NZ has always been behind - but then the European part of culture started late and even when you hold up a light to our 'firsts' you need to be careful to not make that light too bright. Just look at the reasons women got the vote here - essentially it was an exchange of promises between Women's Temperance groups and Parliament - and the vote didn't include Chinese women and a few other groups - there were no martyrs.
There are many things to add to this particular stew - alas, I have to take the dog out to a fabulous park where, as a women, alone in hectares of suburban parkland on a weekday morning wiht only a ridiculously cute small dog and a walking stick, I will stupidly feel safe even though I know there's only history to suggest this assumption as true today as it was yesterday.
Oh and PS Yes Masterton is not a wealthy area but there are a few billionaires, and close to billionaires, living there.
Hi Susan! Thanks for reading, and for the backstory here! Out here learning. I'll still give kudos for the sufferage. It's a deal, but a deal NZ was willing to entertain. Isn't that how this always gets done? There's always another side, and always another assumption based on history, which of course is it own stack of assumptions.
Tough to square all this in one head. History matters. The length of time you've been doing an experiment matters, for good and for ill. The human need to impose a narrative on EVERYTHING is not one we can shake. The limits of narrative that curl every story into a lie by omission...this is also real. I don't know!
I feel safer here, too. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should! I'm not *there* right now, so it's hard to know.
Funny how some billionaires can live in a poor town and nobody can tell! If you just keep all the money to yourself...
it's odd that we are so happy to perpetuate our myths but are so engrossed in trying to rewrite history about the things that we were first in , that we should be celebrating, such as our response to Covid
Really interesting, Dan, & sad. The first time I saw those satellites I had an overpowering urge to smash them out of the sky with a rock. During Covid a lot of Americans arrived in Wellington (those who could afford to flee, mostly). I noticed they seemed to have this see-sawing love / hate, on the one hand, isn't everything so quaint & delightful, on the other hand, things are better & bigger in America. I found this annoying, because you can't have both, you know what I mean? That's there & this is here.
I can remember one conversation with a newish American where he asked me, was I good at what I do (making art)? I looked him dead in the eye & said I was good, yeah, & he fell on me like a starving animal, thank God! he said, someone who was actually willing to admit to skill & prowess! He was so sick of having to pretend to be humble!
By the way rose shows are awesome, skinny jeans are also acceptable in my books, but as you say I am something of a backwards savage LOL. Take all this with a grain of salt, I like that you are digging into these emotional contradictions.
Hi Rosie- I knew you'd hate Starlink as I do. Truly no sight I've seen in my adult life felt so--what's the opposite of sublime? Sublime in its utter-non-sublimeness? We lost something big. Most places had lost it long ago, I guess. I once did a writing prompt about the Milky Way in my Shanghai classroom and most of the kids had only ever seen it in photos.
NZ for me--for a lot of us Americans--will never feeli quite 'big enough.' But I will always struggle with what 'big enough' means, exactly! Maybe there's a converse in there: for some of us, at least, America will never feel *small enough.* Not sure what that means either. But I get a weird vertigo there now. I think I'm afraid if I lived there and someone asked if I was GOOD I would just mumble and disappear.
I loved that rose show more than I could ever say here! I feel bad dragging it over to the grumble list. But--but--rose worship to me feel so English / teapot / prim / proper in ways I am programmed to resist. I love them, our yard is full of them all summer, they are so gorgeous and decadent. I just miss prickly pear flowers that don't give a f**k!
Yeah, roses are arseholes, but they're not prickly enough to be real bastards, I'm talking hardcore desert bastards covered in flesh-gouging botanical weaponry type prickly flowers
So Facts. One thing you may not know is the NZ has always been a test country for large corporations because things can be tested before rolling them out in the wider World. For example we were one of the first with EFTPOS. "EFTPOS was first introduced in New Zealand in 1985, with a pilot program launched by the Bank of New Zealand at Shell petrol stations. The system quickly gained popularity and expanded to other merchants in the following years."
But Its really a supply lines thing. And thus cost and thus many living rooms are still modeled in 50s decor. And if its not 50s its 90s.
