Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Zaoui Sings | Oct 06, 2005 10:37

So the first person I see when I get into the New Zealand Music Awards is Ahmed Zaoui*. His is becoming, ironically, one of the more recognisable faces in New Zealand public life. I've never met him, so I bowl up and introduce myself to him, and to his lawyer Deborah Manning.

It turns out that for the evening, the High Court has granted him his first extension to his curfew. It'll be midnight before he turns into pumpkin or a threat to national security or something, and between now and then he will shake hands with a great many New Zealanders.

The NZI foyer throngs with good-humoured early arrivals. Helen Clark arrives, in the green outfit. She will spend the next hour being greeted by young men and women, who take each others' picture with her on their cellphones. There's something quite remarkable about living in a country where boys with eyeliner and girls with tattoos can just stroll up and make themselves known to the leader. I couldn't even see the DPS guys.

Dick Hubbard is also present, wearing a shirt with no tie and a big disco collar. His Worship is clearly Superfly to at least one buxom young woman, who testifies that she "loves" him. Don Brash is present too, along with Katherine Rich, but, somewhat inevitably, is not quite so in demand. At all …

By the end of the evening, however, Dr Brash will have the sympathy of most of those present, after sitting through a show in which barbs from the stage are tossed his way at least five times. It's not a conspiracy, just a series of people independently deciding they'll have their say, but the cumulative effect is unfortunate, and the "coming second" jibe by Anthony Starr of the Outrageous Fortune cast is plain boorish.

It might initially have been a revelation to Brash to find out how strongly this community feels about the tone of National's campaign, and how aligned it is to the Labour vision, but enough is enough.

Anyway, Brash sat through it all and even came down to the after-party, long after Helen Clark had delivered The Music Speech (a couple of new lines this time, and a bit about diversity) and departed. Good on him for that.

The show was as well-produced as it has been in recent years, and Mike Hodgson's video work was excellent. It started late and - inevitably, given its length - flagged in places, but it really is quite an event. The D4, the Checks and Fat Freddy's Drop were among the performers, but the standouts for me were Pluto, who played 'Long White Cross', and the closing ensemble version of Dave Dobbyn's award-winning 'Welcome Home', where among those taking lines was Ahmed Zaoui, whose case was a partial inspiration for the song itself. Yes folks, he can sing too, and really quite nicely (there's a picture here). Were it up to me, I'd simply welcome Zaoui to settle, become a New Zealander, bring his family here, contribute. (In the interests of maintaining balance, we could send Tony Ryall to Algeria. Admit it, it's appealing isn't it?)

Fat Freddy's Drop cleaned up with four awards, providing a fascinating lesson about the power of grassroots organisation. It's not just that their album Based on a True Story is on an indie label - nearly everything local is these days - but that it's independently distributed. There's a story waiting to be told about the way these folks run their thing.

The after-party in the lower NZI foyer was still steaming along when I (mindful that I oughtn't push it given that I'm still not quite a gout-free zone) left just after midnight. I can only guess what time they threw everyone out, but it was a bloody good do.

Anyway, I was really pleased with the interviews I did on my 95bFM Wire show yesterday, with the outgoing MP Nandor Tanczos and the incoming MP Tim Groser (links are MP3 files, 22 min and 17 min respectively). I enjoy far more finding out who politicians are than just hammering them with the issue of the day.

*Actually, the first person I saw was Garth Bray, but that doesn't work as well as an intro. I'm sure Garth understands. After all, he works in TV and they make shit up all the time.

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Big Day | Oct 05, 2005 10:00

What a day! The Mother of the Nation announces her departure, three Cabinet ministers step down in advance of a major Cabinet reshuffle … but never mind all that. Check out the first tranche of the Big Day Out lineup announced this morning. Iggy and the Stooges! The White Stripes! The Magic Numbers! Kings of Leon! The Mars Volta!

There are two more announcement dates scheduled this year, at which I would expect the dance music lineup to be filled out. The only act in that category so far is 2ManyDJs, who I am very much looking forward to hearing. Top of my wish list would be the return of the Flaming Lips, although I have no idea as to whether that is a realistic wish.

Wellington coroner Garry Evans is not reticent about advising the government. This month alone, he has called for urgent action on highway median barriers, home detention and, most recently, drug education. This is his right. Unfortunately, on the drug question at least, his logic isn't at all good.

In his finding on the deaths of six young people (actually: ages 15, 15, 17, 21, 22 and 27) as a result of solvent abuse, Evans called for a tougher policy that aims to stop drug use entirely. The only problem with such a strategy is that such a strategy hasn't worked anywhere in the world, ever.

