand, the work of Plato, Sargeson et al are just as accessible to Maori as to Pakeha.

The piece comes off as weirdly defensive and insecure - like an over-reaction to having been told by a Maori that Pakeha have no culture. I'm not sure if I'd even feel moved to respond to someone who said anything so stupid - but I think Traue's piece misses the mark. I think it's probably fair to say that in the cultural deprivation/redevelopment stakes, Maori have had a far harder time of it over the last century and a half than Pakeha - what with depopulation, urbanisation, suppression of langauage etc etc, it was touch and go there for a while... Kinda makes the Quest For National Identity of Traue's NZ lit heavyweights look like pissy navel-gazing.

Maybe it's a generational thing - I've never for a minute felt like as a Pakeha had no 'culture'. That's partly cos culture is very very loose term these days, and partly cos I grew up in the eighties, by which time Pakeha had already been patting themselves on the back about their distinctive identity for a couple of decades or more - ironically, largely thanks to Traue and his generation. By the 1980s we even had our own distinct 'culture' of underground rock music, for Christ's sake. Speaking of which, my new green minipod has been shuffling between Aaliyah and The Dead C's 'Harsh Seventies Reality' all day - surprisingly good combo.