To Really understand New Zealand you have to watch GLOSS in its entirety. Episode by episode.
Followed by Country Calendar every episode of the 70s.
Only when you have done that will you be at peace.
I've heard way too much Countty Life on RNZ, but Country Calendar is another level...
A lot of 90s couches here for sure. And why all the leather? The houses are too cold!
Funny, I grew up in Phoenix whose highly transplant population was also used as an American test market--new chain restaurants and stuff. Life on the edge.
In Ellensburg, WA - where I once worked at CWU - you have what is essentially a ranch town with a university in it. Aside from that, there is a Safeway, a Fred Meyer (out by I-90), a feed store and a place that sells farm implements, a McDonalds, Arby's, Jersey Mike's, and an honest-to-God saloon with swinging doors, plus the usual collection of drinking holes frequented by students. There is also an ageing, abandoned bowling alley, probably comparable to the Masterton bowling alley and arcade. Rodeo Bowl closed it's doors for the last time in 2013 and there have been a few efforts (all falling short) to restore and reopen, including one by a Microsoft multimillionaire who studied at CWU and likes to bowl, but that ended flat too.
As for video games: there was a time when I spent an inordinate amount of my meager budget on the arcade at the University of Oregon, and my go to's were Ms. Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Gallaga and the timeless Space Invaders. I never have tried my hand at The Claw, having watched others (my kids included) poring money into the machine in a futile effort to grab something to take home. I don't think I have ever seen anyone get something from those damn machines. Wish I had invented it.
Galaga!!! That was my jam at the Phoenix YMCA summer camp in whatever the hell late 1980s we're talking about. Love bowling alleys too. Jenny and spent a lot of time out at the Belmark outside Ann Arbor, mostly eating fries and watching weeknight karaoke.
The claw machines are a nightmare. This one in Masterton was pretty kind, though--if you didn't get a stuffed animal, you got a turn on this other claw that scooped meager amounts of stale candy. This saved us! In the end the kids all grabbed a toy, left feeling like kings, went home and immediately forgot them. Asi es.
Crime is a worry indeed! I'm not sure where to put this on a timeline, though. Violent crime is actually way down in the US from its peak in the 70s, though it is up in some places since the pandemic. Worldwide, gangs & organized crime are old evils indeed--but maybe not in in NZ? Are they the future, or a deep, dark past we're curling back towards?
I am an Aussie and my partner is far upstate NY born and bred (30 mins. from the Canadian border). We moved to the south island in late 2023 because we predicted Trump 2.0 and the Christian nationalism it would entail.
I spent 30 years in upstate NY or Vermont. Not exactly "middle America" more a liberal bubble living off stray tourist $$ and inheritance $$.
The 90s vibe is OK. Here in the south there are plenty of people still rocking a punk-ish vibe that is charming...
I mostly feel virtuous about kicking the Amazon habit. Smaller Kiwi businesses I would like to support through online purchases miss out because the NZ communication deficit extends to website design and online commerce. It mostly sucks. A huge number literally get you to the order page and then insist you call!
We both work in land use policy (local govt.) And the underlying premise and structure of regulations are problematic and sometimes bizarre. The notion of the public interest here is not meaningfully enshrined in process or outcomes. Equal treatment as a concept is completely absent.
It is not just a matter of being stuck in the 1990s. It is that no one ever looked at other places or asked the right questions. This is weird given the OE right-of-passage. Is everyone so hungover they don't remember anything?
I offer these examples to illustrate a profound lack of curiosity present among kiwis -- which extends to very one-sided efforts on our part of attempting to make friends. We didn't go to the same high school so what is there to talk about?
There are lots of things that make it worth it for us including nature and a quiet-ness that is hard to explain. But NZ is not the only small country on the planet--some catch up with and deep interest in others is overdue.
Hi Roderick! Thanks for reading, and for thoughtful your comments! I didn’t know that about land use policy. Super interesting. Is that because state land is property of the Crown, whatever that means? I grew up in AZ where is tons of federal land (Forest Service and BLM as well as Natl Park) but had lived a lot in TX since (almost entirely private.) NZ has lovely DOC areas but mostly feels much more like TX, fenced and private and Not For You.
