Live blogging! The New Zealand Election Debate!

OK, here's some fun -- I'm going to live blog my impressions of the first televised debate between Labour's Prime Minister Helen Clark and National leader John Key. It's my first time viewing one of these in NZ, and will be interesting to compare it to the American counterparts. Shame they're not including the minor party leaders in this as they actually can have much more impact on politics here than in America, but so it goes....

7.00 Good lord, this set looks exactly like the game show "The Weakest Link." Scary. The blue lighting on the background audience is odd.

7.02 Wow, Helen Clark's voice is REALLY deep.

7.03 And John Key's is less deep. He keeps bobbing his head from left to right.

7.04 Couldn't moderator Mark Sainsbury have bothered to shave? He looks like a hedgehog.

7.06 I do like the format of the questions -- filmed on YouTube and submitted by Kiwi citizens here and overseas. It kind of makes this feel more participatory.

7.09 Why do Key and Sainsbury call her "Helen Clark" on every reference? It sounds weird.

7.15 Yikes, a lot more shouting and going back and forth than in the US debates. Which is good, because it feels like they're really debating, but is bad because there's a fair amount of talking over each other and "Helen you're wrong" combined with "No John, you're wrong."

7.17 Very heavy focus on economy. So far, Key is kind of presenting the everyman view a bit more while Clark is coming off a tad surly.

7.17 Hey, they have commercials here!

7.24 It's curious -- Clark makes a passing reference to releasing housing affordability policy tomorrow. I'm still not used to how, less than a month before the election, all the parties are just unveiling their policies. Campaigns here are definitely far more foreshortened than the U.S.

7.28 Suddenly, all hell breaks out -- an argument over shower nozzles! Awesome. (A rumoured plan to reduce shower water pressure that has been badly received.) Again, very squabbly and in-your-face arguing -- "You might be used to shouting people down at home, you're not shouting me down," Clark tells Key, and the audience audibly grumbles.

7.30 Sainsbury goes off on a crusade about money - "Do you feel rich?" he asks. Clark is a bit nonplussed, while Key turns it into a campaign pivot.

7.43 A debate about climate change is interesting, focusing on NZ's "clean green" image and the cost it takes to maintain that. However, Key starts to lose me by asking "What's the point" of a tiny country like NZ leading the world in being carbon-free? Yeah, we're no China, but still...

7.45 Some goofballs start beat-boxing for no particular reason in the middle of their YouTube question, which comes off really geeky.

7.53 Tough words on crime, but neither really comes across with a sterling answer on a rising problem in NZ, especially in Auckland.

8.00 A curious digression into the 1981 Springboks Rugby Tour which is a defining moment in NZ history, especially since it involves rugby (and apartheid). Trying to pin Key down on what he thought on an event 27 years ago (when he was 20 and as he admits, it wasn't that important an issue to him at that time) seems a bit like a kiwi "Ayers moment," i.e. much ado about nothing much. Clark continues to be fairly aggressive, often to her detriment I feel.

8.08 Final 20 minutes before any Maori issues are brought up.

8.22 It's curious for me that Clark is basically using the same argument as John McCain, even though politically they have next to nothing in common -- it's all about experience and the record.

8.25 Finally a questioner brings up the exclusion of the other six party leaders. I guess they have been included in the past and Clark refers to it as being a "bit like a game show." She's seen the set!

8.30 So it ends as it began, with shouting at each other.

Final thoughts: Well, interesting. I've been saying all along I'm a bit less invested in this election than I am the American one, where I've known since March or so I was voting for Obama. Politically, I'm simpatico with most of Labour's positions, but was curious to hear more from John Key. Frankly, Key was better than I thought, while Clark was less than she often is capable of. She's a terrific politician and a very good speaker, but today she seemed to let Key get under her skin and was too combative and borderline rude. There was too much interrupting and shouting by both candidates, though. Clark looks great when she smiles but spent a lot of time scowling, whereas Key came off fairly relaxed and more articulate than he has in news segments. He was often artfully vague though, like most politicians.

I'm fairly sure who and what I'm voting for myself, but it's been good to get an idea what will happen if -- as the polls seem to show -- Key does become Prime Minister.
Grades: Key B, Clark B-

Tuesday shuffle: I heard Papa tell Mama, Let that boy boogie woogie

...It's the kind of weather where it's cold in the morning but in the afternoon hot and sticky and you're walking home carrying the leather jacket you wore to work this morning and sweating. And your shoes hurt.

