OPINIONMediaNovember 24, 2017

We’ve found it: the worst column of 2017

Madeleine Chapman

Editor

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With 2017 coming to a close, one brave fisherman has thrown his hat in the Worst Opinions ring with a rant against te reo and those who dare speak it. Madeleine Chapman responds.

You might be thinking that the Spinoff publishing responses to bad columns is getting old. But so are these columnists and that hasn’t stopped them from spitting bile at regular intervals. So here we are, once again giving attention to a terrible piece of writing in the hopes that it’ll serve as a last goodbye to a generation of old men standing on their media platforms, yelling at clouds.

Allow me to introduce Mr Dave Witherow, a fisherman slash writer from Dunedin. Witherow has made a late surge in the race for Worst Opinion Column of 2017 – snatching the lead from Duncan Garner and this impressive effort – with a piece in Otago Daily Times titled “Haere mai? Everything is far from ka pai!” This otherwise mediocre headline having as many Māori words as English words becomes very ironic when you realise that his whole rant is about how everyone needs to stop forcing him to read and hear te reo.

The piece itself is a svelte 751 words, but when factoring in time to gasp, laugh, and suffer an existential crisis, I place its reading time at 42 minutes. The thrust of Witherow’s argument is that to speak te reo on Radio New Zealand (as some of the presenters do when beginning and ending their segments) is to spit in the face of all that is holy. And all that is holy, according to Witherow, is the late, great English language. RIP. Cause of death: Guyon Espiner saying “kia ora” on the wireless.

“Maori Language Week, now a permanent annual fixture, is one of those occasions when our determination to give no offence blossoms into the urge to grovel. This year was the best yet, with media apologists the length and breadth of the land prostrating themselves before the holy altar of te reo. Radio New Zealand took the prize, in a seven-day fiesta of cringing servility that, were Billy T. James still with us, would have provided him with material forever.”

How’s that for an opening paragraph. Thank goodness Billy T. James has good friends to carry on his apparent legacy of mocking those who practice te reo.

“RNZ has been ahead of the pack in obsequiousness. Everything indigenous is sacrosanct, and even formerly redoubtable interviewers now shrink from the slightest demur when boring bigots drone on about the mana of all things native.”

Full disclosure: I had to google the definition of “obsequiousness”. Then a second later I had to google “sacrosanct”, and then “redoubtable”. After all that I had to google the entire sentence because it still made no sense whatsoever. Perhaps Witherow, who clearly writes with a thesaurus close at hand, is simply upset that his thesaurus doesn’t have any Māori words in it.

Dave Witherow holding his wet fish of an opinion

“A couple of Maori snowflakes were banging on about the terrible grief they were suffering from the mispronunciation of their names.”

However you read that sentence in your head, go back and pronounce it “Moooowri snowflakes” as it was intended. The mispronunciation of names is a divisive topic. Divisive in that some people want their names pronounced correctly and other people want to not be called on out on their bigotry. Witherow was born in Ireland. If I can get my head around a name like Saoirse being pronounced “sir-shuh”, surely ol’ Dave can handle Kahurangi being pronounced pretty much exactly how it’s written. But oh no, instead he laments a time when “booting was a possibility” in getting “these sad sacks” out of the RNZ studio.

“Radio New Zealand – the New Zealand equivalent of the BBC – is supposed to be free of political meddling. Yet now it has been hijacked, and its hapless staff obliged to dispense their daily dose of te reo. There were just a few words to begin with. Then longer sentences which have kept on growing..”

I hate to think how Witherow reacts when he hears a baby say just a few words to begin with, then longer sentences. Funny how language works. When we demanded that RNZ explain these new obligations, they responded with a cheerful “Morena, I think the columnist is referring to the encouragement we are giving RNZ staff to use Te Reo, one of our national languages, as a natural part of their work. Bread and butter stuff for the national broadcaster.” Asked and answered.

“The uncertain fate of the Maori tongue is hardly our most urgent problem,” Witherow cries, before presenting a long list of very real social issues. The argument presented here is that every time Guyon Espiner greets his listeners in te reo, he takes away resources that would otherwise be used to end homelessness, youth suicide, and child poverty.

“We must respect the native culture, they will ooze. We must respect te reo. And so we should. But respect should cut both ways.”

This sentence made me laugh in the same way you laugh when you drop a full plate of food on the ground. The sound of laughter is there, but why are there tears in your eyes?

“We are lectured much about respect – especially by the grovelling classes. But respect, to mean anything, should involve a willingness to consider points of view other than one’s own, and maybe a recognition that, throughout the history of these islands, no race or culture has held a monopoly on virtue.”

In the words of the great philosopher DJ Khaled, “congratulations, you played yourself.”