The lack of curiousity...In my own field (writing, etc) I am often struck how reviews of NZ books tend to only cite only other NZ books, rather than place them in a larger literary conversation. All the Kiwi writers I know actual read plenty outside NZ, and engage with foreign writers in all sorts of interesting ways! But I sometimes feel like there's a tacit agreement to hold a really Kiwi-focused public conversation? This is good, in some ways--stick up for the your own--but can feel like performing that incuriosity even if the writers in their own writing and reading don't live that way. Hmm. I guess I came up in a culture of hipsterism where the absolute coolest thing you could do was drag in some new reference none of your mates had heard about!
Friends--we came with young kids and that's really helped. All parents are in the same boat, and our kids will have grown up here, too. The PhD program I'm in has helped, too. But I have felt a bit of that same vibe. Americans and Aussies both feel much more open as a default. Backslapping. I am slowly learning to stop hugging everyone here.
Lol about having to call to order! I don't miss the Amazon thing. I miss certain *products* like crazy, and definitely order them via Amazon when we're in the US! Is that cheating?? :)
Agree so much, in some things they've been ahead of other countries but most of the time we're in the 90s. And to be fair, that's exactly why I moved here. Most of the time I absolutely love it, other times it's a source of frustration...
I know Future Shock only as the yellow-jacketed hardback that was in EVERY thrift store bookshelf of my youth, the only title I saw more than Le Carre or Bridges of Madison County. A monster hit, obvs. Never read it. Does it hold now, you think?
Yes but...so many buts.
NZ has always been behind - but then the European part of culture started late and even when you hold up a light to our 'firsts' you need to be careful to not make that light too bright. Just look at the reasons women got the vote here - essentially it was an exchange of promises between Women's Temperance groups and Parliament - and the vote didn't include Chinese women and a few other groups - there were no martyrs.
There are many things to add to this particular stew - alas, I have to take the dog out to a fabulous park where, as a women, alone in hectares of suburban parkland on a weekday morning wiht only a ridiculously cute small dog and a walking stick, I will stupidly feel safe even though I know there's only history to suggest this assumption as true today as it was yesterday.
Oh and PS Yes Masterton is not a wealthy area but there are a few billionaires, and close to billionaires, living there.
Hi Susan! Thanks for reading, and for the backstory here! Out here learning. I'll still give kudos for the sufferage. It's a deal, but a deal NZ was willing to entertain. Isn't that how this always gets done? There's always another side, and always another assumption based on history, which of course is it own stack of assumptions.
Tough to square all this in one head. History matters. The length of time you've been doing an experiment matters, for good and for ill. The human need to impose a narrative on EVERYTHING is not one we can shake. The limits of narrative that curl every story into a lie by omission...this is also real. I don't know!
I feel safer here, too. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should! I'm not *there* right now, so it's hard to know.
Funny how some billionaires can live in a poor town and nobody can tell! If you just keep all the money to yourself...
it's odd that we are so happy to perpetuate our myths but are so engrossed in trying to rewrite history about the things that we were first in , that we should be celebrating, such as our response to Covid
a thought provoking post Dan Even for me - it can sometimes still feel like an experiment
Really interesting, Dan, & sad. The first time I saw those satellites I had an overpowering urge to smash them out of the sky with a rock. During Covid a lot of Americans arrived in Wellington (those who could afford to flee, mostly). I noticed they seemed to have this see-sawing love / hate, on the one hand, isn't everything so quaint & delightful, on the other hand, things are better & bigger in America. I found this annoying, because you can't have both, you know what I mean? That's there & this is here.
I can remember one conversation with a newish American where he asked me, was I good at what I do (making art)? I looked him dead in the eye & said I was good, yeah, & he fell on me like a starving animal, thank God! he said, someone who was actually willing to admit to skill & prowess! He was so sick of having to pretend to be humble!
By the way rose shows are awesome, skinny jeans are also acceptable in my books, but as you say I am something of a backwards savage LOL. Take all this with a grain of salt, I like that you are digging into these emotional contradictions.