I didn't mean to hit the shuffle button twice -- actual content soon, I swear, just been a busy week.

1. Sound And Vision 3:04 David Bowie
2. Lullaby 2:03 Liam Finn*
3. The Taxi 2:07 Young Marble Giants
4. Evolution 4:46 Cat Power
5. One Love 3:36 The Stone Roses
6. Black Dog 2:34 Blue Mountain**
7. Boogie Chillen 3:12 John Lee Hooker***
8. Back In The U.S.S.R. 1:54 The Beatles****
9. Firestarter 4:43 The Prodigy

* Son of the great Neil Finn, of course.
** Great old Mississippi band and friends of mine wouldjabelieveit, and one of their best songs, a right ol' Southern barnburner.
*** Every time I hear this tune, I grin. Can't help it.
**** When I was 12 or 13, another kid tried to convince me this song proved the Beatles were "communists." The 1980s were an interesting time.

Friday shuffle: Holy muscle of love

...Walking to work on a nice sunny morning and then it begins to rain on you. Welcome to New Zealand, mate!

1. Defy You 3:49 The Offspring
2. Rael 1 5:45 The Who
3. Just Lose It 4:09 Eminem
4. Odditty 2:34 The Clean*
5. She's A Rainbow 4:13 The Rolling Stones
6. Muscle Of Love 3:46 Alice Cooper
7. The Passenger 4:43 Iggy Pop
8. An Unmarketed Product 1:08 Guided By Voices

*A very excellent New Zealand band. Fans of Pavement, check them out.
** I listened to about half this song not knowing who it was. From the Stones' wistful hippies phase I think.
*** The best song title ever. Biggest regret in life: When I interviewed Alice Cooper a couple years back, I didn't ask him about "Muscle of Love."
**** Which is better -- wild rabid dog Iggy or moody mystic Iggy? I can't decide.

Days of future shock

Y'know, the Internet is kinda cool. I know, I know, this is self-evident, but honestly, sometimes I think we get used to technology so quickly we tend to forget how swell it can be. Sometimes you need to just stand back and go, "Whoa." This came to me yesterday as the boy and I tested out Skype for the first time -- video-phone calling my parents on the other side of the world, being able to see and talk to them in real-time video, which was amazing. Then after that I sat down and watched the second US presidential debate streaming on The New York Times web site, all the while of course checking in on various live-blogging reactions to it. Even four years ago, I couldn't have imagined doing any of this so easily. Video has just exploded online in the last year or two. It wasn't all that long ago that video-phone calling was the realm of science fiction. The web has so thoroughly entangled itself in everyday life that it's hard to imagine being completely cut off from it anymore. And I don't even own a Blackberry or iPhone.

Even say 15 years ago, moving to New Zealand would have been a lot more isolating proposition than it is now. Back then, Avril and I only communicated by letters and the rare phone call. "Instant" talk was rare. If we'd lived a century ago, we would've basically been saying goodbye to everyone we knew in America for good when we moved Down Under, with perhaps an occasional damp long-delayed letter. These days, thanks to email, Skype, Facebook, and the like, some days I practically forget I'm living in New Zealand and not just in a remote part of America. As Thomas Friedman puts it, the world is flat these days -- and getting flatter all the time. If only we could get teleportation figured out, life would be perfect!

Boring election vs. evil election

So, it's about one month before Election Day in two countries. I wish I could say the New Zealand election was particularly interesting, but frankly, it's been an utter snooze so far. Campaign laws dictate the parties can't even begin "official" campaigns until a month out from the election, so that might be part of it, but really I think it's just a total lack of suspense. As I've written before, Labour's running for a fourth term, and the opposition National has had a lead in the polls for -- well, all year, really. At this point it's hard for me to get that interested in a campaign that lacks passion. I'm frankly more interested in the minor parties and what role they might play in a coalition government's makeup. Maybe this race will change in the next month, maybe not.

