Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Why am I breathless? I’ve just rejoined the mile high club. The boys and I have spent the last week in Aspen, Colorado. It’s another whistle stop on the academic gravy train, where we get to frolic and explore while their dad tinkers with the origins of the universe in the company of other physicists. And we’re all doing it at a mile and a half above sea level, a rather dizzying prospect.

Maybe I’ve spent too long in scrufty old New England, but the scenery hereabouts is, frankly, dazzling. The immense sky, the shimmering aspen trees, the thoroughly rocky mountains – it’s enough to tenderize even the most hardened atheist. Gaze upon this and tell me you don’t see the hand of, if not a personified creator, at least Slartibartfast:

The town itself is a funny contradiction. A modest mountain village – you can picture Heidi herself trip-trapping down the hill with her tame goats – which has been transformed into a luxury resort. It started as a silver-mining town, and struggled on through boom and bust, until the ski business took off, thanks to the post-war efforts of veterans of the 10th Mountain Division (the James Bond-like troops on skis, who trained hereabouts during WWII).

Now there are Gucci and Prada stores on every other corner, and the kind of dubious art shops patronized by people with more money than taste.

It’s as if Little Orphan Annie grew up to be Paris Hilton. Except not exactly. Because even though it’s awash in moolah, the place still has genuine charm and a fair percentage of long-time locals who are keepin’ it real. (Also: an amazing thrift store and consignment shops where you can pick up last year’s rich kids’ goodies for pennies.)

And who can object to deep-pocket town planning that comes up with swank playgrounds like this:

Or cobbled downtown streets, where a (tiny) river runs through it, to the delight of small children:

And can we talk about the bike paths? Oh, the bike paths. Everywhere you go. Every major route out of town and into nearby towns has a paved path running alongside the road.

After New Haven, where drivers (cops included) regularly blow through red lights and regard pedestrians as invisible, the traffic here is startling. Cars mosey through town at a rolling pace, and grind to a halt at pedestrian crossings whether you ask them to or not.

If you should need to alert traffic to your desire to cross, you could use one of the solar-powered crossing signals. (The parking meter is also solar-powered).

Speaking of driving, we bumped into this fellow on our way back from dinner one evening. Something of a local institution, he runs the Ultimate Taxi, a checkered cab tricked out to the max with light shows, musical instruments, and a fog machine.

Which makes him the Ultimate Taxi Driver, I guess.

We rolled through Aspen at about 5 m.p.h. to the tune of "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard," with drum solo.

The ultimate passengers were pretty impressed.

Even more so when they got to keep the glowsticks and the psychedelic glasses at the end of the, ahem, “trip.”

Since he was on his way home anyway, we struck a deal for twenty bucks, but you can book him for weddings, parties, anything, for a significantly higher fee.

Other clues that money is almost no object hereabouts: the extremely well-stocked public library lets visitors to town borrow as many books as they like. And, in a rebuke to the global trend away from newsprint, there are two daily newspapers; one is very professional and big-city looking and runs the New York Times crossword every day. The other is rougher and more homespun, and bears the splendid small-town motto “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.”

Speaking of bears: this is the only one we’ve run into so far.

But one of the physicists (let’s call him Goldilocks) had a late-night encounter a few summers ago, when he heard someone rummaging through the fridge at the Physics Center and went to see which of his colleagues it was. It was a very hairy, very hungry non-colleague, who made a break for it, right over the top of said physicist.

Places not to go in Aspen: between a hungry bear and the food, and between an alarmed bear and the door. Happily, Goldilocks made a full recovery.

The rest of the local fauna is very friendly indeed. Again, I’m used to the New England frost, where you earn the right to smile and chat with your neighbours by living there for, oh, several years or so. Whereas here, you’ll be walking home, and a pleasant chap -- who, like every other person here, turns out to have either been to New Zealand or be an actual New Zealander -- will engage you and your kids in conversation, and you find yourself thinking “Yes, yes, but what are you trying to sell me? What do you want?” throughout the next amiable quarter of an hour chatting with a complete stranger.

And will then realize as you wave goodbye and mosey along home, that what he wanted was to spend an amiable quarter of an hour chatting with a complete stranger. Which, it turns out, is not a crime in this part of the country. A person could get to like that.

Why look: a sweet little yellow cottage for sale. That would do nicely...

...if I had NZ$7million to spare. Maybe we could afford this one instead.