Hi Rosie- I knew you'd hate Starlink as I do. Truly no sight I've seen in my adult life felt so--what's the opposite of sublime? Sublime in its utter-non-sublimeness? We lost something big. Most places had lost it long ago, I guess. I once did a writing prompt about the Milky Way in my Shanghai classroom and most of the kids had only ever seen it in photos.
NZ for me--for a lot of us Americans--will never feeli quite 'big enough.' But I will always struggle with what 'big enough' means, exactly! Maybe there's a converse in there: for some of us, at least, America will never feel *small enough.* Not sure what that means either. But I get a weird vertigo there now. I think I'm afraid if I lived there and someone asked if I was GOOD I would just mumble and disappear.
I loved that rose show more than I could ever say here! I feel bad dragging it over to the grumble list. But--but--rose worship to me feel so English / teapot / prim / proper in ways I am programmed to resist. I love them, our yard is full of them all summer, they are so gorgeous and decadent. I just miss prickly pear flowers that don't give a f**k!
Yeah, roses are arseholes, but they're not prickly enough to be real bastards, I'm talking hardcore desert bastards covered in flesh-gouging botanical weaponry type prickly flowers
That’s it!
How to grow prickly pear flowers:
1) drop a pad on the ground
2) move away
So Facts. One thing you may not know is the NZ has always been a test country for large corporations because things can be tested before rolling them out in the wider World. For example we were one of the first with EFTPOS. "EFTPOS was first introduced in New Zealand in 1985, with a pilot program launched by the Bank of New Zealand at Shell petrol stations. The system quickly gained popularity and expanded to other merchants in the following years."
But Its really a supply lines thing. And thus cost and thus many living rooms are still modeled in 50s decor. And if its not 50s its 90s.
To Really understand New Zealand you have to watch GLOSS in its entirety. Episode by episode.
Followed by Country Calendar every episode of the 70s.
Only when you have done that will you be at peace.
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/gloss-episode-one-1987
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6THswnyLRgA
GLOSS oh wow. I had no idea this even existed!
I've heard way too much Countty Life on RNZ, but Country Calendar is another level...
A lot of 90s couches here for sure. And why all the leather? The houses are too cold!
Funny, I grew up in Phoenix whose highly transplant population was also used as an American test market--new chain restaurants and stuff. Life on the edge.
Before you do GLOSS, you should start with Close to Home then Billy T James, to lighten the mood.
Will do! Thanks for the tip!
In Ellensburg, WA - where I once worked at CWU - you have what is essentially a ranch town with a university in it. Aside from that, there is a Safeway, a Fred Meyer (out by I-90), a feed store and a place that sells farm implements, a McDonalds, Arby's, Jersey Mike's, and an honest-to-God saloon with swinging doors, plus the usual collection of drinking holes frequented by students. There is also an ageing, abandoned bowling alley, probably comparable to the Masterton bowling alley and arcade. Rodeo Bowl closed it's doors for the last time in 2013 and there have been a few efforts (all falling short) to restore and reopen, including one by a Microsoft multimillionaire who studied at CWU and likes to bowl, but that ended flat too.
As for video games: there was a time when I spent an inordinate amount of my meager budget on the arcade at the University of Oregon, and my go to's were Ms. Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Gallaga and the timeless Space Invaders. I never have tried my hand at The Claw, having watched others (my kids included) poring money into the machine in a futile effort to grab something to take home. I don't think I have ever seen anyone get something from those damn machines. Wish I had invented it.
Galaga!!! That was my jam at the Phoenix YMCA summer camp in whatever the hell late 1980s we're talking about. Love bowling alleys too. Jenny and spent a lot of time out at the Belmark outside Ann Arbor, mostly eating fries and watching weeknight karaoke.
The claw machines are a nightmare. This one in Masterton was pretty kind, though--if you didn't get a stuffed animal, you got a turn on this other claw that scooped meager amounts of stale candy. This saved us! In the end the kids all grabbed a toy, left feeling like kings, went home and immediately forgot them. Asi es.
