Wellington Heart Manners Mall Irony Song

If you’re from Wellington and you don’t love this song maybe you should move to Auckland, with all the other stretched-metaphor-irony haters.

If you’re not from Wellington, my aplogies. I’ll write a real post later instead of just sneakily putting someone else’s awesomeness online and claiming some credit for making you aware of it. Briefly the background is that the council are going to make the pedestrian hangout of 16 year olds who can’t quite get into pubs, Manners Mall, into a new bus lane. There was some dissent, culminating in a facebook group called Wellington Heart Manners Mall and lots of these posters round town. Council is going ahead with bus lane nonetheless.

The song gets extra points from me for calling my suburb, Newtown, “ghetto”, thereby giving me extra gentrification hardcore points.  Speaking of which, the other day one of my couchsurfers Thomas went to buy some shoes down the road and asked them if they had something fancy and American (the brand escapes me, but let’s pretend it was Teva) and the shop worker sneered at him and said “this is Newtown“. Extra points again, oh yeah.

I’m in Tauranga (zero ghetto points) for work these days and decided to celebrate a rare spare few hours this evening by going to see Elegy. It was an excellent way to pass a Sunday evening, being shown the loneliness that pretentiousness can only hide for so long once (conciousness of) mortality starts to kick in, and Penélope Cruz’s boobs.

Kiwi couture: some books I’ve read

I’ve finally read Oooooo……!!! by Hone Tuwhare, and it is such good fun… I don’t read a lot of poetry, but this is far from the staid stereotype. Mostly about sex and seafood, with a fair few mentions of Tangaroa (sea god) and jazz musicians; full of unpretentious grammar and spoonfulls of onomatopoeia, every second poem ending with “Yea!” or “ooooo” or the like. I’m probably missing all the subtleties and what but who cares? What I’m gettin’ is great.

Also on the local literary front, Patricia Grace’s Tu was also excellent. It’s about a soldier in the 28th (Māori) Battalion in WW2, fighting through North Africa and Italy, and about life back home, New Zealand, Māoridom, and Wellington in the ’40s, and various family and personal drama. Somehow mixing all those things into quite a short novel seems to fit and it is of personal interest since my grandfather fought in the same battles described in the book, and I’ve even visited some of the places. The sacrifices and struggles of Māori fighting in a very foriegn war on behalf of British New Zealanders – who still treat them badly at home – in the hope of acceptance is one of the novel’s themes, and an important one.

Completing my trifecta of good New Zealand novels lately was Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. (For the record I also read some books I don’t like so much, but don’t feel so inclined to write of them now.) It’s not really a New Zealand novel in that it has little to do with New Zealand, except for a surprise guest appearance of Wellington for about two pages, but it’s written by a kiwi so it counts here. It’s won some prizes and is about a teacher who reads Great Expectations to his class on a Bougainville during a civil war in the ’90s. Again a mix of themes, about love, and childhood, and the escapism of storytelling, and other stuff besides. Interestingly Jones narrates the story from Matilda, one of the student’s, points of views… while the teacher character Mt Watts, the only white man, who he could know best, remains largely unknown. But it works, and seeing both Dicken’s London and the developing civil war through the innocent child’s eyes is mysterious and enthralling.

On a separate front, I finally showed me the Monet the other day by visiting the Impressionists exhibition at Te Papa. Seems like the rest of NZ decided to too because there was a big queue from opening time and apparently it’s been like that every weekend for weeks. People even came from other cities to see it. Worth the wait for me, it was excellent. I’ve seen a few other Monet paintings around and about but to see a whole stack of them together here was cool, even having to fight through the elbows to see each one. I also restarted French lessons a few weeks ago, so I’ll be able to raise this blog to whole new levels of pretentiousness starting soon. Everyone knows that if you want to be cool and write in English you use as many French words as possible. Watch this space.

