IT'S NOT HARD TO BELIEVE IN A SPIRITUALITY OF PLACE when you've grown up somewhere like Nuhaka. You can travel near and afar, immerse yourself in that great global Taniwha we call Western Civilization, pray at the Temples of Consumerism and Altars of Government and Bureaucracy; but at the end of the day, you know there's a place you can go to that isn't part of all that.

A Turangawaewae -- a "Place to Stand" -- that connects you to a universal spirituality that hasn't been commodified, politicised or commercialised. It seems to me we live in an Age of Denial of the fragility of existence; be it grasping at notions of legacy and immortality via the truths and untruths of religion, of the existence of God or of Gods; be it immersing yourself in the disreality of the global media matrix, the mantra has become: I see myself on the television and therefore I do exist.

I see myself on television and therefore I do exist. I see myself on the Internet and therefore I do exist and we grasp at a miniscule sense of immortality in this flash of existence we call a human life.

I expose all of my most intimate thoughts and show to all the privacy of my physical self, and therefore I do exist. My importance counted by the number of friends on my home page; my identity fragmented into MySpace and Bebo and Facebook and List.fm and The Big Idea and Second Life and NZDating and Yahoo Chat; each a reflection from a different angle of my interests, each a supposedly authentic reflection of my personality, but at the end of it all each as manufactured as the Internet framework that these supposed authenticity engines pre-package your identity within.

* * * * * * *

Sitting in a hospital waiting room, I pick up Time magazine from 1999, and the world looks so dated. We were worried that Mandela was retiring from his Presidency and being replaced by this new chap Thabo Mbeki; we were obsessed about the new Star Wars movie and at the time were gobsmacked by its special effects. Urban trendies walked around in black cloth jackets like so many cloned Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.

Circa 1999 I lived in San Francisco, I couldn't afford to fly home to New Zealand for the millenium, our computers were supposedly going to melt down, and Americans were obsessed by the possibility of a terrorist attack at any number of social celebrations in their big cities.

I remember the joke that was the Castro on New Year's Eve; dozens of bars charging $30 a head to get into an empty bar that noone was interested in going out to. Four of us stumbled down to the no-hopers bar that was The Men's Room, and life was actually going on as normal, and noone gave a fuck. The authentic alcoholics were partying, while the scaredy-cat plastic clones had gone home to surf the Internet for a new 2K hookup.

Now its 2007, and everything on the Web is just so accessible and instant and chaotic and so goddamn tempting.

It started in 2005. Google Earth came out of nowhere, and I found myself gazing in wonder at the newly downloaded satellite photographs of flooded New Orleans just days after its devastation ("Welcome to the Third World" the crazed Texan next to me said as we touched down there in 1998).

Wikipedia its twin, time waster bar no other for pop cultural navel gazing, trivia hunting, culture cult explorations and adventures in random click through.

For an obsessed geographer who fell in love with Microsoft Maps in 2006 - wow, global map coverage and a total of 120 satellite photos! - to suddenly find myself zooming in on the Castro Street Fair in San Francisco in full swing seemed like a reality come too soon and too fast.

Protect me from what I want.

Circa 2015, run outside, wave out to the satellite then zoom in on Google EarthNow to rewind and see yourself waving to yourself in Outer Space!

And that was back in the Dark Ages that were 2005. Before YouTube and XTube and Torrentz and Bitlord and the arrival of television onto the Internet.

I remember back in the halcyon days of 1999, dialup access in San Francisco, inviting friends over for an amazing new game - name a song, and lets listen to it in 20 minutes via Napster!

Now its - name that vintage Music Video from days gone by, and there it is on YouTube for instant consumption! (Hey that's Barry lurking in the background of that 80s Propaganda video!)

Listen, watch, consume, lose all sense of anticipation in the hunt and suffer the slings and arrows of boredom.

Protect me from what I want. The malaise of the millenium.

Now our local tv channels schedule shows over the Summer season because, ahem, they've discovered their viewers have other ways of consuming their shows.

Viewing choice becomes: download now (ad free) and add 30c to your broadband bill, or wait three weeks and watch for free on TV (not ad free, but you could always MySky it...). The market demographics splinter more and the Long Tail makes itself felt and suddenly a new generation emerges that has access to all of the fringe film, music and television of a Century of multimedia creativity, and the world of the mashup begins; how many genres can you combine? How many pop culture moments can you strip-mine? How many deep and meaningful references and paeans to the auteurs can you squeeze into your new indie effort? And after all that, where does the pathway of authenticity still lead?

* * * * * * *

Today my life was an Air New Zealand television commercial. Cue emotional moment: illness in the family, need to travel urgently a great distance across New Zealand; scene starts Mission Bay, sad young man runs towards the sea and leaps out and flies into the sky across Rangitoto to the strains of Mum by Prince Tui Teka; Tamaki Makaurau is all moody and muggy and misty and he lands in Tairawhiti, in Gisborne, and suddenly all is hot and dry and Clear. Clarity of light and purpose and he's swimming dreamily across the hills of the Whareratas and gazing up solemnly at his maunga of Moumoukai and then across a sunburnt land to a small, delicate and perfectly planned town called Wairoa. "Those ones are perfect", the lady in the supermarket says as he picks out the flowers. And yet the reunion with his mother isn't emotional, it's the journey that was. She sits there and smiles, unsurprised like she knew he was coming all along. And he smiles, too.

PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT
Naked in Nuhaka, Aotearoa, December 21st 2007

Leo Koziol is of Polish and Maori origin, descends from the Rakaipaaka people of Nuhaka. Leo lived and worked in Nuhaka and Wairoa for the best part of the first decade of the new millenium, avoiding salvoes from property development protestors and inaugurating the now-annual Wairoa Maori Film Festival. Today Leo lives in the awkward emerging meta-metropolis of Auckland, Tamaki Makaurau, where he works in the arts. He wrote for three years under the Naked in Nuhaka moniker, and this is his first new post since 2005. Contact Leo: maorimovies@gmail.com