As America's ruinous War on Drugs grinds on through its third decade, the use of drugs ranging from marijuana to heroin among young people remains higher than that in countries with more nuanced policies (the Netherlands, for example). It cycles up and down with demographic factors (the rate is lower than it was in the 70s, when the baby boomers were young, but drug use by high school seniors has increased through the past decade) but it does not go away. At any time, half a million Americans are in jail for drug offences, some of them in circumstances that are frankly indefensible.

Worse, just-say-no programmes seem to make things worse. A series of studies has found that children exposed the most prominent programme, D.A.R.E., are more likely to go on and use drugs. This seems to be an issue with schemes that bring in outsiders to deliver set-piece anti-drug warnings, rather than drug education being incorporated into the health curriculum in schools.

This story on a California study of D.A.R.E. outcomes explains part of the problem:

Research shows that kids who are taught that pot is as bad as heroin are more likely to experiment with heroin if they tried marijuana and experienced few consequences. Those kids suspect that if they were lied to about pot, then they were probably lied to about hard drugs as well.

As a result, many teens rebel against the programs that are intended to help them. The core of the problem is that D.A.R.E. and other "just say no" boasters refuse to recognize that teen-agers experiment with drugs.

What made Evans' pronouncement so odd was that he was discussing deaths resulting from the abuse of legally available substances. Let's be clear here: no one should inhale solvents, ever. It's damaging and deadly. But you are not going to stop kids inhaling solvents with a "drugs are bad, m'kay?" message.

If you present all recreational drugs as equally unsafe, you fundamentally undermine your message about solvents. If you say that solvents are more dangerous, you per se say that cannabis and other substances are less dangerous. You end up with exactly the same harm-minimisation approach that the coroner rails against. That's life.

There's some merit in the view of Capital and Coast District Health Board alcohol and drug consultant Geoffrey Robinson (on whose report Evans drew) that it is odd that we have public health campaigns telling people not to smoke tobacco, but no matching campaign to warn everyone off recreational drugs. But one doesn't map precisely onto the other. As Ross Bell of the New Zealand Drug Foundation points out, the research indicates that drawing the attention of young people to the abuse potential of solvents can have the perverse effect of increasing abuse by drawing attention to that potential. As usual, I'm inclined to trust the judgement of the people who have actually surveyed the evidence.

Bill English's Treatyology speech on Monday night appears to have been more intelligent than all that Don Brash has ever had to say on the matter. I couldn't say whether I agreed with it without reading the speech in its entirety (it doesn't appear to be online yet), but it appears to offer an intellectual imagination and a sense of historical context that has sorely gone missing from the National Party these past two years. Now Brash has contacted the Herald to praise the speech and declare that he was misunderstood during the election campaign. It's a bit late now, pal.

THIS JUST IN: The rumour that Peter Jackson would be directing the Halo movie isn't true. But wait: he is going to be the executive producer. And Weta will be handling the effects. Geekdom is presumably in a frenzy right now. (Thanks to Leo Rae Brown for the tip!)

PS: I have both an outgoing MP (Nandor Tanczos, 12.30pm) and an incoming MP (Tim Groser, 1pm) on my 95bFM show today. You can listen here or wait for the podcast.

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Some stuff | Oct 04, 2005 11:44

There's not really any need for me to weigh in at length on the Salient business, what with the mobilisation of the Former Student Media Blog Mafia. You can read Tze Ming (whatever happened to that cultural ban on not cheeking one's elders, eh?), Mr Nippert of NYC and Lyndon Hood for the lowdown. I'll content myself by observing that VUW management have shot themselves squarely in the foot.

A source in the US has kindly drawn my attention to some advance (and not yet widely circulated) clips from the new John Kerry campaign fly-on-the-wall documentary, Inside the Bubble, whose effect is generally not to flatter those involved. For general atmosphere there's the promo (bad words bleeped) . Then there's the nutting off over the Times magazine cover, the monumentally off-task pony episode. And there's Kerry's pre-debate training. The Republicans, wisely, didn't have anyone filming their private moments …

Read Synthetic Thoughts on the "big six" movie studios' plans for an anti-piracy research consortium, whose plans seem to me to involve an alarming degree of sniffing, snooping and network sabotage.

My occasional correspondent Ztev is a global warming sceptic who distinguishes himself by pointing to actual evidence rather than merely making assertions. Responding to the recent stories about Arctic melting, he cites this 1990 paper and this 2002 Telegraph story, which both note evidence that while the Arctic might be melting, the Antarctic is mostly cooling.

But more recent work from the British Antarctic Survey, which conducts the most thorough ongoing research programme, is far from reassuring. BAS scientists concluded earlier this year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may actually have lowballed estimates on the contribution of Antarctic melting to sea level rise. Essentially, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is thickening - as predicted by some models - as a result of climate change, but two other areas are thinning quite dramatically. "In the last 50 years," the BAS researchers say, "the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than anywhere else on Earth."