“This myopic strategy can have no happy outcome. Without respect there will eventually be no goodwill, and contempt in the end will yield contempt in return.”

Translation: if you Maoris don’t respect authority, we’re not going to give you any more nice things, for example, your language.

Just a reminder that this is a real column that was published by a real publication in this unholiest of years, 2017. It’s funny to a point, but it also serves as a wake up call that these people still exist in our country. And while we can’t respond to every person who has ever said something racist or sexist or homophobic, we can at least call them out when they do it on a public platform.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Dave Witherow is the Spinoff’s runaway winner of Worst Opinion Column of 2017.

stand-by-for-tape-backup-Ross_Sutherland

MediaNovember 24, 2017

Ghostbusters + The Fresh Prince + Thriller = A multimedia performance about nostalgia and grief

Henry Oliver

Guest writer

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Henry Oliver talks to Ross Sutherland, a British poet whose VHS performance piece Standby for Tape Back-Up, a multimedia meditation on memory, meaning and grief, is on in Auckland and Wellington this week.

A little over ten years ago, with a healthy dose of mid-00s meta-irony, a group of friends and I get stoned and watched The Wizard of Oz while playing The Dark Side of the Moon on repeat. After a couple of attempts at starting the album at the MGM lion’s third roar, we laugh as the two texts synchronise in ways that sometimes seem too good to be true: the word ‘balance’ matches up with Dorothy balancing on a fence; we hear the line “the lunatic is on the grass” as the Scarecrow begins his floppy dance by some bright green grass; the bass-drum heartbeats that close the album for the first time (you have to put it on repeat y’see) match Dorothy listening to Tin Man’s chest to confirm he has no heart.

About a year later, in another country, an elderly man who I’d never heard of until this week dies, setting off a chain of events that will bring British poet Ross Sutherland to New Zealand to perform his VHS performance poem/one-man-show Stand By for Tape Back-Up in Auckland’s Hollywood Cinema tonight and Wellington’s The Roxy on Tuesday.

That man was Sutherland’s grandfather, who, in 1984, took his four-year-old grandson to see Ghostbusters five days in a row. Over 30 years later, when Sutherland’s grandfather died, Sutherland was left a VHS tape, the very VHS tape he would use at his grandparents house when he stayed with them every summer, recording over what he’d recorded the summer before. The first movie he recorded off the TV was Ghostbusters, which was eventually partially taped over with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video, British game shows and Jaws.

A few years later still, Sutherland found the tape in his loft and began watching it repeatedly. He was suffering from depression and asthma and found comfort in the tape. He’d watch it alone, watch it with friends, just put it on in the background at parties. He watched it hundreds of times and started to see it not just as a kind of self-portrait to ground himself during times of desperation – “It felt like a home movie, despite there not being a single image of me on it,” he says – but as a way to process the grief he still felt over the passing of his grandfather.

Sutherland is a poet who followed the practices of the Oulipo school, in which a writer arbitrarily restricts themselves to push their creativity beyond the cliches which all-too-easily spring-forth when a writer is faced with a blank page. He wrote poems where every word contained the same vowel. “The idea is that by choosing those forms, you’d end up writing from your subconscious,” he says. “All your conscious mind wants to write is cliche and you have to circumnavigate your own bourgeois mindset in order to get down to what’s going on in the back of your brain.”

So when he began to unpack and internalise the videotape – knowing it intimately, yet finding new intricacies every time he watched it – he began to see how he could not only be inspired by the tape, but start writing over it and synchronising his poetry to the images he was seeing on screen. He would write his own version of Dark Side of the Moon to perform over images of Will Smith, and Michael Jackson, and an ad for a bank, giving himself over to the synchronicity that he began to find in the tape. Sections are played and rewound and played again. Just as you have to play Dark Side of the Moon two-and-a-half times for it to soundtrack the entire Wizard of Oz, Sutherland plays bits of the tape on repeat, draining them of their original meanings and narratives by injecting his own.

So as much as Standby for Tape Back-Up is about Sutherland’s grief, it is also about how the we process the information of our lives. We remember our lives through repetition of memories. And whether that means watching an old video over-and-over or simply thinking about past events, each time we remember something we are dubbing over our previous memory with a newer version, and just like Sutherland’s VHS, as we rewrite our memories, even if they remain accurate – Will Smith is still missing that shot – they’re distorted slightly. They’re warped, they’re fuzzy, they’re imperfect.

But, because life is imperfect, we’re used to it. We fill in the gaps and see patterns where there are none. We see don’t see still 24 still frames, we see Dorothy skipping in a fluid motion. We don’t think about the millions of details in Dark Side of the Moon that don’t match-up with The Wizard of Oz, we latch onto the instances where, even vaguely and metaphorically, it does.