I did my frugal best to prop up the local economy by visiting the nearby mountain village of Snowmass, where the boys were enjoying a couple of days of camp (Rocket Camp for the big boy, which had the small boy briefly convinced that he personally was going to be blasted into space as the pilot of his big brother’s rocket).

Snowmass is small, and either very humorous or not very good at maths:

I moved from café to lunch spot to nail salon with my laptop and my review books and my wallet, and was greeted like a hero everywhere I went. There are genuine ghost towns nearby, left over from the silver rushes, but Snowmass in the off-season was even spookier. Even a stranger in paradise can feel the economic chill in the air.

No town is an island, after all. Aspen itself is reporting a 20% downturn in retail sales compared to this time last year; the restaurants are hustling customers with appealing prix fixe menus, and the shop-owners are uncommonly welcoming of anyone who might spend a dollar, even scruffy out-of-towners with noisy children who are all elbows.

But luckily some towns have an island that a young man can conquer and, for a quiet half hour,and entirely for free, call his own.

The only downside to this lofty place? You cannot make a decent cup of tea, thanks to some bollocks about the altitude and the boiling temperature of water. (A top physicist explains it here, with nifty diagrams). And the claim that your G & T goes twice as far, twice as fast at altitude turns out to be a wishful myth. So much for the Rocky Mountain high!

After extensive, diligent, probing research into what you want (and a few afternoons flicking through disappointing but thoroughly educational alternatives at the newsagents), we are delighted to announce a total revamp of Public Address.

We’ve bared all before, and we’re doing it again. It’s no secret that we’re after your eyeballs; a website like this lives or dies by the traffic it attracts. Distracted commuters on a highway to elsewhere: bad. Curb-crawlers: good.

So the all-new Pubic Address (new motto: This Is Where You Get Off) will be the real thinking person’s crumpet: unfettered, unfiltered raunch, slathered in buttery prose, with lashings of political golden syrup on top. Best of all, everything that attracted you to us in the first place is still there - with knobs on.

Here’s a taste of what you can look forward to...

No doubt about it, he’s the top! In Hard, Throbbing News, the indefatigable Russell Brown lovingly details the dick of the day. Sometimes, if the government's been really busy, more than one dick a day! He's the hardest working man in journalism. Also featuring occasional bonus food pron, and regular lubricious accounts of the nocturnal shenanigans of a usually mild-mannered city (hey Auckland, is that a Sky Tower in your pocket, or are you pleased to see me?). For the reader with plenty of time on their hands, legendary Big Russ delivers at length... luxury length.

If you prefer it quick and dirty, sail over to Get Lei'd on the North Shore, where the breathtakingly energetic and flexible Mr Anything-But-Slack makes a delightful nuisance of himself with men, women, bicycles, and the occasional eager Prime Minister who is, reportedly, up for anything as long as it’ll fly in the opinion polls.

For those who like it every which way and louche, there’s Up Yours, Full Frontal, in which the lithe and lovely Emma twists herself into a variety of provocative philosophical positions... with utterly bare-naked feet. You are not fit to lick them, but she’ll entertain your intelligent comments in lieu.

The more bookish, sensitive reader will thrill to the erudite prose of the pseudonymous A Cantabrian Gentleman, in which a straitlaced intellectual recounts in tantalizing detail his exquisite daily humiliations at the hands of a much, much, much younger man. Oscar’s disingenuous Bosie had nothing on the machinations of green-eyed “Bob.”

It’ll be business as usual at You Little Cracker, where Damian, our beloved pioneer in the art of lurid self-disclosure, happily debauches himself all over the globe for your amusement. Shameless exploits in foreign climes (with donkeys!) alternate with glowing tributes to Pussies I Have Known. With pics!

For your viewing pleasure, there’s You'll Go Blind, in which the delicious Fiona puts on her sexy librarian specs and gives it up: dates and times for all glimpses of saucy bits, intriguing erotic subtexts, and anything Buffy-related in the upcoming week’s TV listings. She likes to watch...

And you’ll never be disappointed by a bit of Random "Play", ‘cos Graham’s been doing it longer, harder, and in more places than most of us can dream of. And what a soundtrack! This is the man who put the "ear" in erogenous.

Or maybe you’d prefer to find yourself on the business end of a jolly good fisking at Get My Point, in which Keith loosens his tie and administers strict correction to naughty politicians and journalists who’ve been very, very naughty. You won’t believe what he does with that slide rule.