Meanwhile, in the US, well -- this is an election that will be talked about for a long time, no matter what happens. What's been amazing to me is just how low and awful John McCain's clan have sunk. No hurdle is so low they can't crawl under it. The latest of course is the thinly veiled racism and "other" card, with hatchetwoman Palin repeatedly dropping code words about Obama. "Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asked today. Because, y'know, Obama's different if you get my meaning. I hear he's a Muslin or something like that. What we should be asking is, what happened to "straight talkin'" John McCain, or has he always been this way? You reap what you sow, and if you sow hate, that's what you get.

It's amazing that the "inexperienced" Democrat has run the far more mature, statesmanlike campaign, while McCain has been running as if he were some hotblooded county sheriff yanked off to Warshington for the first time. I hope the poll trends are correct and the right choice is made Nov. 4. Frankly, if McCain/Palin govern like they campaign, we'll be launching nukes in North Korea by Groundhog Day, journalism will be outlawed and Pat Robertson will be Secretary of State.

TV On The Radio: Dear Science,

Calling all stations – TV On The Radio is back on the airwaves, and it's worth tuning in for this. The Brooklyn art-rock combo's third disc, Dear Science, is here (yes, the comma's part of the title), and it's a dazzling and inventive "letter to whom it may concern" that's funky, angry and open-hearted.

If TV On The Radio's debut was fuzzy space rock and their second album Return To Cookie Mountain a gritty, tense marriage of doo-wop and industrial howl, this one is a bit more mainstream. It's hard to categorize, hence the one-size-fits-all tag of "art rock" – splinters of Motown, Afro-pop, post-punk splatter and Brian Eno cascade about Dear Science, a test-tube full of influence that still manages to sound wholly original.

They're still a band that thrives on tension, but this is also a pitch for global audiences. I don't know if TV On The Radio set out to create the soundtrack to the Bush years, but the push-and-pull of anxiety I get from their albums makes as good a background music as any. Acidic asides on the state of the nation -- "I'm scared to death that I'm living a life not worth dying for," goes a line in "Red Dress" -- blend with very personal dramas. TV on the Radio are nervous, but their fears make for some unforgettable sounds.

Tunde Adebimpe (the Peter Gabriel-esque wail) and Kyp Malone (channeling Prince's falsetto through a Pixies filter) trade off vocals and songwriting duties, resulting in a diverse yet coherent mish-mash. There's more hip-hop and funk dripping into the band's sound here -- "Dancing Choose" starts off with an outraged rap ("Angry young man / American apparently", Adebimpe sneers) that segues into punchy horns, a smooth chorus and even what sounds to me like an alarm clock beeping repeatedly. The oozingly luxurious single "Golden Age" could be the most uncomplicatedly happy song TV On The Radio's ever done -- if it wasn't for that skittering, unhinged set of beats.

Beautiful downer "Family Tree" evokes the ethereal gravitas of Sigür Rös, while the knock-out "Shout Me Out" starts as a blissed-out reverie that explodes into a scribbly light-speed guitar workout straight out of a Velvet Underground live bootleg. "DLZ" builds up to a catharsis that ranks with the band's best – "Never you mind, death professor / If love is life, my love is better," Adebimpe hollers against a chorus of bleeps, whistles, bangs and feedback.

I think I might prefer Adebimpe's more adventurous, outgoing anthems to Malone's slightly mellower songs, but it's a peanut butter-and-chocolate thing here -- the two songwriters together are what make it all work. Multi-instrumentalist band member and producer David Andrew Sitek is key -- he layers sounds without making it claustrophobic; the dense production is enveloping and rewards repeat listens.

Dear Science, bounces between the poles of love and fear, rage and acceptance, and it's this fierce struggle that animates it. TV On The Radio's music has always felt to me like it's being broadcast from about five minutes into our future. It's a channel I can't wait to tune into again.

I have never seen "Batman and Robin" and I'm OK with that

I am a man of wide and discerning tastes. And I do love the comic-book movies, from the very, very good (The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Superman II) to the just OK (Fantastic Four, Superman Returns) to the oh god why did I watch that? (Ang Lee's Hulk, Elektra, the John Travolta Punisher movie which hurts my brain)

But while I'm a bona-fide comic geek fanboy, there is one comic movie I've never seen: 1997's hugely reviled Batman and Robin. I saw 1989's Batman, which is the perfect example of a movie that seemed awesome at the time but hasn't aged all that well. I saw Batman Returns -- loved Catwoman, hated the Penguin. I saw Batman Forever and I loathed it -- Val Kilmer's Botox-lipped Batman, Tommy Lee Jones chewing through walls as Two-Face (thank god for Aaron Eckhart), the day-glo production design, Chris O'Donnell's oh-sweet-jeezus-can-I-punch-him-in-the-face-pleeze-annoying Robin.

