So I was reading The Listener the other day. Well, I say I was reading, but to be honest I was merely flipping through seeing if I could find a Chris Slane cartoon to be amused by. If comics are the medium of the sub-literate then let me throw away my favourite copy of Orlando and embrace it fulsomely and fervently. Because you know after a hundred years of evolution of that media we still have to choose between viewing Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville or Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. Thankfully, by choosing Horrocks over Hulme, I can also choose to hand rape myself regularly and with great and forceful prejudice. I of course resent and belittle anyone who claims that this is actually the case in a non-satiric manner. Now back to The Listener. See, I was reading this column called the Black Page—I wasn’t sure if this was because the columnist was in fact of one of the darker cultures or if it was because her last name was Black. Regardless of her column’s ethnic authenticity or quality, it had this amazing feature. She used these red squares… possibly this indicates that she is a communist as well as someone from Africa, but look, I just haven’t done the research to comment fully. The thing is these little red squares were totally awesome, she’d just drop a Commie Box and flip topics like some ADHD kid on twitter. So of course I took it upon myself to play around with this new columnist’s tool.
What’s the deal with attractive dudes?! Wellington was always kind/sorta full of attractive women, but the men were character actors at best, like Steve Buscemi or Michael Galvin. Now we have people who strut around like Craig Parker in his glory days. I wonder just how many of us had a coming of age when they saw him in the Rocky Horror Picture show. I’m guessing around 14 of us. I wander around and there are hotties ranging from Old Banks Arcade all the way down to BATS. My penis thanks the metro-sexuality fad of a couple of years ago for teaching the modern emo kids to dress well and bathe. Because it’s bathing that sets emo and New Romantics aside from each other. You ever smell Tori Amos? If so, drop me a line at nic@thesando.com, I’d love to interview you.
I’m actually rather feverish while writing this column today, so forgive me for the sticky and sweaty stains that may be pooling around your copy of Salient, as that is how printing works, isn’t it? The point of this is that I was suffering both a fever and that awful band and symptom The Chills at the same time since five o’clock this April first. Now, as we all know, the most important thing that happened on April first this year wasn’t the two ten-minute and one half-hour break “thang,” which our Prime Minister, who, if not hateful, is at least downright disappointed about workers’ rights, has promised to repeal given half an excuse. No, the real story was about a warehouse of cheap and old television called Comedy Central being birthed onto Sky digital. Its first broadcast started at 8am, with little to no fanfare. It took another hour and a half to betray its own nature by playing an episode of a show called The Game, which according to the web is a dramady at best. And they didn’t even start with the first episode of the show. It’s tragic. I am almost willing to forgive it by inserting a sequence called BITS, which is made up of New Zealand comedians being filmed at BATS. God help them if they play the same seven one-minute pieces over and over again for eternity.
I had yum cha on Saturday, it was totally awesome. You see, yum cha, much like the New Year, is filled with promise. It contains everything that you have not yet sampled or changed, and you’re prepared to do it all. You never will, and will probably end up bloating and despising yourself months later, but that doesn’t stop the joy of the occasion. I am in love with this eating style. Not because of the delicious food or the delicious tea, no! It is because I was able to use one of those amazing rotating table trays to consistently move the delicious tea and soy sauce out of the reach of my other diners. Then, when they tried to use the thing, it took just one subtly placed hand to slow down the rotation and irritate everyone. It’s not that I was trying to hurt their feelings, it’s just that during my fever-ridden dream, Bus Driver’s Union boss Nick Kelly appeared to me on an angelic bus driven by Engels, and told me to do it as a way of screwing with the capitalist order. I didn’t understand him then, but the dream had to be real or else how could he have known that my favourite yum cha place had rotational tables? It’s not like he’s a Christian Scientist who believes he can see into the very future itself, is it?
Speaking of last week’s Stop Work Meeting of the bus drivers’ union, why can’t they advertise these outages more effectively? I knew for weeks that some dumb-ass triathlon was halting my ability to take a number 14 to Oriental Bay—why was it that the three posters about the Stop Work meeting were all located in the central city? How is that useful? I had to stand next to an old woman for forty minutes before her stink drove me to walk into town. It’s not that she had old lady smell; it’s more that she was an old lady who also smelled.
Sin… Morality… Sin… Morality… Sin… A well-known politician paused from his thoughts and looked up from his champagne flute. He spotted the bald pate of Rodney Hyde glinting in the wind and wondered softly to himself… “Wait, am I a Bear Hunter?” This columnist assuredly hopes that he is.
When I was a child the Easter Bunny touched my eggs. At least, that’s how I kind of construct the scenario and how it went down at the time. It’s weird, because I didn’t really think that it was bad per se, I just didn’t understand why he’d even want to. I wasn’t to tell anyone because they’d be jealous. So I didn’t. And you know what, they didn’t get jealous, so the Easter Bunny was right.
My childhood. Oh god. No wonder I eat so. You know what, I just find this entire skipping my column around like Mary Hunter Benton the jump rope champion to be really hard. The strings of narrative and polemic that I so deftly tug fall too short to create natural movement on my puppet of a page, and it’s almost impossible to create a pataphore of any complexity. It’s not that reading a bunch of dislocated snippets about my palsied life isn’t interesting enough, but what of it? Where is the insight? The high-handed judgement? The raw meat of it all?! Oh yes, it’s easy and indeed fun to use a small paragraph to talk about cute National party members or to editorialise to you all about my horrific childhood ideals in a comic tone, but… Yeah, okay, I see why Joanne Black does this now. This is the last sentence of this week’s column. Or was it? [Yes, it was.–NS]