12-3-04 Spent ten or eleven hours out drinking (not heavily but steadily) with some of the journalism class yesterday afternoon/evening... tbc tonight. Not sure what this says about the journalism profession. At least half the people in the student bar on Fridays are in the journalism class. They even scheduled a 'staff/student liason session' at the bar in the first week and put it in the course programme. Oh well they're all intelligent & articulate people so good to hang out with. Still no desire to work on a newspaper for a career though.
24-3-04 Spent the last couple of days at home having sick days, aching all over & congested. With all that free time it’s amazing how little I can accomplish. Not completely over it but should be able to go back to class today. Weather was fine the last couple of days, now it’s raining. Daylight savings ended which is somewhat of a bummer. Fasten seatbelts til late June.
Two-part dream this morning. First part about being on a grey stone coast with Maori affairs minister. He got me to look for pieces of gold, I didn’t find any but did find some metal nuts & bolts which he said would be useful. He said the big rock offshore taking up 15% of the horizon was Maui. Second part of dream was a James Joyce-themed swimming race for school kids. Over-16s paired up with an under-16 each. I swam varying my stroke a lot, including stopping and standing and doing stylized arm movements to reflect Joyce’s varied language in Ulysses. There was acoustic guitar accompaniment.
31-3-04 After spending the last couple of years cultivating a studied indifference to tv and popular culture I’m observing my own reaction to the news that the BBC are – about bloody time – bringing back Dr Who. They’ve cast Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor which is a pleasant surprise, and this generates all kinds of anticipation about what the new series is going to be like. Eccleston’s great in such programmes as Cracker and Our Friends in the North - some of the last tv I actually felt the urge to sit down and watch. I’ve heard The Sopranos is supposed to be good but haven’t seen more than half an episode because I wasn’t willing to give it the kind of time investment needed. I hardly even watch The Simpsons these days, even though my current literary hero Thomas Pynchon makes a cameo in one of the new episodes (with a paper bag over his head). No idea what Fionnaigh sees in Buffy since I’ve never watched it.
Dr Who is the one big concession I’ve been willing to make to tv. I loved it as a kid; Dr Who, Lord of the Rings, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were my personal triumvirate of influences. On the other hand I hated WWF Superstars.
Lord of the Rings we all know what happened with that. The guy who introduced me to marijuana at high school also introduced me to Bad Taste – the moment where the sheep gets blown up with the rocket launcher stands out for me as a defining moment in NZ cinema. It took me another year or two to click that this was the same director whose Heavenly Creatures I’d seen with my parents in 1994 (year zero for NZ film). And then he filmed one of my favourite books right on my doorstep and I had hardly anything to do with it (apart from nine days as an extra – I think I made it into one shot in the third film) since I was at uni and didn’t realize how persistent you have to be to get a foot in the door in the film industry. I gradually worked out that bad shit goes on in the film industry but that’s another story. I’m burnt out on Lord of the Rings these days – I’m curious to see if I’ll still be able to enjoy reading the books again, but won’t do it for a while. King Kong doesn’t particularly interest me. Maybe you need to discover these kind of stories in childhood – I saw the first Harry Potter film and found it completely tedious.
It’s interesting how the relationship with early influences continues to evolve over time. I got into Bob Dylan at age 14 and still haven’t grown tired of him, his (best) work is rich enough that I keep discovering new things. The last couple of years have been interesting, the brilliant Love and Theft and Live 1975 albums and seeing him for the second time in concert last year put everything in a fresh new perspective. And there’s the Masked and Anonymous film and the Martin Scorsese documentary on him to look forward to. Live 1964 gets released today, not sure if that will have so much to say to me since he’s 22 at that point and I’m now 25.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also changed its tone for me as I got older and realized just how dark the satire is. I also read Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams’ non-fiction book on endangered species (including a chapter set in NZ about the kakapo), which shows another side to the author. His biography, Mostly Harmless, paints a somewhat sad picture of someone who got rich & famous early on and then struggled with writer’s block for the rest of his life. The discovery that he was very tall also reinforced him as an identification figure – anyone notably tall or short or fat or skinny or brainy or stupid gets picked on at school (though he was 6’5”, I’m only 6’3”). The death of Douglas Adams coincided eerily with me getting my first published short story in Takahe magazine – issue #42.
As for Dr Who, it ran for 26 years and went through such a range of styles and material, comedy to high-concept SF to darkness and back that it’s impossible to predict what the new series will be like. Its versatility is its great strength – the format even thrives on having a change of lead actor and style every few years – so there’s no reason why a new series couldn’t be something really cutting edge. Hopefully it’ll be something adults can watch without feeling embarrassed – the original show is severely cheesy at times. Fortunately they’ve got an interesting choice of leading man (on whom the show largely depends) and some writers with a good track record. Great dialogue will be essential to make it work.
When the series ran on Prime in 2001 I spent a fair bit of time getting the episodes on video and watching them again. A lot of it’s crap, at least from the perspective of being now older than ten. There are moments of brilliance though. I tried to introduce my nephews who are SF fans to the program, and being from a younger generation they couldn’t see past the low-budget special effects. Maybe the new series will convince them? I’m just half-surprised that it’s not being shot in NZ, otherwise I’d be having second thoughts about giving up on working in film…
A new series will be a great shot in the arm to make Who something living again, rather than locked into the nostalgia death-trip. Dr Who was not cancelled but indefinitely suspended after 1989 - although it did survive in book form. Apparently the writers of the books were able to introduce heavier concepts and go deeper into the characters than the tv series could. I approve of the idea, but wasn’t willing to delve into the books for fear of getting trapped into fandom. I started getting my SF hits from Greg Egan and Philip K. Dick instead.
Would it be selling out for me to start watching tv again? Should I be worried about the dangers of the ‘electric nipple’, as tv’s been described by sorry can’t remember who? Would I be too seduced by the opiate of the masses to pay attention to more important things? I don’t own a tv at this point and don’t miss it at all. There’s still nearly a year and a half to wait before Dr Who returns and I might want one again…