Oh, the irony

Tipped off by Dan, I have a new favourite blog. Stuff White People Like. 100% pure fact. I’m one of its targets: urban, educated, mildly socially and environmentally aware, having travelled a little, studied a foriegn language, disliking grammer mistakes, doing yoga (though without canine at this stage), etc, etc, etc. Look at its full list of stuff white people like, pick whatever appeals to you, and look straight in the blog-o-spheric mirror, oh my white friends and followers. Enjoy.

PS. In looking for a pic with which to promote our upcoming flatwarming (come!) The Wellingtonista confirmed itself as now #2 best blog ever. Newtown, it’s a bit shit. Everyone says it, you’d be surprised. Originally I thought it was just my friends from other parts of Welly taking the piss with strangely similar language. But no, it’s a slogan of sorts. Newtown, it’s a bit shit. I love it.

Newtown, it's a bit shit

Wellingtonista discussion of it and the less cool t-shirt here. All of it gold, but especially the comment:

Y’know, rapidly gentrifying places where you can get an ironic designer t-shirt, decent coffee, ethnic food, retro furniture and the shit kicked out of you if you’re not careful.

All of the above is probably true. Newtown is great.

Mt Matthews

Day after that penguin business we went for a day walk up Mt Matthews, in the Rimutaka Forest Park, over the harbour from Wellington. Another great escape from city life, and another perfect Autumn day. This was my fourth time up there but first for a couple of years and experience and rememberance don’t diminish the good times playing in nature.

First hour or so is walking along easy tracks to the Orongorongo river from the Wainuiamata entance to the park, then next hour walking up the river and watching the right bank for the trademark big orange triangle. And after that, up, up and up. Not too long later views open over the south coast and then the seaward Kaikoura mountains of the south island loom large. Awesome. Then it’s a long and twisted ramble along the ridge and through the forest to the summit proper.

One of the team had a GPS which I’d previously have scorned a little, but look at the data it gives after!! Maps of where we’d been, and even an altitude map. Shows the steepness quite clearly. It’s not very high, a cool 933m from memory, but starting from close to zero makes for a good day walk, especially these shortening days.

This is near the summit. If you look closely at the map above you’ll see a circle where we lost the track then found it again but went the wrong way (don’t tell anyone). You can see why with the thick forest in the photo below… though seeing the sea on the wrong side should have been a good clue… A pretty embarassing mistake for six somewhat experienced outdoors-people to have made.

There was a massive slip on Mt Matthews a couple of years ago, and the track does wind around it. We took the alternative route across the top however, which was a good opportunity to practise the “don’t look down” principal. Luckily it was strangely calm (for Wellington) this day or a few of us could have been blown a long way away. On the way down someone quietly suggested going the long way round and everyone agreed so quickly it was obviously on all our minds.

Welly Welly Welly Well Ing Ton

Check this out. Thanks to Jinetero MC Wellington, once a mix of rain wind and shaky ground, is now the new Miami. Or San Diago. Or some other place I haven’t visited that’s full of beautiful people and cloudless skies. Such clever things those clever kids can do with bluescreens these days eh?

I randomly saw this guy at the Newtown festival. It’s pretty repetative stuff but you’ve gotta respect his ability to roll his “yes”es like a southlander rolling his Rs. Pity that didn’t make the cut in the video, but I guess when you’ve only got a few minutes and you gotta say the name of the city you are in at least 100 times, other skills (or words) don’t make the cut. Cool to see the city’s sights in the background, Te Papa, Cuba St, the beehive, Manner’s Mall BK, et al.

Hat-tip to Welly’s finest blog, The Wellingtonista, where I got the video link from. If you’ve any doubts about its awesomeness have a look at the Waitangi weekend Venn Diagram.

You probably need to be local and a bit of a geek to get it… basically it is stereotyping people and the suburbs the live in based on what events they’d have chosen to attend over the Waitangi weekend this year. All with Venn Diagram useful overlappy goodness. Strangely enough I live in Newtown and went to the sevens, so I guess I’m in that hard-to-stereotype hazard-ahead area in the middle.