That Wonderful Load Of Art

The art world has had numerous moments where controversy has stormed blustery, vicious, cold and tumultuous, and like all storms: it passes, the world goes about its business with the wheels of progress never stopping, freshly galvanised and lubricated from the abrupt stop it came to earlier.

Years ago there was the beer crate fiasco, then there was the dildo shaped batons, the embalmed shark, the human excrement, and now... literal rubbish.



Made from the packaging of other entrants, and done via the webs without any consultation "Collateral" by Dane Mitchell won the Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award and is the fresh storm brewing in the art world - or at least NZ for at least the time being. As far as the art work goes one has to admire the simplicity of it, and the sheer - for lack of a better word - balls. What always surprises me about these works is the arguments over the internets. Check out the herald's your views for amazing, well thought out analysis of what art is, and why this is a great piece of art because we're talking about art, or why this is awful because my three year-old son could have done a better job, and pearls of wisdom from the likes of ALISHA091 from Auckland who offers a wonderfully concise comment taken verbatim from the site so as to not detract from artistic merit, 'TRASH! Who were the judges? The locals on K road?'

A wise man once told me that, "a retard debates art's worthiness, and a true imbecile offers an opinion. A wise man would do well to stand back and watch them both squirm."

MMP and such (or the funny thing about referendums)

The other day I was cheating people out of their money over the phone, half asleep, half hungover - or possibly still drunk from the night before - and the oddest thing came on the television, in fact if I remember correctly, it actually interrupted whatever British drama series TV One was showing - Emmerdale, East Enders or something along that vein - with "Breaking News" - like it's an emergency or something, something that's going to change the trajectory of my day in an unimaginable way - I couldn't hear the reporter as the mute button was on but saw the text exclaiming 'Key Announces MMP Referendum' and went back to calling people about a four hundred dollar piece of plastic that's going to change their life - and in only three minutes!

The avid National supporter across from me yelled, 'about fucking time!' and I thought to myself, 'you realise it's only a vote don't you?' What followed was a comedy of errors on the National supporter's part as he made the mistake of talking politics to me. Now, normally if given half a chance to get on my soapbox and wax politics I would jump at the chance; however, being that I'm under a contract which actually states in no uncertain terms that, 'no employee should discuss politics, religion, and other controversial matters whilst working for... failure to do so will result in instant dismissal,' and so I bit my tongue, kept my head down and tried to go about my work but was asked if I liked MMP by the National supporter. I gave a non-committal answer and then was treated to an almost David Brent moment where the Nat supporter went about telling me everything that was wrong with MMP, everything that was wrong with Labour, why National was the only party he supported - ever since he began to understand politics - why taxes suck, why Maori's shouldn't be involved in the supercity, and to top it off, why Asians, Indians, Wogs - anyone not white was ripping him and the country off.

I held my tongue, then asked him to wait for my cigarette break and said that, "then I would be happy to explain my opinions on everything," to him, in words he could understand but he kept at me and so I decided to take my break early. What followed over a cigarette was your cliche' black versus white conversation where no-one would ever back down, no-one would show weakness and even the idea of admitting there was something we could agree on was unimaginable. I finished my smoke and walked upstairs saying, 'let's just get on with our day,' then went and sat at my desk. Five minutes later I was approached by the manager who said, 'we were listening to your conversation through the headset, you handled it well, I'm about to go and fire the fucker.'

And so five minutes later the National supporter was fired and asked to hand back his headset. The word schadenfreude sprang to mind as he left. After an hour or so I got reflective and wondered just how annoyed he'd be when he realised the referendum is two years or so away and the announcing of a referendum doesn't mean a win, it means um-ing and ah-ing, talking about it til you're blue in the face and don't care anymore, but people seem to think the vote is a formality and it's already a done deal, even when John Key himself said, "the country is in no mood to dump MMP." So... one has to beg the question if this is a waste of time that a National government would normally - as their ethos requires them to do - cut, or is this just Key placating the extreme edges of his support base with the hopes of grabbing some more supporters from Act when Act hits rock bottom?

Overall, people need to chill out, not be so premature in their ejaculations of victory when all a referendum is, is a nice exercise of democracy - and sometimes means keeping the status quo.

Mostly magical music news

The Pixies are coming! Tickets go on sale Spetember the 18th; grab yourself a ticket quick as the vector arena - yeah it's a shame it's not somewhere decent - is going to sell out fast. So, mark down the 18th of September in your diary, grab yourself a ticket, then chill out... and then gradually get more and more excited at the prospect of one of the greatest bands of all time gracing lowly New Zealand with their presence. According to The Herald the show is going to consist of the entire Doolittle album plus selections from there other albums. It's going to be good and probably the concert of the year.

