The Road to Nostalgia
[HE same day I declined happily to go to an evening function which would have kept me out till after eleven, I saw an ad. for the movie about Benny Goodman. It was a catch all; nostalgia for the older ones, for the kids a thrill that had been just a name now brought to pulsating reality on the wide screen. . . » This startled me a little, like any other threat of mortality. Was it so long ago? Goodman hoisted himself into the big money in the two years 19361938. The kids in the queue outside the Paramount theatre burning newspapers to keep themselves warm would now be stable suburban citizens adjusting the central heating in their own houses and making conservative noises about rock ’n’ roll. Carnegie Hall has jumped to all kinds of jive since the Goodman brass blew the first jazz bugle call there. And B.G. himself is seldom seen in the late spots now. He stays at home comfortably with his large investment portfolio. He is, I admit, a little older than I, but we have both arrived at the afternoon of a jazz man, coming through the fresh morning woods by somewhat different paths, He played it good, I just knew it was good to listen to, right from the time I first heard real jazz on a short wave radio at the age of fifteen. The crucial mile post on this road to nostalgia is marked WHY GO OUT TONIGHT? The young jazz man naturally doesn’t go to bed while some cat is still swinging or there’s a platter not yet spun. The question doesn’t occur to him. Now that nostalgia is dripping from my pen, I confess it first occurred to me towards the end of the practically rainless summer of 1951, in Victoria, British Columbia, when I was at a concert given by Lionel Hampton: Victoria is not a late night town by Canadian standards, and the Hamp was astounded when they wanted to close the hall up on him at 1.0 a.m., by which time the boys were barely warmed up to their blowing. But the audience knew a joint down the street where all would be welcome, the whole five hundred, and they could send out for beer and chow mein and really have thernselves a ball. The Hamp and his men picked up their instruments and snake danced away to this clean, friendly, well-lighted place, and my friends told me they blew a mess of jazz till sunrise. But I had doubts, Suddenly the prospect of bed seemed more attractive than a further twenty choruses of Flyin’ Home. So I went to bed, and when I woke there I was on the road to nostalgia. Well, that was years ago, Now I’m reconciled. I saw the Benny Goodman movie, which was full of visual hokum, but most of the sounds were about right, and I didn’t have to stay up late to see it. We Got Rights UCKLAND and the Waikato are still mentioned as one by the weather forecasters, and in spite of family brawls and schisms (bound to happen as the kids grow up and develop their own ambitions) they stand together when disaster threatens, stick close and angry when their rightful claims are neglected. It’s like you see in the movies. Those two big, brawling brothers knocking
each other about in arguments over horses or oil wells or who can spit tobacco juice the furthest-that’s byplay, high spirited fun. You know what's going to happen when the sinister Stranger hits town with the papers in his pocket, all set to do the family out of its rights. Yessir, virtue and straight shootin’ win the day, and there’s another corpse tossed into Dead Man’s Gulch. Well sir, I wouldn’t of given a hoot in heck for their chances if the selectors had showed up in Hamilton or Auckland after the second test. Nossir, not a hoot. An’ now us folks are all plenty sore at them Olympic selectors who have tramped on our rights. We don’t aim to make trouble ‘less we have to. We jus’ aim to change their minds peaceful like, but I seen some of the boys oiling up their guns, an’ if these hyar selectors showed their faces in any milk bar in these parts on a Saturday night when the boys got a couple ice cream sodys under their belts-well, anythin’ could happen. Whose Kingdom for a Horse? ET’S see, who should be interested more than casually in New Zealand Book Week? Agents, publishers, printers, wholesalers, retailers, the buying public, and, ah, yes, writers. Just because writers don’t make a living from books, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have some sort of interest in them. After all, Knatchbull Twee, most exquisite of gardening writers (refresh yourself with him in Garden Rubbish) got his aesthetic ecstacies merely from fondling the covers, New Zealand is a favourable area for books. A statistical type, broadcasting during Book Week, said it was quite close behind the top countries, Iceland and Norway. Each Norwegian sperids 12 dollars a year on books, Any New Zealander who spends dollars on books has rocks in the head. The only thing to do with hard currency is stash it away in a steadily producing oil well in Texas. Any sort of money will buy books in New Zealand. Then the statistician said there were nineteen bookshops: in Queen Street from the bottom up to Karangahape Road, about a mile. That’s fine, too, except for the soft currency aspect. Next year let’s have a book week celebrating New Zealand book shops which sell books to American drug stores and bus terminals (very few book shops in the U.S.), and give the resultant dollars to New Zealand writers. Let’s see. There must be nearly ten New Zealand writers, leaving the late Miss Mansfield undisturbed. That would probably make two bucks a piece. Any of those nineteen Queen Street booksellers going to play? No? O.K., we’ll have a Horse Week. I bet there’s at least nineteen trainers within a mile of Cornwall Park (right next door to Ellerslie), Should be easy to knock a nag off those strings they lead in pre-dawn exercise, and the other day a New York lady paid twenty thousand bucks for a New Zealand horse. How: about it, writers? Doesn’t that make you want to look through a
bridle?
G. leF.
Y.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 899, 26 October 1956, Page 10
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1,077The Road to Nostalgia New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 899, 26 October 1956, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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