Old news by now, but here's my run-in with David Hasseloff while holidaying in the Bay of Plenty. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW5UpBTFVhk&fs=1&hl=en_US]
DOP: Bronwyn Bent
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Mokoroa Falls /
[gallery] All this and only 40 mins from my front door. Found a Woodstock can merrily biffed from the track. Felt ominous unease for the future of mankind. Hurm.
Ode To Chips /
O, Honey and Mustard Grain Waves ... you're the sweetest of the Waves, yet you're always the hardest to find.
Also: why have you gone all Uppercut with your packet design?
The Christmas Haul /
My Adrian Tomine prints framed, finally.
My iPad with a new funky keyboard thing.
Updates to come.
The anticipation is excruciating.
Update 1: $30 Whitcoulls card. Also accepted at Borders.
Also received: a compilation of The Listener's"much loved" Life In New Zealand column.
It also includes excerpts from Listener writers which means I now own a book that contains the navel gazing of Joanne Black.
"Unless the ad has been in the Listener, my newspaper or on the back of a bus that I have banged into, I probably haven't noticed it."
Insightful stuff there.
And That's Exactly How Arsed I Can Be With Christmas Decorations This Year /
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The Dom Post lays out its hits and misses on telly this year. That Joseph Barbosa chap sounds talented.
Stuff From My Grandmother's Garage #3 /
Among the brick-a-brak I found the very first comic book I ever owned.
It's an Australian reprint of DC Christmas stories, apparently culminating, as this cover suggests, with our heroes flying into solar oblivion. Note the apostrophe crime at the bottom.
Let's take a look inside ...
Jonah Hex will not abide by those damned celestials.
Wyrd Beasts, they're so weird.
Did the same to a bloke who parked in my driveway. We are living in a society, you know.
"Land O'Goshen!" I'm pretty sure that's just nonsense.
Check out Jimmy Olsen's bitching necklace! Just the thing for hitting the clubs and the hoes.
Can't go into a war zone without garters.
Minutes of fun!
For Sale: Wasted Dog /
Stuff From My Grandmother's Garage #2 /
My mother's skateboard, scarred from decades of use. I like the red Atari-style design on the deck and the fairly primitive wheels (I expect modern wheels are very different) which still provide extreme flexibility.
Wool and Hot Pants: This Was The 80s /
While going through my later Grandmother's garage we came across this artifact of the New Zealand Wool Board. Some genius no doubt struggled for days with his or her (most likely his) task to make shearers take notice of the new wool preparation standards. An elegant solution? Although I'm not sure if hot pants were standard shearing attire of the day.
Is Art Boring? Or Just Steve Martin? Or Both? /
A Day At The Waihi A&P Show, 13/11/10. /
Welcome To The Internet! /
"To put a finer point on it: I would just ask, is Facebook the engine of homogenization? Do we live in an era where everyone reads, watches, and listens to the same things? Of course not! We live in the time of the hyperniche. All this liking and information spreading has led us to build more paths that are all less taken. Consider that you could capture a majority of the households in the United States on a given night by advertising on the Big 3 networks. And Facebook is to blame for a culture in which everyone watches the same thing?" Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic responds to Zadie Smith's article on the vacuousness of Facebook.
Like all technology Facebook morphs itself into different configurations depending on who is looking at it. All I can say is that it's pleasing to use Facebook as a way to keep in touch with people I don't see that often and update myself as to their various comings and goings. That's strengthening my relationships rather than eating away at them.
Where Facebook and other online communication tools have frustrated me is when people on the periphery of my digital circle have misunderstood something I've dashed down and responded with instant bile. Mostly that's because what I've written is unclear, sometimes it's not. But, then, I can hear your response: welcome to the internet!
Melbourne, 27/08/10 /
More Beautiful For Her Suffering /
"There are plans for stories - so many that she did not live to carry out - and sketches of characters. These are not set down in the dreadful manner of the two-story-a-week writers who carry obnoxious notebooks about, snapping at "copy." She wrote them in her journal, this journal that was for her alone, because here was her life, because the writer and the woman were not and could never be two separate beings. The photographs of her that illustrate the journal are of deep interest. The first was taken in 1913; the last shortly before her death ten years later. She grew always more beautiful for her suffering."
Dorthy Parker in 1927 reviewing The Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Her private journals were published after her death by her husband, the critic John Murry. Some felt he was exploiting her.
5? Really? /
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I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Garry Trudeau on Satire /
"Satire is unfair. It's rude and uncivil. It lacks balance and proportion, and it obeys none of the normal rules of engagement. Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended target reacts, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. And as if that weren't enough, this savage, unregulated sport is protected by the United States constitution. Cool, huh?"
Life Is Unfair For Us Spidermen /
Life is unfair. Take the horrendous injustice that I call the Spidey Inequity. If I was to start wearing a Spiderman costume in my daily life I would be looked down upon by my fellow citizens.
Yet if a child were to do the same, the little tike would either be ignored or fawned over. Society says "ok, all you people under the age of six, you can wear what the hell you want, but all you people over thirty you can't. In fact you can start paying for insurance and lemon scented rubbish bags." I'm an adult, I should be allowed to wear what I want if it does no one no harm. Yet my on-air television career would almost certainly be over (you could argue that everyone wears different clothes depending on the context, but Spiderman is an icon of morality and principle, if his blue and red stripes are not acceptable in this arena what does that say of my industry? Actually don't answer that), other cinema goers would snigger and almost certainly poke fun, I might even have trouble getting a passport photo ala Israeli restrictions on Palestinian travel.
According to the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal's economic freedom index, New Zealand is the fourth most groovy and relaxed place in the world. Yet I feel like a prisoner in my own land, a second-class citizen.
To the authority of the state and all those who follow the way of belted trousers I say: deny me spandex no longer!
LOST: One (1) Astromech Droid, last seen outside Grey Lynn Community Center /