By the time 1997 rolled around I had enough, and things were kind of chaotic that year for me anyway and so I never got to see the glories of Arnold Schwarzengegger as Mr. Freeze, Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy, or George Clooney pre-Oscar as Batman. A year or so later word of mouth had set in on this movie (random IMDB commenter to director Joel Schumacher: "I hate you so much, just for this film."), and despite working part-time at a video store for the late 1990s, I never felt the urge to see it. Then came the 'comic book movie revival' with X-Men and all the rest and so forth.

Occasionally I've thought, gosh, as a comic book geek, fannish completism is part of the gig, and I really ought to just watch this "Batman & Robin" one day to see just how bad it is. I watched Madonna's "Swept Away" after all (and lost the ability to see for a week, but never mind).

Then this morning I idly stumbled across a YouTube 10-minute "best of" clips from "Batman & Robin" online. I watched it all, coffee dribbling from my slack mouth in horror, Arnold Schwarzenegger's lame puns ricocheting about my brain, and I realized, that life is a precious jewel that is far too short and our time is far better spent. Ten minutes was enough.

Ten minutes I will never, ever get back:


Update: Comics blogging icon (well, demigod) Mike Sterling weighs in on "Batman & Robin", totally ripping me off really but I have to give him props because he actually watched the movie, and took notes. He's a hard, hard man, that Sterling.

It's never too early to think about summer music

Ahh, summer (er, in New Zealand) is near and that means summer concerts! Why, it's been months since I've gone to a gig, since my three-show-run in March of Cat Power, Iron & Wine and Wilco. But tunes lurk ahead -- the Mountain Goats have FINALLY rescheduled the show they were supposed to do down here earlier this year, for right before Christmas, and yep, the wife and I are going. Their latest, "Heretic Pride," is one of my favorites of the year and the club they're playing in is supposed to be nicely intimate.

Also today we got a look at the lineup for NZ's biggest music event of the year, the Big Day Out 2009. It's hard to top last year's stellar lineup -- Spoon, Arcade Fire, Billy Bragg, Bjork, LCD Soundsystem all in one go? With ticket prices in the three-digit range you've got to get a decent amount of value for your money, to put up with the crowds and heat and so forth.

This year's lineup for the January festival gets a big plus with me with headliner Neil Young, one of my top 5 artists and one I've never seen live. He's coming with Crazy Horse so expect the loudness, and, at 62, I'm thinking I may not get too many more chances to see Neil live. So big incentive for tickets there.

Also on the bill is TV On The Radio, the art-rock Brooklyn combo whose new album "Dear Science" is way cool and I'll be writing more about soon. Another plus. But after that my interest level drops a bit -- My Morning Jacket and Prodigy would be quite interesting to see, but not enough to draw me out on their own. And I've quite enjoyed the newbie punk-pop Arctic Monkeys, although I'm not really a fan of being shoved around by people 20 years younger than me in mosh pits anymore. The rest of the bands either I'm not familiar with or don't much care about -- the Ting Tings, Black Seeds, The Datsuns and many more.

So I've got two "must-sees" and a handful of "like to see's." Does that merit a ticket? Not sure yet. But it's Neil, man. Neil. They usually announce a few more bands (I'd really dig it if the rumoured Beck would come), so I can hold off on the spending for now at least.

My Classic Comics ABCs: Eightball #5

Man, the late '80s and early '90s were a fantastic time for 'alternative' comics, weren't they? This was a golden age, my friends, where Peter Bagge's Hate, Roberta Gregory's Naughty Bits, Paul Chadwick's Concrete, Cerebus of course and many others shared space with Batman and Spider-Man. And perhaps my favorite of the alterna-gang, Dan Clowes' wacky anthology Eightball. The first issue I picked up of it was #5, and indeed it was one of the first of the alternative comics age that I was soon drawn into. In my ongoing alphabetical look at comics in my collection, "E" is for edgy, exotic and Eightball, by gum.