The BAS researchers also conducted work this year that they believe "points the finger squarely at CO2 rather than the ocean currents" as the trigger for past atmospheric warming incidents. In short: the news on Antarctica is not good either.

And here's something remarkable. NBA player Etan Thomas of the Washington Wizards addressed the recent anti-war protest in Washington. It's as much a performance as it is a speech, and it's quite spellbinding. Democracy Now has video, audio and a transcript here.

PS: I'll be interviewing Nandor Tanczos on the past six years and where-to-now on my 95bFM Wire show at 12.30 tomorrow. It should be good value.

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Special Friends | Oct 03, 2005 10:30

In a nutshell: National performed dismally in the special votes but not quite badly enough to shed two seats rather than one. As it was, the Maori Party picked up enough on the party vote to reduce the overhang by one seat, at National's expense. If the Greens had managed 1246 more votes, Nandor would have been back, and National would have been down to 47 seats - meaning that Labour-Progressive-Greens would have constituted a majority if New Zealand First abstained on confidence and supply. Nonetheless, Helen Clark won't be unhappy with the result.

DPF has the detail on the specials. What does it signify? It's hard to say without knowing exactly how the specials split up between late enrolments, out-of-electorate votes (ie: students) and overseas votes, but it looks like National didn't finish well, and failed to get out its soft vote.

For a little amusement, click here and scroll down to the post headed 'Why Labour Won the Election'. This is the sort of exaggerated fruitloopiness that keeps political movements out of government. I actually wonder whether a number of Western centre-right parties are facing an internal battle with a US-inspired hard right at the moment. That's certainly the impression you'd glean from the Daily Telegraph's interview with British Tory party leadership contender David Davis, who says he won't cave into demands from the "religious right", including an abortion rights rollback and a flat tax. Davis isn't even the "left" contender in the leadership battle - that's Ken Clarke (popular with the public, but his party won't let him win). British Labour spent years being ankle-tapped - and kept out of government - by its own extreme factions. I wonder if that's what the Tories are wrestling with.

Back home; if National does keep on Don Brash for the next election (and, worse, the McCully tendency) then Labour's prospects for a fourth term will be considerably bolstered. But I really don't think it will.

Adam Gifford has revived his Maori news digest Nga Korero o Te Wa as a new blog, in which he takes issue with the Maori Party's decision to hold regional consultative hui before it decides who to support in Parliament.

Google has offered to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet access at no cost to the city, at a minimum of 300kbit/s (the commercial operators can battle it out over real broadband service). Where's the money? In super-locally targeted Google ads. Google knows what WiFi access point you're nearest to and delivers advertising from the nearest café or copy shop. Sweet. There's a Slashdot thread.

Meanwhile, at home, the revolution begins in … Whakatane! The local café Ground Zero and website management company Klixo have combined to offer what they believe is New Zealand's first free, public WiFi hotspot.

But most Slashdot posters seemed to have wholly missed the point of the news that BitTorrent (that is, Bram Cohen and Ashwin Naven) has picked up $8.75 million in venture capital. The point being that content creators have to start grappling with the new distribution models implied by this technology: there's nothing to stop the creation and use of a customised BT client, with private trackers, to distribute free programming with advertising in it. I'm always a little amused by people claiming that the problem with BitTorrent is that it's "slow". Intrinsically, it's not. It's slow when (a) the supply/demand (essentially the same thing in the BT model) is insufficient, and/or (b) you're using a deliberately crippled connection like Telecom JetStream. On the other hand, there's something pretty exciting about watching a Daily Show torrent (because Jon said it was alright, okay?) with 3000 seeds max out both sides of my 2Mbit/s Wired Country connection, and arrive in just under five minutes. A few million dollars of venture capital to explore that future is a no-brainer.

Staying on the geek tip, it's been interesting watching the episode of Late Night With Conan O'Brien that features our own Flight of the Conchords rise to the top of the torrent lists - it seems markedly more popular than ordinary episodes of the programme, and that bodes very well for the Conchords. Further evidence of grassroots action for Jermaine and Bret: a Technorati blog search in the wake of their HBO special. Their independent fan site What the Folk has, for the first time in its two years online, had to take down audio and video content "due to extreme caning of bandwidth after the HBO show aired."

But no mind. There's an excellent 22MB AVI of their Conan appearance available here, and the audio from the HBO set here. Also, an HBO interview (text) and the Conchords' official site (with links to their BBC radio comedy programmes). And, if you're up for it (via Figwit Lives), the big ol' 185MB AVI of the half-hour HBO special itself.

And , in conclusion, an oddity: Robyn Gallagher encounters the phenomenon of "people doing stuff like sending or forwarding texts to random people" that has arisen since the introduction of free weekend texting. Bizarre.

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