Alas, for legal reasons, we cannot yet disclose the direction in which “Barely Legal Beagle” Graeme will be taking his column. Let’s just say IANAL. Woof!

And fans of the sporting life will be keen to tackle Playing the Field Theory, in which the always up-for-it Hadyn wins the toss, then proceeds to play both ends against the middle. Forty-five minutes each way, ladies and gentlemen. In tiny shorts. Followed by a hot shower and a good hard rub down.

(Busty Town will continue to specialize in boob jokes and other infantile humour.)

Because I am a Very Good Mother and wish to avoid the internet ducking stool reserved for Very Bad Mothers who shamelessly violate their children’s privacy, I am not at liberty to tell you, not even elliptically, that in a small city in New England, a three year old has just engineered a major transition in 48 hours with barely any fanfare or assistance, in one weekend reducing his carbon footprint by approximately a sack of nappies per week while entirely eliminating a line item on the family grocery bill.

With respect: beat that, President Obama, sir.

Ah, the cheerful whistle of the toilet train. Woo woo! I’ll confess to deploying a few strategic jellybeans – at an exchange rate of two for a one and five for a two, if you get my drift – but oh, it was so much easier this time than last time.

Of course, in the tradition of raising your second child like a second child, he pretty much had to learn to read the timetable and walk all the way to the station by himself. Whereas the first child spent a few anxious months camped out on the platform, bags packed, his parents riffling bossily through the Eurail book trying to figure out the best way to get full value out of the ticket.

And of course the train arrives when it arrives, and everyone gets where they’re going in the end.

The young man himself has no further comment at this time, being too busy digging through the very exciting bag of hand-me-down undies, most of them featuring a certain yellow-hatted cartoon construction worker standing cheerfully erect in a very convenient spot on the front. And on the back, a dump truck.

The dodgy semiotics of undergruts: can we spot them? Yes we can.

I’m hugely impressed with the speed (and accuracy) of the transition. There’s just one small thing that remains to be cleared up. This morning I overheard the seven year old giving a highly technical explanation of testicular anatomy and function, apparently in answer to a question from little bro.

The three year old listened patiently to his brother’s textbook account of what little boys are made of, but was unpersuaded: okay, sure, other fellows might have nuts. But his are jellybeans.

It’s very very clear in his mind. He had never noticed them before; you only eat them when you’ve, ahem, scored a goal in the toilet department; and so of course that’s where they wind up.

Sweet, sweet magical thinking. I won’t hurry to correct him (besides, the Conchords are testifying along the same lines).

Don’t spoil his achievement by telling him that when he goes into space, it’s diapers all over again. Even for Tiny McTinypants, the world’s smallest astronaut.

But enough bathroom talk. Ooh, look, wheels! An excellent little scooter with two wheels at the front and an intuitive, Segway-like steering mechanism. It’s super.

But the packaging and instruction sheet it came with? Very confusing. One of these things is not like the others.

Not to mention:

Still, not nearly as flummoxing as this sign at our favourite children’s bookshop in NYC. Tell me your version of the call that inspired this notice; best submission wins a pair of jellybeans.

So far I’ve kept my face off Facebook. And I never did join Friendster, so no need to unfriendster myself. But my sister and I were iChatting the other day about our reluctance to join the twitter chorus - despite the fact that both our brothers are unrepentant tweeters (and probably woofers, for all we know) and everyone around us has phones that go bingly bingly bop all day long with the happy chirping of new tweets.

Heck, even Damian is doing it now. (What's that revving sound, and why are there sharks in the para pool?)

gems: do you twitter?
jojo: nah, I just read other people’s and then I titter
gems: haha
jojo: plus, 140 characters?
jojo: that’s me just warming up
gems: true
jojo: I need witter
jojo: for people who witter on
jojo: in 1400 words or less
gems: or more
jojo: or twatter - WHO are you doing right now?
jojo: doh, it’s been done
gems: what about tutter
gems: where you can tell people off
jojo: ooh yes! censorious status reports
jojo: about other people’s status
jojo: “what are you doing wrong now?”
jojo: “tut: civil servant being uncivil on bus”
jojo: “tut: boy on Cuba St showing buttcrack needs to pull his trousers up”
gems: “tut: John Key.”
jojo: we’ll need graphic representations
jojo: of disapproving tongue click
jojo: and/or eyeroll
gems: it’s a winner
gems: blog it!

