Mid-winter treats

Christchurch winters can be pretty miserable. Among the few things to look forward to at this time of year are the Christchurch Arts Festival and the International Film Festival. I eagerly await the publication of the programs for these festivals each year (or every two years in the case of the former, which is biennial) and love going through and circling the various events I want to attend. I then add up how much it's all going to cost, and go through the programs again, re-circling the events I really don't want to miss.

This year I ended up going to two arts festival events and three movies. First up was the Sydney Dance Company's presentation of Rafael Bonachela's 360° at the Theatre Royal. Dance is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the past, so the novelty of the experience made the evening all the more enjoyable. The music was great, and I particularly liked the way video was incorporated into the various routines.

Next up was the Iiro Rantala New Trio, a jazz outfit from Finland, who performed in a tent-like structure in the middle of Cathedral Square. I was intrigued by the line-up for this show, which featured a pianist, a guitarist, and a beatboxer, but I was also a bit apprehensive, given that it's not the sort of jazz I normally listen to. It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining evening. Rantala talked quite a bit between numbers, but thankfully he's a pretty funny guy (his dry humour reminded me of another Finnish jazz artist we saw at the same festival several years ago, Jukka Perko, so it may be a Nordic thing) so mostly these musings were a bonus. The notable exception was a joke about Susan Boyle and the moon landing, which quite rightly went down like the proverbial lead balloon.

The three movies I saw at the International Film Festival were Departures, North Face, and Encounters at the End of the World. I enjoyed them all, but Encounters made by far the greatest impression on me. Ostensibly a documentary about Antarctica and the people who work there, this movie is actually an exploration of our relationship with the planet and the universe. It's hard to avoid concluding that the famous scene with the disoriented penguin who wanders off alone in the direction of a distant mountain range (and certain death) is a metaphor for the human species.

Despite Herzog's at times hilarious narration, there's no escaping the fact that this is a dark movie (what movie that deals with the reality of global warming, among other things, wouldn't be). Having said that, its message isn’t entirely negative. There's something noble about the efforts of the scientists Herzog interviews to find answers to all manner of questions about the natural world around us, efforts the director contrasts with those of the early explorers who set out to "conquer" Antarctica and of people like the idiot who plans to pogo-stick to the South Pole.

The movie ends with one of the interviewees (not a scientist, but in fact a forklift operator at McMurdo Station) paraphrasing a quote by Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own glory." Watts is religious, but similar sentiments have also been expressed by non-religious figures, including Carl Sagan ("We are a way for the universe to know itself") and Murray Bookchin, who in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, my copy of which remains missing, describes humankind as "nature rendered self-conscious".

Although I've seen two documentaries about Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe), this was the first documentary by him that I've seen. I'm now eager to see more. I'll probably start with Grizzly Man.

Some things don't pass

How big a fan of The Beatles was I? Well, the first album I ever bought (on vinyl, of course) was a compilation of Beatles songs called Love Songs. That wasn't the first album I ever owned, though. That honour goes to ABBA's Arrival, which my parents gave me as a Christmas present in 1976. OK, I admit I did ask them to buy it for me. If my memory serves me correctly, Arrival came with a very fetching poster of the band (I preferred the blonde).

My best friend in high school was also a big fan of The Beatles. In fact it was one of the few things we had in common. That and an interest in cycling. And a lack of girlfriends (perhaps the three were related). But while Peter was more a Paul fan (he even named his firstborn Prudence - luckily it was a girl), I was definitely a John fan.

Having said that, I also had a bit of a soft spot for George. One of my most prized possessions as a teenager was a copy of All Things Must Pass on vinyl, which Wikipedia informs me was the first triple album ever released by a solo artist. And when my parents went to London and asked us kids if there was anything we wanted over there, I requested a copy of The Concert for Bangladesh, also a triple album. A couple of years ago I bought the film on DVD, and still enjoy watching it from time to time. And while I've sold off a lot of my old records over the years, I still have The Concert for Bangladesh safely stashed away in a cupboard. It must be worth quite a bit of money now.

Anyway, today while browsing through the cheap DVDs at the Warehouse I came across an episode of the Classic Albums TV series on John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. I've never seen this episode, but I'm a great fan of the series and love the album concerned. I'm looking forward to watching it.

Off topic

One of the dilemmas I created for myself when I started this blog and gave it the title The Walking Fool was what to do during those extended periods when I was not only not walking, but also not thinking much about walking. Back when I'd completed the Nakasendo walk and was really into running, I even considered starting up a completely new blog called…The Running Fool.

As you can see from the list of labels at left, I have written on quite a few different topics over the years. However, many of these topics are either directly or indirectly related to walking, and as I've mentioned previously, a lot of my posts (including this one) are composed at least partly in my head while I'm out walking (in this case to the supermarket and back). In the end, it just doesn’t feel right to write in this blog about things not related to walking in some form or another.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that since I got back from walking the Tokaido nearly two months ago, I've hardly done any walking at all. So what have I been up to?

One thing I've been doing is refining my cooking skills. I'm working on perfecting recipes for a couple of things I've always wanted to have in my culinary repertoire: one a good vegetarian curry, and the other a good dahl. Judging by Mrs Fool's reaction, I'm definitely making progress on both.

I've also been reading quite a lot. I finally got around to reading Edmund White's The Flâneur, which is one of the books I bought in Wellington when I was up there for the Wellington Jazz Festival. It's a quirky and well-written volume, more a personal guide to and history of Paris than a book about walking per se. The Paris Commune was mentioned a couple of times, but there was no mention of the Situationists, surprising given the similarities (superficial though they may be) between the "drifting" of the Situationists and the favourite activity of the flaneur, described on the back cover as "someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the street he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic."

I've also read a couple more John Rain thrillers (including one I bought in Tokyo at the end of the Tokaido walk), which means I've now read all but one in the series. Incidentally, on my last day in Tokyo I'd intended to have lunch at one of the real-life restaurants frequented by John Rain, Las Chicas. I spent ages roaming the backstreets of Aoyama searching for it (I'd checked its location on the restaurant's website before leaving New Zealand and was pretty sure I knew where it was) but to no avail. Next time I'll take a map.

With my pile of unread books severely depleted and the New Zealand dollar the strongest it's been for many months, yesterday I logged onto Amazon and ordered three items from my Wish List. The first is Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, the account of the film director's journey on foot from Munich to Paris to which I've previously referred. The second is Rain Storm by Barry Eisler (yes, it's the one John Rain novel I haven't read). And the third is Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald.

That third item probably demands some explanation. Well, I was a serious Beatles fan in my teens, and I've recently started listening to their music again and watching some of their live performances on YouTube, a medium that wasn't around when I was at high school (this was back in the days of vinyl). I read about this book, which is a song-by-song analysis of every song ever released by the group, in a discussion in the comments section of Russell Brown's blog, Hard News, and thought it sounded really interesting. Coincidentally, another post on the same blog made just a few days earlier led to an equally fascinating discussion about food, with dahl featuring prominently.