The gem of this issue was part five of his 10-part David Lynchian epic, "Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron." A man wanders through a night in a strange city and an awful hotel room, with a headless dog, horrifying dreams and a prostitute crashing in for good measure. It all floats by in a haze of imagery -- few words -- and it's kind of incomprehensible on its own yet it caught my interest. Reading this was like taking a shower in surrealism -- Even when I pieced together the entire story (now in a nice collection of its own), I realised plot wasn't the point. It was mood, mystery and menace. Images from "Velvet Glove" still haunt me -- the misshapen girl-fish thing "Tina," the dreams of animals chewing at your legs or even just the throwaway lines filled with desperation. Clowes tapped into the world of nightmares, a Kerouac-meets-Dada haze, and the uneasy feeling was just increased by his '50s-ish, straight-lined artwork.

"Velvet Glove" was the bulk of the issue but there were also several of Clowes' more straightforward short satires. The one that really hooked me was "Playful Obsession," taking a page straight out of R. Crumb or the Freak Brothers with his take on the Harvey Comics characters like Richie Rich and Casper -- except, y'know, naughty. (I can't see "Little Dot" without thinking of Clowes' depraved fetishist "Little Octagon.")

There's an ongoing sense within Clowes' work that the world is tissue-paper thin, and far stranger and weirder beneath than we'd ever imagine. Later issues of Eightball brought forth the masterful "Ghost World" and stuff like "Art School Confidential" (which both became movies -- one great, one, eh, not so much). Clowes -- and Eightball -- is still cartooning, but it seems like the publication has radically slowed down (I'm not sure how many years ago the last Eightball came out!). In fact a lot of the same group of artists I followed so much 15 years ago or so - Bagge, Gregory, Chadwick -- have either faded away or their work has dropped a lot in quality. Clowes is still chugging away, but it might be selfish of me to say I wish we'd see his work a little more often.

Previously in this series: A, B, C and D.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten

There isn't an adult alive who hasn't idly wondered what it'd be like to go to high school again. Forty-something, balding Andy Wicks has done it – he's zipped back more than 20 years to relive his high school geek days in 1985. It's the plot of the latest graphic novel by the indie comics creator Alex Robinson, "Too Cool To Be Forgotten."

Robinson is best known for lengthy multi-character stories like "Box Office Poison" and "Tricked," but the relatively short "Too Cool To Be Forgotten" sticks pretty close to one protagonist. 40-something Andy Wicks wants to give up the smoking habit he's had since his teen years, and after all the cures fail, decides to try hypnosis. But it has a bizarre effect, sending the modern-day Andy back to his high-school body to get a second chance to get things right.

The hypnosis thing is a whopping deus ex machina and fortunately "Too Cool" doesn't dwell too much on it. This is the tale of a guy really reliving his high school days -- all the crazy uncertainties, mega-drama and foolish mistakes. It's often quite funny – what would you tell a power-tripping sadistic school principal if you were 40 rather than 15? Would you approach that old crush with a little more confidence with a few more years of living under your belt?

What Robinson really captures here is the contrast between the fumbling strangeness of being a teenager, and the more settled, if less exciting, existence of an adult. Unlike wish-fulfillment movies like "Freaky Friday" or the like, Andy really doesn't want to stay a kid forever. "Too Cool" doesn't pretend that our younger days were really the better ones – it doesn't put a glossy romanticism on things. But it also comes to finding a kind of genuine peace between the way you were and the way you are, which is a lot deeper than "Freaky Friday" really got.

Robinson's crisp, expressive cartooning knows when to push the conventions of the medium and when to just sit back and let the drawings work.. There's a marvelously trippy 'word cloud' image Robinson uses to illustrate Andy's transition into teenager-hood, yet there's also just a kind of calm, precise detail to how Robinson shows the differences between Andy at 40 and age 15.

In its final pages, "Too Cool To Be Forgotten" takes a bit of a swerve, into an area that's foreshadowed a little earlier on. It's a heart-wrenching move and adds a generous dollop of pathos to the story. Sure, being a teen again would be kinda cool, but it'd also be kind of awful as well. It's a mark of Robinson's ever-increasing talent that he takes the shopworn idea of "18 again" and turns "To Cool To Be Forgotten" into a genuinely heartfelt, funny and sad piece of work.