BooksDecember 15, 2015

Books: The Year of Alex Casey – On Ghostwriting Youtube Sensation Jamie Curry’s Memoirs (+ VIDEO)

Senior writer

Spinoff legend Alex Casey’s 2015 as a first-time author: Jamie Curry, Jamie’s World, Napier, Sydney, ‘proper famous’, bacon and eggs and revenge.

The first time I encountered Jamie Curry she was in a short Facebook clip, you know the kind that start out kind of normal and then you suddenly see a dog walking past in the background on its hind legs while smoking a pipe? Jamie was that pipe-smoking dog that day, beginning by innocently cleaning her bathroom to ‘Talk Dirty To Me’ and eventually spiralling into a wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube man covered in shaving cream. It was absurd, completely fearless and a million miles from the Jessica Simpson-style foamy young woman of yonder year.

I’m 24 years old, which is just old enough to have missed the boom of the YouTube personality. When I was at high school and university, I would gladly take a militant rooster or an inspirational sloth over someone blabbing to a camera any day of the week. When I was first asked to get onboard to help out with Jamie’s book, I had to come to the realisation that there was a whole YOUNG PERSON world happening that I had absolutely no grasp on.

Juggling the crushing realisation of my own mortality, and the fact that I’m definitely not a teenager anymore, I shakily flicked through a bunch of Dolly and Girlfriend magazines. Every single poster in each magazine was of a YouTuber – or ‘social influencer’ as their agents like to call them. No Chad Michael Murray, no Gwen Stefani, no Ricky Martin. All just posters of people who started out talking to their camera alone in their bedroom. It was daunting and confusing, which is why I still think a lot of people who aren’t approximately 15-years-old struggle with and berate the power of the YouTube community.

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To dive into the titular Jamie’s World, I did what anyone would do and binge-watched her entire YouTube channel until her voice, wig-wearing characters and erratic dance moves were lodged deep in my every thought. Everything from Justin Bieber parodies to impersonations of her Mum to more traditional ‘tag challenge’ fare. Her videos were often rough as guts, unhinged and full of stupid faces and alarming noises I didn’t know humans were capable making. Over time, I started to see why she was so successful, and why she had such a huge following of avid fans (1,387,625 on YouTube and a whopping 10,102,788 on Facebook – more than Lorde).

I thought back to when I was a teenager, and who my own idols were. For someone who often felt awkward and out of place, I gravitated towards the goateed boss David Brent of The Office, and Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy as the only people who understood me (naturally). I didn’t have any female role models in popular culture that were free to be exactly as freaky as they wanted to be. It’s only looking back that I realised what a breath of fresh air Jamie must be to teenage girls, or anyone who feels out of place. Jamie goes above and beyond to make sure she is the weirdest person alive at any given time, which would surely take some of the stress off.

We did a lot of Skyping back and forth in the beginning, because Jamie was travelling around Australia on the Amplify YouTube tour. Thousands and thousands would turn out for meet and greets, selfies and autographs. A lot of people cried when they met her, this 19-year-old girl from Napier. I thought this was odd too, until I remembered how I cried at Fall Out Boy and then threw up on my own shoes. Her direct, authentic one-on-one relationship with her subscribers is by far more intimate than anything From Under the Cork Tree could have ever provided me.

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She had one two-hour slot free in Sydney one day when I happened to be there, but we missed each other. Jamie’s schedule is unlike anyone I’ve ever known, she seems to work in one hour blocks, about four weeks in advance. It can make collaboration tricky, if it wasn’t for the information superhighway. She once Skyped me from her parked car after a shoot in Wellington. It seemed apt that we would spend so much time communicating through the medium that she was most known for.

Finally, we were able to tee up a day that I could fly down to Napier and spend time with her in her hometown. She picked me up from the airport in her incredibly flash car that she had bought for herself. That’s the other baller thing about Jamie, she has amassed an enormous empire around her just based upon her being exactly who she is. If that’s not the ultimate end goal in life, I honestly don’t know what is.

We sat in her lounge and talked for hours and hours about her upbringing, her family, her school life and her favourite things. Still living in her family home at the time, we perched in the fancy lounge – all untouched giant candles and silver photo frames. She told me about growing up as an outsider, digging herself a giant pit in the backyard to sit in (she took me out to see it) and how she was a sporty tomboy who got teased at school. A couple of hours later we would drive past her old school, and she dramatically gave the fingers to the ghosts of bullies past. It’s definitely a cool look when you’re driving past in your brand new Audi that you bought for yourself at the age of 19.