NZ might be behind in some ways but you don't have to look far to find gangs and organized crime in every city, town and community. Its horrific
Crime is a worry indeed! I'm not sure where to put this on a timeline, though. Violent crime is actually way down in the US from its peak in the 70s, though it is up in some places since the pandemic. Worldwide, gangs & organized crime are old evils indeed--but maybe not in in NZ? Are they the future, or a deep, dark past we're curling back towards?
I am an Aussie and my partner is far upstate NY born and bred (30 mins. from the Canadian border). We moved to the south island in late 2023 because we predicted Trump 2.0 and the Christian nationalism it would entail.
I spent 30 years in upstate NY or Vermont. Not exactly "middle America" more a liberal bubble living off stray tourist $$ and inheritance $$.
The 90s vibe is OK. Here in the south there are plenty of people still rocking a punk-ish vibe that is charming...
I mostly feel virtuous about kicking the Amazon habit. Smaller Kiwi businesses I would like to support through online purchases miss out because the NZ communication deficit extends to website design and online commerce. It mostly sucks. A huge number literally get you to the order page and then insist you call!
We both work in land use policy (local govt.) And the underlying premise and structure of regulations are problematic and sometimes bizarre. The notion of the public interest here is not meaningfully enshrined in process or outcomes. Equal treatment as a concept is completely absent.
It is not just a matter of being stuck in the 1990s. It is that no one ever looked at other places or asked the right questions. This is weird given the OE right-of-passage. Is everyone so hungover they don't remember anything?
I offer these examples to illustrate a profound lack of curiosity present among kiwis -- which extends to very one-sided efforts on our part of attempting to make friends. We didn't go to the same high school so what is there to talk about?
There are lots of things that make it worth it for us including nature and a quiet-ness that is hard to explain. But NZ is not the only small country on the planet--some catch up with and deep interest in others is overdue.
And the hard-to-explain quietness, I totally feel this. It *is* hard to explain. I will have to try one of these days!
Hi Roderick! Thanks for reading, and for thoughtful your comments! I didn’t know that about land use policy. Super interesting. Is that because state land is property of the Crown, whatever that means? I grew up in AZ where is tons of federal land (Forest Service and BLM as well as Natl Park) but had lived a lot in TX since (almost entirely private.) NZ has lovely DOC areas but mostly feels much more like TX, fenced and private and Not For You.
The lack of curiousity...In my own field (writing, etc) I am often struck how reviews of NZ books tend to only cite only other NZ books, rather than place them in a larger literary conversation. All the Kiwi writers I know actual read plenty outside NZ, and engage with foreign writers in all sorts of interesting ways! But I sometimes feel like there's a tacit agreement to hold a really Kiwi-focused public conversation? This is good, in some ways--stick up for the your own--but can feel like performing that incuriosity even if the writers in their own writing and reading don't live that way. Hmm. I guess I came up in a culture of hipsterism where the absolute coolest thing you could do was drag in some new reference none of your mates had heard about!
Friends--we came with young kids and that's really helped. All parents are in the same boat, and our kids will have grown up here, too. The PhD program I'm in has helped, too. But I have felt a bit of that same vibe. Americans and Aussies both feel much more open as a default. Backslapping. I am slowly learning to stop hugging everyone here.
Lol about having to call to order! I don't miss the Amazon thing. I miss certain *products* like crazy, and definitely order them via Amazon when we're in the US! Is that cheating?? :)
Agree so much, in some things they've been ahead of other countries but most of the time we're in the 90s. And to be fair, that's exactly why I moved here. Most of the time I absolutely love it, other times it's a source of frustration...
Glad I'm not alone! Trying to find that time-travel balance every day :)
This was good, I needed this one. Do you know the 1970 book Future Shock?
Also, your ’90s apostrophe is on backwards. Which I only mention because it's likely the one and only chance I'll ever get to proof ya
Mortified, fixed, thanks! Glad you dug it!
I know Future Shock only as the yellow-jacketed hardback that was in EVERY thrift store bookshelf of my youth, the only title I saw more than Le Carre or Bridges of Madison County. A monster hit, obvs. Never read it. Does it hold now, you think?
Reads both quaint and prophetic, so it's a good head-spinner, I think! And ya: great cover