Beauchamp St

The glitter rubs right off & you're nowhere

One of my favourite ever tracks is this George Benson number from his 1978 live album 'Weekend in LA', and for me it sums up the sound of the late '70s. I watched Bob Fosse's All That Jazz for the first time last night, and Benson's version of the song that first became a hit for the Drifters in 1963 is the soundtrack to the superb opening scene. It's masterful filmmaking, dialogue-free but highly successful in introducing the setting of a stressful Broadway audition, illustrating most of the main characters including Roy Scheider's ruthless choreographer Gideon, and placing the film firmly in its New York stage context - one that would be rendered ubiquitous by the success of the film and TV version of Fame a few years later. (There's also an icily splendid live new wave version by Gary Numan from 1979).

Reclaiming Wellington from the motorway

I went to an interesting talk after work this evening at the City Gallery by architectural historian Ben Schrader (author of the award-winning The Big Smoke, a history of New Zealand urbanism), on the role of the Wellington urban motorway and its opponents in shaping the design of the central city. The title of the talk was 'Four lanes to the planes: Yeah, right', flipping 2016 mayoral candidate Jo Coughlan's slogan.

Schrader is a strong advocate for urban heritage and people-centred design, as opposed to car-centric. But the history of the motorway blasting its way through Thorndon in the '60s & '70s and Te Aro in the 2000s until its comeuppance from the Save The Basin campaign in 2014 has me wondering if the current ceasefire of the motorway builders will endure. The next time there's a right-wing mayor and/or council and a National government, will they be trying again to concrete over the central city to allow more traffic through? Unless their transport thinking changes, probably.

All the discussion of CBAs (or BCRs, if you prefer) reminded me that the next time a congestion-driven motorway expansion is planned, Wellingtonians should look to San Francisco and other cities that have successfully removed highways to revitalise their inner cities. If you've visited the Embarcadero in San Francisco you'll know what was once a brutally ugly double-decker highway cordoning off the city from its waterfront is now a tourist Mecca teeming with social & economic life. So my question would be, what if we ripped up the Thorndon and Te Aro motorway and replaced it with, y'know, neighbourhoods for people to live in and shops for them to purchase things in? Stranger things have happened.

Civic Square, after the Schrader talk

The duality of the Victorian libido

What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds - a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never - or hardly ever - have so many great public figures, from the future king down, led scandalous private lives. Where the penal system was progressively humanised; and flagellation was so rife that a Frenchman set out quite seriously to prove that the Marquis de Sade must have had English ancestry. Where the female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by his ability to carve naked women. Where there is not a single novel, play or poem of literary distinction that ever goes beyond the sensuality of a kiss, where Dr Bowdler (the date of whose death, 1825, reminds us that the Victorian ethos was in being long before the strict threshold of the age) was widely considered a public benefactor; and where the output of pornography has never been exceeded. Where the excretory functions were never referred to; and where the sanitation remained - the flushing lavatory came late in the age and remained a luxury well up to 1900 - so primitive that there can have been few houses, and few streets, where one was not constantly reminded of them. Where it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate them. Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal and fundamental.

- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969, p.258-9. 

Upper Hutt

The presidential art of handshaking

On rare occasions [President James K.] Polk essayed the light touch. Once, for instance, he explained to some people how he handled the problem of handshaking. 'I told them,' he confided to his diary, 'that I had found that there was great art in shaking hands, and that I could shake hands during the whole day without suffering any bad effects from it. They were curious to know what this art was. I told them that if a man surrendered his arm to be shaken, by some horizontally, by others perpendicularly, and by others again with a strong grip, he could not fail to suffer severely from it, but that if he would shake and not be shaken, grip and not be gripped, taking care always to squeeze the hand of his adversary as hard as he squeezed him, that he suffered no inconvenience from it. I told them also that I could generally anticipate when I was to have a strong grip, and that when I observed a strong man approaching I generally took advantage of him by being a little quicker than he was and seizing him by the tip of his fingers, giving him a hearty shake, and thus preventing him from getting a full grip upon me'. Polk's auditors were much amused by his exposition, but Polk ended up being deadly serious about it. There was 'much philosophy,' he decided, in what he had said: 'though I gave my account of the operation playfully, it is all true'.

- James K. Polk (US President 1845-49), quoted in P.F. Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, 1981, p.101.

See also:
Music: They Might Be Giants - James K Polk
Blog: Would Limbaugh be a better president than SpongeBob?, 25 February 2016
TV: American Idol - Reagan, 26 March 2011