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After talking for hours, wringing out every little corner of her journey to YouTube success, we went out to get lunch. Which is where I encountered Jamie’s infamous fussy eating habits for the very first time. I had always thought she was joking when she talked about only liking a very small number of breakfast foods, but I always thought it was like how when I was younger and pretended to not like tomato to seem interesting. She ordered a plate of bacon and eggs, which she would proceed to do every single other time we caught up. She’s pretty much Ron Swanson. I think I remember her saying she didn’t even really like eating rice.

With a few more hours to spare before my flight home, we delved into her life in the warm YouTube glow. She was uncomfortable talking about ‘fame’, and corrected me every time I used the word ‘fans’. But there’s no denying that Jamie is proper famous. She can’t go to the mall, the movies or outside any school grounds around 3pm. Pop concerts? Forget it. After her move to Auckland I bumped into her at the supermarket. She was buying crumpets and white bread for her gentle palate, and someone took a photo of us in the aisle. I felt like Blanket Jackson.

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Discussing her YouTube success, Jamie opened up about having anxiety in large crowds, panic attacks, and nearly fainting on stage at YouTube events. She maintained that she’s always been much more comfortable talking to a camera than a group of people, a trait that I suspect isn’t unique in the breed of YouTube personality. I began to see how YouTube became an outlet for an awkward teenager, but ironically catapulted her further into the belly of the beast than she was ever prepared.

I flew back to Auckland and we continued Skyping, texting and ringing back and forth about the book as Jamie flew to Australia, southeast Asia, Los Angeles and Fiji. All the while, I was sat in the same place in Auckland. She would email through changes in the middle of the night, and chase up with random txts about one specific line, particularly worried chapters mentioning the people who bullied her at school. She didn’t need to call them out individually, and I told her that the fact that Jamie’s World exists is revenge enough in itself.

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Months later, and They Let Me Write a Book now sits in bookstores next to Tina Fey’s Bossypants, Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please – all books that I drank like a fish, parched for so long from a lack of snackable, relatable female realness. Helping to write something for young women that won’t make them hate their body, be depressed that they are single and that might even make them laugh, is one of my proudest achievements yet. I am glad they let us write a book.

They Let Me Write a Book is available to purchase for $24.99 from Unity Books

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BooksDecember 15, 2015

Books: The Year of Brian Turner

Brian Turner

Guest writer

Brian Turner’s 2015: life and bicycles in Oturehua, ‘lucky still to be alive’, his new book Boundaries: People and Places of Central Otago, a visit to London, Anton Oliver’s birthday party, ‘the neo-liberal pandemic’, Richie McCaw.

A couple of days ago I met a bloke at the café by the Hayes Engineering Works about a kilometre down the valley from my small house in Oturehua, in the Ida Valley, Central Otago. I hadn’t seen Max Presbury, or chatted to him, for years, decades actually. A mob of us, including Max, Stu Melville, Brendon Pauley, Dave Gerrard, Jo Hansen, Mark Henaghan, John Dean and others, used to run together from the Dunedin Hospital in North Dunedin most lunch hours. Round Logan Park, through the upper Botanic Gardens, round Woodhaugh and back to the hospital we charged, thundering down George Street and back into Hanover Street.

They were an interesting bunch: Gerrard, previously a top swimmer turned an academic; Melville and Pauley outstanding athletes on track and road; Hansen subsequently became a judge and Henaghan a law professor, and was an Dean an optometrist, and so on…

That was back in the 1970s, what seems, now, an awfully long time ago. Since then I’ve floundered a lot, gone off in all sorts of directions – some stupidly – before crash-landing in Oturehua, (pop? let us say about 30) in the so-called ‘middle of nowhere’, in 1999.

I was born in Dunedin in 1944. My father was ‘absent’ because, as he put it, he was away ‘fighting the Hun’ in far off places. He came home in 1945. I wrote about my childhood and youth in southern New Zealand in Somebodies and Nobodies which ends with my leaving the south and going to work in Wellington in about 1969. It’s a book I’m fond of, glad to have written. I’ve sometimes thought of writing about what’s happened since but that’s looking less and less likely. Time’s wing’d chariot and all that. I simply see myself as lucky still to be alive.

When I look back I see that I have done things, experienced things, that I wouldn’t have thought possible. But now, increasingly, the past is a foreign country, and I don’t have a passport to it anymore. I live day to day, take nothing for granted, work hard and play whenever I can. By ‘play’ I mean fishing, bike riding, gardening, socialising, and so on. There’s a lot of socialising, community activity generally. I know contractors, farmers, drivers, writers, artists, craftspeople, café owners and chefs, musicians, hoteliers, moteliers and tourism operators, and so on. The Central Otago Rail Trail passes through the town and I often meet some of them down at the store, the hotel or on the trail itself.

