Flabbergastation

First published in Column 8, some time in the 1990s 

Flabbergastation isn't a word you'll hear very often. (The emphasis is on "station.") One of the local radio announcers flung it past my ears while describing Dunedin's welcome to the America's Cup winners.

Curiously enough, flabbergastation describes the state in which I've found myself over the last week or two, a state in which I feel as though I must see both sides (or more), of every current argument. It's difficult to be appropriately opinionated when your perspective is stereoscopic.

So when I set out to write about New Zealanders' joy and elation over the America's Cup win, (which I heard on the radio while snivelling with a cold), I'm held back by other concerns as to why we're getting so excited.

We have more people turn out to shout and throw bits of shredded paper than ever appeared at the original VE celebrations we've just been remembering, yet the "victory" we're celebrating isn't anywhere near as historic. I have everybody telling me that it's going to set NZ on its feet financially, yet I suspect the trickle-down effect we'll see here will be about equal to the sweat trickling off Russell Coutt's nose as he sits in a becalmed Black Magic on a windless day.

So I don't know how to try and de-flabbergast myself on that subject. Even worse is the way my mind has been swayed by how/whether/when we settle the issues raised by the Treaty of Waitangi.

I mean, I thought I had it all sussed. I'd finally got hold of the fact that we white New Zealanders are SOOOHH guilty of everything that we should just admit defeat and start leaping into the sea like a pack of lunatic lemmings. I understood that we had no culture, no history, no understanding, no sensitivity, no mana - and hardly any womana - to speak of. I was prepared to believe all the articles I read that told me I was the one having to do the apologising and repenting.

And then, blow me down, along comes this fellow, Stuart C Scott, who at the age of 74 is prepared to put his money where his mouth is, pay to publish his own non-pc book, The Travesty of Waitangi, and say everybody's got it wrong. The Maori have been conning us, he says, and we shouldn't pay them another penny.

That's another subject I no longer know how to de-flabbergast myself on.

Nor on this. The police finally decide to target persistent drink-driving offenders by a surveillance operation which may stop these drivers going out and slaughtering innocent victims. I think to myself, now that's good.

And then I read that the civil liberties people disagree. "I would be opposed in principle to any method of policing which targets individuals not on the basis of what they're doing at the time but on what they've done in the past or might do in the future," says Dr Rodney Harrison.

Well, yes, we must, (mustn't we?), protect crims as much as non-crims - I think...I mean I wouldn't put any security systems round my house, no sir! I mean if one driver has 24 convictions, (and killed someone through his drunken driving), I wouldn't want to stand in the way of his individual rights - would I?

And lastly, most flabbergastating of all, thousands of innocent NZ users of the Internet have the spectre of censorship hanging over them. These people, whom MP Trevor Rogers calls, "nerds and wallies and some people who wanna stick their faces in custard," are just the sort to find out how to blow up schools, or build bombs, or spend their days looking at trite pornographic pictures and reading uninspiring sexual graffiti. None of them can be trusted, you know!

On the other hand, do I want innocent children being propositioned by perverts and paedophiles?

Flabbergastation all the way.....

Surprise - self-portrait by Jeffrey Isaac

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 One of those posts that for some reason didn't make it online when it was first written. Just rediscovered it and thought it was worth adding here. It's a review of what turned out to be an unexpected marvel. I think I caught up on it some years after it was made, on a streaming service. 

The notion behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was always going to cause difficulties for the writer of this movie: firstly in the outworking of the idea that a man could be born old and gradually get younger – it has potential for disaster all along the line – and perhaps more importantly from a dramatic point of view, the loss of the main actor, the star, from the last ten minutes of the movie, at a time when he’s perhaps most needed to complete the thing.

 Surprisingly these two factors are, in general, overcome.  They still cause the movie to be less than it might have been, nevertheless Benjamin Button proved to be a much better movie than I expected. I think it’s too long; there’s an overindulgence in extraneous material. There are two framing stories rather than one (the backwards clock is interesting but essentially fluffery in terms of the movie itself, as is the hummingbird theme, there because hummingbirds can fly backwards). The affair with the spy’s wife in Russia, though superbly done, contributes nothing to the ongoing story. The red herring of the way in which a series of delays can cause someone to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is a great piece of filmmaking, full of detail, and yet it actually has nothing to do with the story. The summing-up piece at the end which points up the different gifts of various characters. Is it necessary? Nope, we’ve already seen these gifts throughout the movie. 

Take all these out and it would have been a much leaner movie, and maybe more effective.  Yet, perhaps to contradict what I’ve already said, all these ‘extras’ are actually very enjoyable, if you allow yourself just to take them as they come. They bring a kind of Dickensian flavour to the film in the sense that Dickens was never averse to adding in extraneous but rich material. (His book, The Pickwick Papers, has several short stories included in it, usually told by characters who have nothing to do with the main story. He avoided this technique in his later books, but never got over the use of including characters who wouldn’t be missed if they hadn’t been there. Another 19^th century writer, Victor Hugo, often stops the story in Les Miserables to write an essay on one of the aspects of his story, such as convents, or the Paris sewers.) 

In Benjamin Button there are also too many themes: missing fathers, loss of time, wasting time, the value of individual gifts, death in the midst of life. Yet within the context of this particular movie, the embarressment de riches somehow works, and keeps the viewer’s mind active. There’s no single straightforward path through this movie.  