In other news Pere Ubu have a new album coming out in the next couple of weeks called Long Live Pere Ubu! It sounds interesting but of course one comes to expect this sort of thing from Mr David Thomas and so to quote from the press release, "Long Live Pere Ubu!" is the album of songs that was the genesis of the entire mess. It is a great leap forward in our pursuit of hyper-naturalistic recording techniques by which we replace microphones in the studio with wooden boxes, junked radio speakers, metal horns, and electrically charged window panes. Sound itself becomes the narrative. Everyone is going to hate it. We know that. The story, though satiric and comedic, is utterly bleak, lacking charm (the usual counter-weight to the band's noire tendencies) and devoid of redemption. Few people have ever read Ubu Roi, fewer heard of it. Wonderful. Altogether two years of work. Pere Ubu, the character, ruined Jarry's life. And now he's ruined our career. This thing is our Waterloo, our Bridge Too Far, our Pickett's Charge. Well, somebody had to do it." As another interesting aside the album will contain the singer Sarah Jane Morris, who has quite a large following in Italy and Greece as shown below.



And so we add that, with this.



And throw in a pinch of this.



And we get... this.



Other releases this month are Neil Young's Dreaming Man, one wonders if he ever just spends a day on the couch watching TV? My bet would be no, he'll write a song about spending the day on the couch watching TV.

Jay Z has an album coming out called Blueprint 3 - does he think he's Led Zeppelin or something?

Nick Cave has another album with Warren Ellis coming out, it should be good, as long as it's not all Nick Cave piano ballads. But overall, one must admit it's shaping up to be a good month for music.

It's about that time.

There was always going to be a day where I'd start a blog with, "apologies for not blogging for so long... but I've been busy," and this would be the day. So, for all those that actually read my blog and have been malnourished for interesting reading here it is... sorry.

Ok, now that that's out of the way let me catch you all up on what's been happening. First, I got a job - an unglamourous job, but a job all the same. Second, I've moved from my delightfully quaint and fiscally prudent house, which could have possibly been the reason for the song Dominion Road by The Muttonbirds - but from all research undertaken by me seems unlikely - to a rather cold, yet nice house on Franklin Road. I moved a month ago and have only just come to grips with the added costs involved with living very centrally, running into celebrities, musicians, actors and other personalities whilst grabbing a coffee on Ponsonby Road or simply grabbing some milk from New World.

So, that's what I've been doing, fairly unexciting, fairly vanilla, fairly unworthy reading really; however there has been some interesting things happening in Auckland over the last couple of months: the film festival, an art festival or two, the smacking referendum, road works on Symonds street bringing traffic to a standstill most days, a rape in Victoria park - which is about five minutes walking distance from my house - and my own personal story regarding the 90 day fire at will bill.

I won't bother talking about the film festival except to say if there is one documentary you see this year, make sure it's We Live In Public, it's an incredibly interesting look at a particularly nutty man who was one of the first Internet pioneers. The referendum, of course, was an absolute joke and I feel there has already been far to much ink spilt in regards to that topic, so I won't weigh in, but I will weigh in on something which hasn't been in the media since it was first announced and that would be the 90 day fire at will bill.

As I said previously I'm gainfully employed in a job with a cringe worthy job title: telesales. Since I have been working there I've learned many things about corporate life and culture (will probably blog about this later) as well as seen first hand the ramifications of the fire at will bill. Since starting my job nearly three months ago I have seen five people fired, two people leave, and four new people start each week - the company I work for seems to have a revolving door policy in terms of retaining its staff. My own personal story is somewhat of a success story, in that, A, I haven't been fired, B, I've made a decent amount of money from my toils, and, C, I'm about to be offered a full-time contract; however it's not as easy as one would expect, before even discussing the contract, the pay rate, the hours, the leave, holidays and other stuff, I've had to undergo a myriad of psychometric tests - you know filling out forms answering questions about how I would react if someone lied to me, or if someone arrived late to a meeting, to determine whether I'm the right personality type to offer a contract.

Hopefully, the tests show me as a fine upstanding member of society and not the marginal alcoholic slash opinionated bleeding heart liberal that I am. Anyways, cross your fingers for me because if I have to stay on a casual contract I could go the way of many other staff members who have been fired within two days of starting work because they had a bad day or week. So, the 90 day bill works exactly how the National government wanted it to work, keep the workers in fear of losing their job so they work harder, take reduced pay, no holidays, no leave and of course if they prove themself to be worthwhile they can keep their job - hooray! - otherwise it's a new soul destroying job somewhere else where the whole process starts again. But it's doing even more that that because not only does it undermine your job security at the start of a job, it has a roll-on effect when you're actually under contract, meaning that when you sign your contract to get that job security that you've been wanting for so long, all that you really get is a piece of paper, your rights as a worker have pretty much already gone done the gurgler and so all you end up negotiating is what rights you have left, and in this current economic climate you can imagine just how many of those rights you'd give up for that piece of paper.

And with that, I'll leave for the time being, my laptop is about to die.