Oturehua has a sports ground – splendid cricket pitch, tennis court, small swimming pool, historic (century-old) store, hotel (excellent food), trucking company and garage, very good accommodation and so on.

I spent most of the first six months of this year writing a new book, Boundaries: People and Places of Central Otago – launched in the presence of over 100 people from town and country in the local hall. What a launch that was! Red carpet, bunting, singer-songwriter-guitarist Graham Wardrop, and the best variety, quality and quantity of food and wine of any launch I’ve attended anywhere! I’ll write it up one of these days.

Boundaries has interviews I did, guest contributions, essays and poems of mine, and lots of splendid photographs taken by my friend Steve Calveley, a ‘semi-retired’ doctor from the Auckland region. He and Margot built a house 2km down the valley from Oture.

I also spent a bit over two months this year in England visiting my son Andre, his wife Tree, and friends. Jarrad and Barbara Murray took me in for a few weeks, samaritans that they are. I’d hoped to go to Spain and France for a bit but caught a bug and was crook for a lot of the time. In London I did what I’d done previously, saw some shows, visited museums and art galleries, yarned with and attended Anton Oliver’s sumptuous fortieth birthday party, read poems with Andre, Paul Birtill and others in the little Peace Garden by the entrance to the Heath at South End Green, and so on.

I met the fiction writer Kirsty Gunn a couple of times and heard her discuss aspects of Katherine Mansfield’s work, especially how she was influenced by her time in Wellington. Gunn’s engaging, good company, lives up in Scotland, teaches both in London and Dundee, frequently commutes back and forth by train from the north. Struck me as an arduous, high-pressure commitment.

I wrote several new poems when in London, walked for miles, rode a borrowed bike around the place and regularly frequented a café in Queen’s Crescent run by North Africans.

PHOTO BY MIKE WHITE

When at home in Oture, I often go for a ride on my road bike, a yellow Reiker. Sometimes – though not yet, this season – I take part in road racing events conducted by the Central Otago Wakatipu Cycling Club. Much time, also, is spent on environmental issues – submissions, letters, meetings, and hearings. I first got involved in environmental campaigns about 40 years ago around the time of the Save Manapouri uprising, then in efforts to prevent a large aluminium smelter being built at Aramoana, the entrance to Otago Harbour. If you’d told me then that we’d still be working at laying waste to the natural environment in New Zealand in the way we are I’d have said, ‘No, surely not.’ We continue to be an obstinate, destructive, unethical lot, if we can get away with it. And all of us are guilty – me included – to some degree.

Worldwide we’re systematically destroying much of our natural heritage in the name of ‘progress and development’. New Zealand’s no different. What passes for ‘development’ often results in degradation or destruction. And, a lot of the time ‘change’ and ‘progress’ are presented as one and the same. They’re not.

Politically, as I see it in New Zealand today, we are governed by followers not leaders, those who won’t accept, or fail to understand, that there are limits to what we call ‘growth’. Ignorance, apathy, wilful blindness, greed and so on, pervade our lives. The neo-liberal pandemic which spread in the 1980s is still with us.

In my view there’s a lot of truth in the allegation that my generation, the so-called Baby Boomers, is largely responsible. I see my lot as the most self-satisfied, self-congratulatory and materially well-off generation ever. Thus far, too few of the BBs’ children have woken up, and therefore they share the same sense of self-congratulation and entitlement that their parents display. You’d think rational people would see the sense in, and adopt, a precautionary approach when it comes to that upon which all life depends, the natural environment.

But no, despite talk of the importance of legacy and heritage, most of us still act as if we believe we’ll be dead and buried before the worst arrives, so what the hell.

We could choose to alter course, accept that what we as a people are able to do is one thing, what we ought to is quite another. But how one alters the collective consciousness of a nation in ways that prick our conscience and compels us reconsider, and to change course, I don’t know.

Want to talk about, raise and discuss what our preoccupation with certain sports, rugby and league in particular, tell us about our behaviour and attitudes to life in general, and to nature itself? I think we ought to have that conversation, and soon. Now that Richie’s not playing footy – he is clearly talented and savvy and resolute – it would be heartening to see him figuring in the wider conversation. For example, in an effort to persuade people that life’s not all about us, but actually, and crucially, about what’s all around us, in the rivers and oceans and forests and grasslands and atmosphere and what we’re doing with and to it.

Is this too much to expect?