If a newspaper falls in a city that you don’t actually live in, does it make a sound? And is it a loud whump, like a redwood hitting the earth, or the shuffling sigh of a small pile of documents swept off a desk into the recycling bin?

Major dailies are closing across the United States. My local paper (in a university town, yet) has laid off its science reporter among other long-servers. The local ad-funded weekly, for which I review books, is feeling a little edgy. Deep thinkers are proposing entirely new business models, like endowment-funded journalism, something our Russell has occasionally championed on a smaller scale. Meanwhile Time and the New York Times concede that paper news may have had its day. It’s beginning to feel like the end of an era.

Amongst all of this, Clay Shirky’s provocatively matter-of-fact piece on how newspapers got it wrong makes for intriguing and very timely reading. Shirky details the paradigm shift we're in the middle of: it's as big and as messy as the one that gave us newspapers in the first place. This is useful to know, although not necessarily comforting. As Terry Pratchett put it in his definitively comic version of how the printing press turned lead into gold: “The truth shall make ye fret.”

Shirky offers one note of solace: the market for good journalism per se hasn’t gone away, it's just changed. Empirically, we know that's true. In my town, for example, the New Haven Independent – a purely online news source set up by a former editor of the New Haven Advocate -- is thriving, and I really dig its gutsy, grassroots reporting and its gossipy comments section. I can see the same thing working in some neighbourhoods in New Zealand -- although it’s not much use for those who don’t have computers at home. Which is a fair number of people, most of them already disenfranchised in various ways. Which is troublesome.

Still, I freely admit I let my last real newspaper subscription lapse years ago, when I realized I was really only enjoying Thursday (lifestyle supplements!) and Saturday (hardest crossword of the week). These days, I get virtually all of my news virtually, from the NHI to the NYT to Stuff and the Herald and a few other places I’d be embarrassed to name. Even if I could source all of that material on paper and in real time, I couldn’t afford to pay for such a catholic news habit.

Yes, I’m part of the steamroller, not the road. And aren’t we all? Hands up who bought an actual newspaper this week?

But what is lost when we no longer get our hands inky, rustling through the pages in search of things-that-are-new? I grew up reading daily newspapers. One of my earliest memories is of running into the house with the evening paper, knowing from the giant letters on the front page that something enormous had happened. I was able to read the words but unable to fathom the curious syntax of newspaper headlines. In my memory the letters are, inexplicably, red; they announced the death of Norman Kirk.

Most mornings and some evenings there was a newspaper spread open on the lid of the chest freezer for perusal by any member of the household -- after the alpha male had had first dibs, of course. Even now, when I visit Mum and Dad, part of the fun is sending the boys out to the letterbox first thing to get the paper; the other part is intercepting it before they can ask too many questions about whichever shock doom horror scenario the Herald has chosen to lead with. (Over here, the closest they get to that is the weekly thud of the New Yorker in the mailbox, and trying to fathom its cartoons, most of them about sex and banking.)

For a couple of years, my brother and I had a paper run, delivering the Auckland Star (R.I.P) in exchange for a paltry few dollars a week. It was child labour, but it kept us fit and busy and paid for our comics (more piles of paper, although never recycled). We met a few bad dogs, and lots of neighbours, some of whom we came to know well. Long after he gave up his paper run, Greg used to visit a sweet elderly blind Frenchman and his bedridden wife - he'd hobble to the door to collect the paper, she'd read it to him, and the little chat with the paperboy was the highlight of their day.

As well as the daily papers, there was (and still is) the doughty weekly Courier with its more granular local news, in which you might recognize someone from your own neighbourhood. Indeed, if you excelled academically, you might even get profiled yourself, with accompanying photo. Whakama!

When I headed to Japan in the early 1990s, the internet in its infancy, I looked forward to an occasional envelope from home with news clippings in it, to be eagerly shared with other antipodeans, much as our great-grandparents had passed around letters from the old country. I got my first computer and my first modem, was one of a few hundred subscribers to one of Tokyo’s first ISPs, but there was no news online; I spent a small fortune on English language newspapers to glut my news-hunger, and, as my Japanese got better, the odd Japanese newspaper to fill in the gaps.

