Foreign Report

BY TAHI MOORE

I'm not back in Auckland but then someone was talking about Swedish jeans and then I looked up this company I never heard of, Svensson Jeans, and the pictures looked good, so I looked up a shop that sold them, went there, tried some on, but the fit was really loose on the calf, I mean no good at all. And that was that. I didn't have time to obsess over something I couldn't get hold of it was just down the road. They even had a pair of hand crafted plain the right cut blue jeans from Japan in my size no pocket art or funny threads. They seemed a bit expensive. They weren't overly though, about half what you'd charge in Auckland. This was meant to be a good story, but now I'm just depressed. The sale shall be your only hope young man. Go.



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Barcelona, 1 de Junio de 2007.

BY SARAH HOPKINSON

As you may be aware, from the proliferation of gripping hostage crime-dramas on mainstream television, ransom demands are commonly accompanied by an image of the abducted (often blindfolded, looking suitably terrified) holding a local newspaper. I always thought that this role effectively reduced the newspaper to its essence - its currency and locality. Serving primarily as a marker of specific time and place, it acts as unquestionable proof of a subject’s ‘alive-ness’ on a certain day, proof that they continue to exist. For Fiona Connor’s Free Literature newspapers are the sole material. Mining content from a series of tabloids (the ‘free literature’ on a given day), Connor creates a hybrid version of Barcelona’s principal newspaper El Pais.1 The accompanying video (viewable online) offers a short glimpse of Barcelona as a city marked by vast numbers of newspapers, stacked on street corners, littering gutters. Maybe we are supposed to see the newspaper as a leitmotif for a place; a city succinctly summed up in its recurring symbol. One of those funny idiosyncrasies that tourists always notice.

Despite muddying signature styles, and displacing stylistic cohesion (ransom notes are popularly constructed from cut-out magazine and newspaper letters, precisely to prevent authorial detection) the modified El Pais’ spatio-temporality remains intact. In fact, subsuming all other publications into a strange crossbred whole, the newspaper is reduced, via a process of layering and doubling, to its marker of local-ness and current-ness. The collaged result is a mélange of one day’s worth of news; a concoction of information, imagery and advertising, disseminated in a certain city at a particular historical moment: 1 de Junio de 2007.

The content of this chronicle is largely unreadable, but not necessarily incomprehensible. In construction, areas of text and image that resemble one another, deal with the same topical issue or advertise the same product, have been pasted over the ‘master’ edition of El Pais. Idiosyncratic formats, fonts, proportions, wording and colours prevent a seamless assimilation yet a peculiar sense of cohesion prevails. Quite simply, the collaged pieces appear to signify the same (or similar) thing; they speak to shared concerns. The language barrier further allows us, and Connor, to behold this information pared back to its basic sign-value. Guided by the recognisable terms in the headlines, familiar political images (in this instance of pre-election Sarkozy) and ever-present ads for shiny, new-model cars the viewer is faced with a simultaneously discordant and harmonious whole, both foreign and oddly familiar.

While this fittingly subjective product of an encounter with a day in a foreign city maintains a casualness, this is neither a ‘stroll’ nor a meandering journey. It is less flimsy than that, more directed, more decisive, maybe more like a dérive - if we can take the liberty of thinking the ‘terrain’ as the newspaper, as opposed to the city, and the point of departure as El Pais. Despite this abstraction, both practices share a certain situated-ness – the ransom note’s aforementioned crucial spatio-temporal grounding. A paradigmatic derive - the practice of ‘transient passage through varied ambiances’ - took place for one whole day, ‘the time between two periods of sleep’, in a primarily urban setting, as it was in the ‘great industrially transformed cities’ that the social conditioning was considered most pervasive. Like Guy Debord’s practice, Connor is less guided by chance than the ‘psychogeography’ of her chosen environment. Open to the ‘constant currents, fixed points and vortexes,’ Connor is acutely aware and responsive to the recurrence of certain events and imagery, and their varying representational guises.2 The decision-making process has its own logic, developed in the very act of making. Collage causes a necessary fissure or rupture in the previously self-contained microcosm, opening it out to speak to the macrocosm, revealing a communicative system in perpetual movement and flux, constantly slipping and sliding, feeding off and folding in on itself.

