ReadingRoom
The diary of a legendary musician and award-winning author
Monday, October 11
Some idiot is blithering on the internet. Resist the urge to become another idiot blithering on the internet. Although the streets are empty I feel the quiet creep of fear. Resume reading Distant Mirror: The calamitous 14th century to find parallels between that century’s plague and ours. Apparently the Black Death dealt to most of the town of Bristol which makes the rise of Portishead even more remarkable.
Work on music, searching for a lyric or even a line for a flailing second verse. Find none. Exercise instead. Have done so religiously as a sanity valve and to end up somewhere different - 45 minutes later, tireder - without leaving my lounge. Wonder if my last public performance was my last public performance. We are all now the Great Unseen.
Nighttimes I have been indulging in a slow, torturous Ingmar Bergman festival. Tonight’s offering is Persona. Bergman’s films consist almost entirely of two heads in close up discussing the likely existence, and then the likely non existence, of God. The films are incredibly monotonous but still leave one feeling oddly haunted. The talking in never ending circles parallels perfectly my current inner dialogue. Lockdown on your own is basically an Ingmar Bergman festival with one talking head instead of two, which is the only reason I mention it.
I walked to the top of Mt Eden today. It was like Womad up there minus the speakers and stalls. There seemed to be some hardcore picnicking going on involving some seriously large households. Below, the city sat frozen in a fantastic panorama, still, brooding, possibly unwell, waiting for no-one knows what.
Tuesday
Despite myself, I start the day in the usual self-defeating way by checking the news on the internet. A man whose entire life experience involves sitting in a dark booth behind a microphone is braying from the mountaintop. A drug addict acquaintance parked in front of his computer, is sharing anti vax messages from a ‘doctor’ legitimised by a white smock.
“There’s always been fuckwits out there,” I say in a phone call to my brother in Tauranga. He replies, “Yes but they just used to be one neighbour." Now there’s dozens of them in my room.
I’m playing guitar in Don McGlashan’s band. Well I’m not playing guitar in Don’s band because the tour next month has been postponed. I don’t expect much sympathy because we’re neither Queenstown moteliers or running a fine dining restaurant on the Auckland waterfront. My tour with Dimmer in December is similarly imperilled, which is my annual earnings pretty much down the drain. Read of an Australian musician who had two albums in the top 20 two years ago now driving a forklift in Melbourne.
The 1 pm press briefing has lost all it’s sexiness and there is now no hope or intrigue in any of the numbers. A country watches numbly and glumly accepts it’s fate. The Team Of Five Million is a quaint wee slogan from a long forgotten Telethon and instead of tooting and cowbells the rising total is now greeted with jeers, anxiety and dread. I switch off before the journalists butt in, jockeying for position.
STOP PRESS The PM has announced an “eight hour Telethon-style event” to promote vaccinations this weekend. Apparently the idea was first suggested by John Key, who’s always up for some fun.
Wednesday
Wake wondering who to blame today. We need someone to blame because it gives meaning to injustice and unwarranted piles of poop. In the 14th century plague everyone got blamed - the poor, royalty, lepers, the clergy, sinners, Jews, the Catalans… Currently In New Zealand there’s a lot of focus on sex workers and gang members which has racial and class bias all over it. Our MSM continues with its bigoted and frequently irresponsible slant on events. I know who I can blame today.
Risk my life by walking to the supermarket. I pass the block of shabby flats a few houses down and the small dark girl I see so often playing on her own is in the driveway again, laughing to herself as part of some game. Contentment drifts up that drive. The ones I often feel most sorry for are the kids because they’re just starting out in a world perched right on the edge of implosion and they’re not getting much of a go. Still you have to hand it to kids. They’ll make do with whatever they’ve got, which I think is the task that the rest of us face now too.
Thursday
Crisis brings out our true colours and my true colours oscillate wildly between utter contempt and possibly self damaging levels of empathy. These extremes have only been exaggerated by lockdown and I swing between the two on an almost minute by minute basis which is strange as there has been exactly nothing going on. My most serious form of human contact is the person outside the entrance to the supermarket whose small nod of welcome has come to mean a lot. That my business is appreciated. That they’re glad I’m walking around. You need other people because, among other things, they’re proof that you’re alive.
Because they were all about to die, people in the medieval plague indulged in incredibly licentious behaviour. Old men married young women in rush marriages, people rooted whatever they could find, extreme forms of fashion emerged where arses and genitals were crudely exposed, perhaps for the final time. I’m wondering if people might start emphasising these parts of their bodies again since they can no longer show their faces? Are too short tunics and cod pieces about to blow up on Tinder?
Friday
Lockdown fug is a thing, sitting on top of your scalp like a pregnant cloud, a medium light pressure rubbed in at the temples by monotony and repetition. The same coloured curtains that greet you every day. A routine is important, any kind of routine, because somewhere in that there’ll be a small achievement and because there’s no point of comparison, or contrast, or proportion, that achievement can feel as momentous as you want it be and it exists as your buffer against lethargy and doom.
Sometimes my small achievement is going to another room. Or surviving a Zoom call. I struggle to return an email because I wonder if it matters and my priorities are turned upside down.
Saturday
The plague in the 14th century killed anywhere between 75 to 200 million people. Ye olde handling of a pandemic was poorer than ours with some weak scientific calls. Where we have hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin they were avoiding eye contact and drinking urine. Fresh air and generally burning yourself were their sunlight and disinfectant. Instead of Pfizer shots people rubbed themselves with excrement, toads, hare’s feet and leeches. You put your head into latrines to whiff up the pong because the plague could be killed by foul smells. Folk dropped money into jars of vinegar as a cure while doctors recommended writing the word abracadabra in a triangle.
Sunday
Vaxathon was a big success. Arms throb from the Cape to the Bluff. I would’ve got a hit in sympathy but I was vaxxed early on, presumably because I’m old, Maori and statistically more likely to die. As a D-list celebrity I was a bit hurt that I wasn’t asked to take part in yesterdays festivities, but I’d forgotten I was last seen in my lounge and have probably disappeared.
I watched the final episode of I May Destroy You last night and I’m thinking of the great speech the show’s creator and star Michaela Cole made accepting her Emmy; how we’re living in an age where being seen equates to success, and that maybe it’s best to turn away from that to find what you will in the silence. That was reassuring to me because I know it’s the small concerns that have kept me going instead of any of the big ones.
Shout at my door all you like, but my sustenance remains the inconsequential intrigues that don’t have much to do with anything . A point in that Mozart piano concerto, the book on the Orkney Islands a friend sent me, a mate move from a chess game played 73 years ago, how magnificently removed Deborah Evans Strickland is in the clip for “Money” by the Flying Lizards... Personal points of interest that keep me curious and involved.
I try to write music every day. It’s my best first line of defence.
Dead People I Have Known by Shayne Carter (Victoria University Press, $40) won the prize for best book of non-fiction at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand national book awards.
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Shayne Carter's diary - Newsroom
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