Somewhere along the line, on the recommendation of a very smart and cool friend, I subscribed to the Guardian Weekly. I grew incredibly fond of its onion-skin pages, despite two galling discoveries: a) the revelation that there was so much going on in the world that I didn’t know about or understand; and b) the amazingly sexist ratio on its culture pages, where weeks would go by without a review of anything written or produced by a woman. Still, it was full of golden stuff, including the “Letter from...” feature. I remember vividly one “Letter from Ouagadougou,” a plaintive piece by some fellow seconded to Burkina Faso, about his yearning for letters and news from home. I cut out and carried it around with me for years.

Newspapers were a crucial part of how I oriented myself when travelling. I bought papers in the languages of countries I visited, just to see what they looked like. If I spoke the language, I puzzled my way through, just to find out the issues of the day and how they were being discussed. When I first made it to the UK, I bought an armful of Sunday papers and gorged myself sick; it was almost more culturally exciting than seeing the British Museum. Keep your bog man, give me the theatre pages and Dulcie Domum's Bad Housekeeping for afters!

I moved to the United States on a Saturday afternoon, and the next morning, I walked down the hill and bought myself a bagel with lox and the Sunday edition of the New York Times, both of them more massive than I had dreamed possible. It took me an hour to work my way through the bagel; the newspaper lasted all week and, at only a couple of bucks, was by far the better bargain, as well as tastier and better for me.

Oh, it’s all fruitless nostalgia, eh? I can already hear a chorus of “don’t weep for the buggy-whip manufacturers.” (By the way, what did happen to those guys? I like to think they retooled their clientele rather than their product, in sort of a Kinky Boots scenario -- perhaps Emma’s corsetière might look into it? Or perhaps they mothballed their machinery in hopes of an eventual return to the days when all the best families had their own phaeton, and anyone else could whistle up a horse-and-buggy as needed... I live in hope.)

But it's hard not to lament the impending loss of the material culture of the newspaper, its many physical manifestations and afterlives. What will we trip over on street corners, if not newspaper-boxes? What will kids do for exercise and pocket money without paper rounds? (Does anyone let their child do paper rounds any more?). With what will we line the budgie’s cage, wrap fish and chips, do papier-mâché on wet weekends? What will we clip out and put in our scrapbooks, if we still keep scrapbooks?

And it’s not just that. There’s also the role an actual, physical newspaper plays in one’s public identity. Online, we can rustle the pages of any old rag in pursuit of village gossip from villages other than our own. I’m free to browse the horrible (and horribly addictive) Daily Mail, for example, although I wouldn’t hand over good money for it, nor be caught reading it in person. Whereas in person, the newspaper you hold in your hands, regardless of how erudite or crappy its content, is a momentary badge of membership in some club bigger than you.

Benedict Anderson has written eloquently about the role of the newspaper in constructing in what he called the “imagined community” of any given nation. (That’s what I love about academia – you send someone out in search of, say, anthropological analysis of a military coup in Indonesia, and he comes back with a profoundly influential new theory of nationalism).

In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983;1991), Anderson describes the newspaper as essentially fictive, its key “literary convention” the random assemblage of data on its pages, which is held together by two key elements. The first is the mere (but crucial) fact of “calendrical coincidence”: what all of a given newspaper’s stories have in common is the date at the top of the page. This creates the “steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time,” within which “'the world' ambles sturdily ahead.”

In this sense, the newspaper is a serialized novel; Anderson gives the example of Mali as covered by the NY Times - subject to a small blizzard of coverage during a famine, then all but invisible. But even when it's gone from the pages, it doesn't cease to exist. “The novelistic format of the newspaper," writes Anderson, "assures [readers] that somewhere out there the ‘character’ Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next appearance in the plot.”

The second element that, as it were, glues the newspaper together is its readership. A “one-day best-seller” designed to be obsolete by bedtime, the newspaper is defined by its ritual consumption in time and space by otherwise unconnected people. This “mass ceremony” is “performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull,” writes Anderson:

Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. … At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbership, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.

With the loss of the paper paper, we lose that visible connection. Does it matter? I dunno. We’ve retained other engines of national consciousness noted by Anderson; singing in unison, whether at church or at the rugby or WIUO gigs; and nationhood is still busily fetishized and enumerated via maps, museums, and the census, not to mention tiki T-shirts and pounamu pendants and paua earrings and you name it. And did newspapers ever really work the way Anderson suggests they did?

We’re definitely turning a page, though, and I have no idea what’s on the other side of it, apart from Ent-like forests of pinus radiata waving their evergreen limbs in joy. The news will keep coming, the truth shall make you fret, but no trees will be harmed and it won't make your hands all inky. Is that good news? Or no news at all?