Cutting, sampling, reducing, doubling and obscuring, Free Literature unconventionally maps an experience, a city and a moment, via active engagement with a thing inextricable from that experience, city and moment. Can we see the result as one big, unwieldy ransom note? Perhaps, but I am not sure what the demands are, it doesn’t appear to be asking for anything. Maybe just giving testament, maybe working it out for itself.



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Not-Auckland

BY SALLY CONOR

Where does Auckland begin and end exactly? In a city that is characterised by its sprawl, it is almost impossible to tell. The only silly metaphor I can think of is a fried egg… built up in the middle and with a fairly definite central area but sort of tapering out into almost translucent thinness somewhere around Albany in the north and Manurewa in the south. Does Orewa count as a suburb yet? It can’t be more than five years before it does, surely.

The disease of mass suburban development is spreading north like a terracotta-tiled architectural plague. The Hibiscus Coast is already being eaten alive by the canker, and soon Orewa will be engulfed, as will acres of beautiful rolling arable land and dark forest. Auckland seems to be something of an insatiable beast, always spreading, always expanding, in the manner of The Blob. Stand still in the outer suburbs for too long and you might find you have been paved over to make way for a carpark.

Two consecutive weekends have seen me uncharacteristically venture north out of Auckland and I have found myself to remark on several occasions: “I really must get out of Auckland more. I find myself forgetting what a gorgeous country New Zealand is”, but if I’m honest, these brief sojourns have left me conflicted. It’s clear that I love Auckland. Most of the time on this blog I won’t shut up about how great I think it is. So any trip away from it, however brief, leaves me feeling mildly homesick and a little discombobulated. The country is so QUIET. You can hear The Wind. You can see the shape of the landscape for miles. You have to drive for ten minutes to get to THE Shop, singular.

For any institutionalised city-dweller, these things are beautiful and pleasant but nonetheless unsettling. I like the country but I miss the city. And then at the same time I resent the encroachment of the city into the country. I want them to be able to exist together in harmony without the growth of the one equalling the death of the other. I want Auckland and Not-Yet-Auckland to sign some kind of Treaty:

“I, Auckland, promise to be a more considerate neighbour and to not keep moving my borders further into Not-Auckland’s territory at night when no one is looking. I promise to be satisfied with the already massive space that I occupy and to focus on utilising it more effectively and making it better for those who already live there rather than exacerbating my already significant problems by ravenously expanding even further. I acknowledge that my expansion problem stems from insecurity and that I need to look inside myself for validation rather than eating more of the country in attempt to fill the void. I promise to respect the integrity of the countryside and to leave it the fuck alone for the sake of Nature and for those small communities that make New Zealand awesome and of which I have already gobbled hundreds. I promise to go on a diet. I promise to purge myself of asshole developers, bad architects and Mark Ellis. I promise to love myself and my brother, Not-Auckland and to respect his private space.”

Cities are characterised not only by what they contain, but by what surrounds them – everyone needs to get away from the city sometimes, and where will we go if Not-Auckland is subsumed into Auckland? Somewhere, somebody needs to draw a line.



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Note Books

BY ASH KILMARTIN



A friend, recently returned from visiting family in China, presented me with a set of three notebooks. The largest, about the same length as my hand from fingertips to heel of palm. The smallest, making it just to my first knuckle from the heel.

The covers are of thin recycled paper, the colour of each a slightly varied shade of golden-tan, a colour I can't help but associate with thrift and pleasing uncontrivedness.
The unassuming nature of the books is further stated by the cover inscription: in red, four characters translated as "note book". Below this assertion, in a position on the page that tells pleasantly of well-considered design, lie two parallel lines. Also in red, they echo in the lower third of the page the form of the characters in the top third, encouraging the owner to make their own inscription – a name; perhaps their own or that of a project to which the book is dedicated.

The cheap material and simple form do not entail shoddy workmanship: the pages of each differently-sized book are bound in six sets of leaves, creating six evenly-sized humps at the spine when viewed from above and six small ridges which run the length of the spine, interrupted by the four adjacent rows of stitching which hold the sets of leaves together.

