Squealicious Fane and Deborah
Fane Flaws makes me grin wildly. I can’t help it. He uses colour and music exuberantly as both should be but few are brave enough to or with such abandon. He’s entirely lovable for those two reasons alone. His magical book ‘The Underwatermelon Man and other Unreasonable Rhymes’ is squealicious (a made up word of my own because that’s what happens to a person when you write about someone like Fane).
“Camouflaged in a leafy Napier suburb is the home of creative dynamo Fane Flaws. From the street, the weather board bungalow gives no hint of the avalanche of artworks inside. On that day, Fane was out in the sun on the back deck painting final details on his latest work. In the living room every inch of wall space is taken up with paintings, prints and witty assemblage pieces concocted from old window frames, doorknobs, hinges, handles, and a rainbow of painted demolition timber.
Outside, the one-time garage is chock-a-block with works in progress. At the end of the lawn a stack of colourful demolition timber leans against an old garden shed that looks like it too might soon be scavenged and re-emerge as a work of art. He’s a prodigious talent whose bio reads like a potted history of New Zealand pop culture.
He’s a musician, film director, writer of fiction, and animator with credits ranging from BLERTA and Radio with Pictures to some of the country’s best-known, and awarded, TV ad campaigns. Now he wields his wicked sense of humour to entertain, enlighten and sometimes subvert with an array of prints, paintings, assemblage, t-shirt designs, and even a book, CD and animated DVD of hilarious children’s rhymes.
The average child, exposed to three languages, will speak them fluently by the age of five, so why are so many children given ‘Kiddie Music’ as stimulus for the corresponding years? Songwriters Fane Flaws & Peter Dasent, aka ‘BEND’, have set the ‘Underwatermelon Man’ rhymes to a variety of musical styles, and recorded them with their favorite singers, as if they were songs for adults (which of course they are).
This has created an encyclopaedia of musical modes to introduce children to a world they may not completely discover until adulthood and sadly, in some cases never. Their unusual soundtrack may surprise you since you can hear: Italian Film Music, Rhythm & Blues, French Swing, Rockabilly, Psychedelic Pop, Swing Blues, a Spanish Circus Tango, a String Quartet with Sitars, a Tex-Mex Rumba, a James Bond style Movie Theme, German ‘Cabaret’, Military Brass with a Barbershop Quartet, and much, much more. What’s not surprising is the way even toddlers trill to a dose of up-tempo ‘Django’, or the close harmony of a ’60’s Pop song.’
This is characteristically ballsy Fane stuff, not in the least bit flawed. I figure he’s got it in one, if you’re gonna feed the child solids might as well go the whole hog! When my own children were growing up they were exposed to the whole kit and kaboodle of musical styles. As young adults today, they have and are developing their own musical tastes that run a similar gauntlet, wide as they are deep. Following Fane’s lead, we need to introduce them early to genres that increase their capacity for appreciation of a variety of musical styles whether they end up in their Top Ten favourites or not.
Deborah Burnside
Deborah Burnside on the other hand is a whole other kettle of fish, she’s as warm as she is terrifically delightful. I first met Deborah at her book launch of ‘Night Hunting’ at Taradale Primary School. Night Hunting (Puffin, 2008) is her first Junior Fiction book and tells the story of a young boy who is finally old enough to go hunting with family friend Rotorua Bill. Deborah’s larger than life because she has that capacity. I liked her immediately when I met her because she had a great deal of depth to her colour. I met her again at the 50th birthday party of a mutual acquaintance. We had a lot in common, us feet in the mud girls.
She was born in Napier and now lives on a rural block in Jervoistown in Taradale in the Hawke’s Bay with her husband and three sons. She runs a waste disposal company with her husband Robert. In her spare time she writes in a cottage by the sea. She took part in the NZSA mentoring scheme in 2001, working with Tessa Duder. This was the catalyst for her first novel, On a Good Day (2004), published by Penguin.
She has also produced Sky Fishing, an adult short story which was published in the anthology, Hot Ink (Steele Roberts 2002), a picture-book, An Everyday Sunday, which was runner-up in the inaugural Joy Cowley Awards in 2003, and It’s True! This book is a load of rubbish, which explores facts about rubbish and recycling (Allen & Unwin 2005). She combined her creative talents with her business acumen and has been instrumental in setting up The Hawke’s Bay Writing Competition, which has proved popular with writers in the region.
Mostly Deborah, like Fane earlier get to be squealicious in my books because they’re Bay people. From Hawke’s Bay. Have you heard, Hawke’s Bay is the next BIG thing! Mark my words. I liked Deborah a lot because as a small child she had an invisible friend called Zebedee and her Mum had to empty the vacuum cleaner bag to let him out once when she vacuumed the seat beside her.
I loved that her Dad refused to go to the fish and chip shop with her again after she mimed, with sound effects, a terrific death scene from smoke inhalation (the shop was full of smokers). She thinks the most telling thing that she was going to be a writer was that once, after winning a beach beauty competition, she used a substantial amount of the prize money to buy a very good dictionary. “I loved that story the best. It’s such a writer thing to do!
Me, well I was quite pedestrian actually. I read dictionaries in my spare time, loved unusual words, reread the white and yellow pages of the phone directory each year, memorised fellow students names and faces from School College books and smiled to myself when I recognised them on the streets years later. I never had an imaginary friend because my life was top heavy with four-legged ones anyway. On the other hand, I talked out loud to myself a lot, I used the process to straighten out wonky thinking. Did you ever have an imaginary friend?