Brad Pitt plays the innocent ‘old’ man as someone with eyes wide open to the extraordinary nature of the world, a man without guile. I think it’s a superb piece of characterization, perhaps one of the best things he’s ever done. Cate Blanchett always has a kind of severity about her, and yet this works well in the complex nature of her character as Button’s lifelong love. Curiously, his other passion, played by Tilda Swinton, looks so much like Blanchett at times, that for a while I thought it was the same actress playing both roles. There may be an intention behind this. The vast cast of other actors are all excellent in roles big and small.     

The photography by Claudio Miranda is superb, always at one with the tone of the movie.   Shot after shot uses colour to heighten the emotion of the scene. Yes, I know this isn’t unusual in movies, but it’s certainly done with great art here. Miranda has worked with both Brad Pitt and the director of this movie, David Fincher, before. (Fincher also directed the highly acclaimed, Social Network.)  There’s obviously a compatibility at work. 

And the special effects are seamless: it’s hard to know where Brad Pitt ends and one of the other actors who play his role begins – or vice versa. Several younger actors are credited with the role – though it’s obvious which ones play Button in the last stages of his life, it’s not so obvious in the early stages. 

 This is the sort of movie to take your time over. Don’t be put off by its length (some 166 minutes). Accept it as it is, and enjoy its trips down side alleys, and its delight in human beings. 

Interesting montage of the various stages 
of Button's life. 
Sorry, I've lost the address of the site it came from.

Remembering Nuns

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s.

 In the memory course I did a while ago I was supposed to learn how to remember where I'd put things years before, and how to recognize faces from the distant past. 

One face eludes me. Try as I might, I can't remember the face of the teacher, (a nun), who tied me to my desk with a belt because my childish exuberance was somewhat over the top! 

On the other hand, during a recent visit to a convent, (for a friend's Jubilee), I was amazed at the phenomenal memories nuns appear to have, particularly those who claimed they'd taught me at primary school, forty years ago.

 (None of the sisters took responsibility for tying me to the desk, however, and my memory failed to recognize any face that connected to my "traumatic" experience.) 

I don't think these ladies have done a memory course - it just seems to come naturally. If I was a teacher, I'd find pupils' faces blurring into one big Mr Blobby after a few years. 

For instance, the sister who greeted us at the door instantly knew me, and said she'd taught me. As usual I had to ask who she was, and still remembered her not at all. 

Perhaps it's because when I was a lad all the nuns wore long, black, person-enclosing garments that hid them almost entirely from view. The only identifiable parts were the hands and the face. 

I'm not good at remembering hands at the best of times - and faces that used to be tightly framed in black change out of all sight when viewed in ordinary everyday gear. 

But not all the nuns at the afternoon tea were unremembered. One I met again had had the misfortune to follow in the footsteps of my favourite music-teaching nun of all time, the one I adored, and for whom I actually wept when she said she was being transferred. 

This other lady, whose qualities and abilities, while different, were no doubt as excellent, suffered badly by comparison, through no fault of her own. 

Naturally, she remembered more about the past than I did. (Do they keep dossiers?)

She spoke of my poor practice record and the strain it had on my mother's nerves, as well as my embarrassment at bringing her flowers (perhaps as a peace offering). I apparently came half an hour early to escape the unwanted attention of my mates. 

I remember none of this - surely I used to practice perfectly? 

Embarrassed about bringing flowers? Never.

Later, as I was sitting down balancing my cup of tea in one hand and in the other one of those soft, fluffy cakes filled with mock cream and smattered with icing sugar, (the sort that sticks to your beard and can't be wiped off because you don't have a third hand), I was approached by a six foot vision from the past. Someone I could never forget. 

This nun, holding a tray in her hands and encouraging everyone to eat more cakes, turned out to be my first and favourite music-teacher of all time. And she was the only nun that day who didn't instantly recognise me.

(She soon made it clear that this was hardly surprising: when I was seven, I didn't have a beard.) Her delight was even greater than mine, and she greeted me with the warmth of someone to whom everyone is a long-standing friend.

She was as full of beans as ever, words high-tailing it off her tongue as though she had so much to say the day would be over before she'd finished. And she still had an enthusiasm for life that hasn't changed in forty years.

It's curious how we so easily forget the names and faces of some people who leave an unpleasant mark on our memories. This sister, however, had made music a delight to her pupils, opening up a world formerly unexplored. More than that, she filled life with laughter. How could anyone forget her?

Dinosaurs....are bores

 First published in Column 8 in 1993 (and later online under my Poems and Short Fiction blog in 2019). It relates to my surprise that the scientific world seems so obsessed with 'selling' dinosaurs to children. 

I’ve had enough of dinosaurs,

Especially Hadrosaurs.

Dinos must rank, I think, as the

All-time greatest bores.

Who cares about some fifty tonnes of

Hefty Brontosaurus

Shoving all his weight around and asking:

‘Don’t you adore us?’

Who wants to meet and greet some

Rampant Iguanodon,

Marketing his lizard look

Until I feel quite put upon.

Who gives a hoot about a coot called

Rex Tyrannosaurus,

And whether on his nastier days he’d

Gouge and rip and gore us?

Euparkeria, Hypsilophodon, your

Names trip off my tongue –

NOT!

Triceratops, Coelophysis, your

Praises they ain’t sung.

Compsognathus, Dimorphodon, you

Thought you ruled the land;

You missing links, you’re all extinct –  I

Wish you all were banned.

You poor deficient dinosaurs, you

Denizens long gone.

Scarce good it did you, lumpy brutes, being

Weighed up by the tonne.

Go back where you belonged, you lot, in your

Dim Cretaceous time,

And let me try and end this rot with a

Non-Jurassic rhyme.

My wife (on the right) and I disguised as dinosaurs
at a grandchild's themed party.