The text-block (the bound-together paper stock) is attached to the cover by glue at the spine, and secured by white end-papers (the pages attached to the inside covers and the first adjoining pages). Such perfectly-glued end-papers are probably my favourite feature of these notebooks.

The pages themselves are of thin recycled stock – like the covers, the pages differ slightly in colour between sizes. Each is finely-ruled (7mm, by my eye) in indigo ink, with two close lines separating the heavy header-space from the lined body of the page. No margins. All perfectly printed and matched, but for one page in the largest notebook, which is charmingly askew. Here, the lines march off the page at a thirty-degree angle, as though heading dynamically into avant-garde Soviet poster design. Quietly combatting loathed dog-earring are gently rounded corners at the upper and lower left-hand corners.

On the back cover, corresponding in place and scale to the parallel lines on the front, are four lines of characters and numbers. What they describe, I can only guess (or, I guess, ask said friend to translate). Their exact origin is unknown to me, although I'm told they're Government-issue books once given free to employees of the state-owned corporations. That they're apparently becoming harder and harder to find only adds to their mystery and appeal, of course.


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BDO

BY AMBER EASBY

We made it to the stadium in good time. We arrived a little before 4pm, having missed the traffic and spent $20 on a car park close to the front gate. The security was more relaxed than I remembered – a quick glance in the bag, no physical pat down. As a teen, I hid a cask of wine in my underwear to avoid confiscation. My brother once went to the grounds a week in advance to bury a bag of weed and a bottle of Jack Daniels. This time, I was happy to make it through with my water bottle.

Dizzee Rascal had just started in the Boiler Room. The tent was packed and like stepping into a steamy shower of sweat. For the first time, those bikinis and bare chests made sense to me. I was expecting to see a skinny little kid but Dizzee was totally buff! It was a fun show and overall, the best sounding performance of the day.

We queued for the next 45minutes for the Immortals Lounge. It was only worth the wait for the use of clean, flushing toilets. You could also drink beer from a bottle. I tried Steinlager Pure for the first time and was disappointed. Sure – it’s natural but so is urine.

If I see a band I like at a festival, it usually makes me wish I were seeing them at their own (indoor) show. This was particularly true of Arcade Fire. The barricading of the main stage floor made it impossible to see or hear anything, unless you were the die-hard Rage Against the Machine fans who staked their claim (I am watching a lot of Deadwood) early on. I have seen this system work well overseas but here, it was poorly implemented. Long lines and confused security guards meant the flow of the crowd was heavily restricted. I was stuck on the periphery and might as well have been listening to the radio.

We ditched Arcade Fire to see Battles. They were a little too techy for me but Henry loved them. Maybe it is a dude thing. Gemma and I sat at the back and were still able to hear well. I had hot dogs and chips with the good tomato sauce - delicious! Henry sent me text message that I got four hours later, saying “Believe it or not, this is their hit song."

Determined for a more satisfactory main stage experience, we made our way to Bjork a little early. We caught the end of Shihad, a band that must organise their entire year/career around playing the Big Day Out. We managed to secure a slightly better spot. I stood on my tiptoes for as much as I could for Bjork. The marching band of Icelandic teenagers, the costumes, Bjork’s spidey hands – it was an amazing show. Unfortunately the creep factor was growing in anticipation for ‘Rage’. One guy was yelling, “You suck” throughout. I was stuck behind a loud stoner couple who thought they had lost their weed. If I had been at the movies, I would have ssshed them. When they finally found it (in their pocket), they started to roll a joint. One dude wedged himself between Gemma and me, hoping to catch the joint as it was passed back. Another apologized for pushing in with a slow, inappropriate rub of my arms and a “sorry babe”.

We made our way back to the Boiler Rom for LCD Soundsystem, which was everything you would hope. T O T A L D A N C E P A R T Y. Still, I couldn’t help but worry about the muddy ground ruining my shoes or the young girls wearing t-shirts that said, “I am with the band”. During North American Scum, a sixteen year old pushed me out of the way in excitement and I realised, I no longer have the ability to enjoy the festival for what it is. We skipped The Clean to avoid the traffic and were in bed by midnight.



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