Blithering

I started painting in late September 2001. I'd been preparing for it with a self-imposed programme for a while, but the sudden start of the resource wars much sooner than I'd expected gave me quite a kick up the bum.

I'd realised since my early teens that the 21st century would be overshadowed by an increasing technological totalitarianism in response to dwindling natural resources and collapsing ecosystems. However, I thought we had more time than this. Which part of 'accelerating rate of change' did I not understand? Idiot.

I recently found the first studies I did then, with the help of my friend Paul Faris:

As I recall, I sketched in the landscape, which he painted in, then I went over it and added the figures. No doubt Paul will correct me in the comments if I've got it outrageously wrong.

It's called The adventures of the young Te Kooti predella cycle. The story comes from Judith Binney's Redemption songs, which I'd helped my dad work on (one day I should blither on about the connections between editing and painting).

The young Te Kooti was a bit of a cunt, you see, causing all sorts of trouble. One day, his father had had enough and decided to get rid of him once and for all. He asked Te Kooti to go down an old well on some pretext that I forget:

As soon as Te Kooti went down, his dad piled rocks in and blocked up the entrance:

However, Te Kooti escaped out a side-tunnel:

He returned to the people, and the tohunga put a stone in his mouth to dedicate him to the war god Tu:

What appealed to me about this story in particular is how archetypally mythic it is – the hero who goes into the underworld and returns with secret knowledge and a new purpose – and yet how modern it is. It happened to a historical person almost within living memory – someone born around the time this happened could've still been alive when I was born.

Sure, it's a minor episode compared to the rest of the myth cycle (and so suited for a predella), but that just makes it more stark.

Needless to say, I abandoned this line of inquiry reasonably quickly. Even though the specifics of the individual culture hero are incidental, they are inevitably the focus of attention.

Leave the nationalism to the knuckleheads, I reckon.

Back in the day

I'm the eldest in my family. I reacted badly when my brother Jeremy came along when I was one and a half. I did the conventional things like try to flush his teddy bear down the toilet and lead him out to play in the traffic.

I showed him those learn to read books that have a picture of a cow on one page and the word 'cow' on the facing page. I'd run my finger under the word 'cow' and say 'sheep'.

Before he could walk or talk, I'd break something, put him next to it, hit him so he'd start crying, and then hide in a good vantage point near-by to watch the ensuing fun. Until the day Mum snapped me, that is.

A few years ago, we were out drinking and talking about this. Jeremy said he wouldn't tell me what the worst thing I did was. He was going to wait till we're older and he'd got his revenge first.

I reckon he's making that up. His sneaky plan is that is his revenge – making me worry – so I am therefore nonchalantly unconcerned.

Fucking family eh?

Dada school

I first discovered dada when I was 12 or 13. I was in my first year of boarding school and not enjoying it very much. I went to Nelson fucking College. An indication of their pathetic aspirations comes from the school colours: light blue and dark blue, just like Oxford and Cambridge. (It impresses the Blenheim farmers.) I came from a nice liberal middle class family, and that kind of hideously authoritarian environment was a bit of a shock.

Cos I came from a city, I was put into a dorm with all the other city kids. The others had pretty much all been sent to the school cos their parents couldn't handle them. We were the punk rock dorm. Peter and the Test Tube Babies were a particular favourite. At the end of the year, it turned out most of the dorm was involved in a cannabis ring. I didn't know anything about it of course.

We used to go to war with the other dorms. If you drop a light bulb vertically, it'll bounce. We'd start by drop-kicking a bulb into the opposing side, then charge swinging pillow cases with knots tied in the end. Some of the more unscrupulous of us would put coins in the knot.

Boarding school is a funny place. They have stupid rules for stupid rules' sake. You can't walk on the grass, just so it can be a privilege for seventh formers to do so. They'd pick suitable seventh formers to be prefects. Suitable in this context means being not too bright, with a conventional mindset, an uncritical attitude, and an emphasis on physical strength ... you get the idea.

One time, the prefect in charge of our dorm heard us talking after lights out. He barged in and demanded we tell him who it was. When nobody owned up, or would rat anyone else out, he got really angry. We all had to get out of bed and go out on to the front field in our pyjamas. This was in the middle of winter. Then we had to stand there with arms outstretched making small circles with our hands. Try it sometime. It fucking hurts after a while. And that was just the start of it. I'm pleased to say that no-one did rat anyone out no matter what was thrown at us.

I have a line: The only things boarding school taught me were a healthy disrespect for authority and the ability to lie glibly. I've lost the latter due to lack of use, but there's not much chance of that for the former!

I didn't have many books to read, so I would read the Encyclopedia Britannica they had. I'd find an interesting article and then follow the cross-references (analogue hyperlinks!). I can't remember what the original article was, but one led me to both anarchism and dada. Needless to say, at that time and in those circumstances, both appealed to me a lot, but especially dada.

Spontaneous Search Party

The other day a couple to people let me know that National Radio, while talking about people changing their name by deed poll, denied the existence of my friend Spontaneous Search Party. Someone else rang up to set them straight before I could.

I was there when he decided to change his name. It was a memorable night during Easter 95 when a group of us had gone to camp for the night by a lake in Central Otago (read all night party). Spont and I sat by the fire talking for a fair bit of the night. Two things came of that conversation: he agreed to teach me to drive (which was to involve wiping out and broadsiding a lamppost – and that was him driving, showing me what the car could do) and he decided to change his name to Spontaneous Search Party by deed poll. It comes from a Julian Cope song.

We were flatting in Waitati, 20 km north of Dunedin, at the time, and you had to wander down to the servo on the main road to pick up your mail. One day there was a nice official letter from the deed poll people, and it was done. Spont was Spont. He started to carry that letter round with him after he got hassled by the cops walking home drunk one night. When they asked him his name, they thought he was taking the piss and refused to believe him.

Soon after that, I had to be in Christchurch to catch a flight. Spont suggested he drive me up and give me some driving lessons on the way. Our friend Amanda came along for the ride. I had to be in Chch by midday, so we left the afternoon before. When we got to a turn-off to Alexandra, I suggested we go via the Haast Pass and the West Coast. We had plenty of time, and the name of the driver was Spontaneous after all, so we did.

By the time we got to the Haast Pass it was about 10 or 11 at night and pissing down. They were doing a lot of work on the road, and large chunks of it were gravel. Spontaneous was pretty buggered and said he couldn't drive anymore. So that was the first time I drove. It was a fucking nightmare.

We were running out of petrol by the time we got to Franz Josef. We pulled into the forecourt of a servo, peered out into the driving rain and murk at it all closed up and dark, and crashed out. In the drizzle early next morning we saw that the petrol pumps were those 24 hour ones with built-in eftpos machines. At this point the recriminations began.

Plenty of time had turned into not much time, and here we were on the wrong side of the Southern Alps. The rest of the trip involved a washed out bridge and hairy detour over the Alps. It finished with a mad dash at the airport and me catching my plane at the last minute. After that, we started doing road trips on a fairly regular basis.

I could go on, but won't. I haven't seen Spontaneous Search Party in years. If you stumble across this, Spont, give us a yell. It'd be good to catch up.