Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Public Address Radio | Mar 26, 2007 10:41

We have a radio show. It is called, with impeccable logic, Public Address Radio, and it will be presented by myself and David Slack at 2pm on Saturday afternoons, starting this week, on Radio Live.

It's produced by the Down Low Concept, the creators of Off the Wire and Pop Goes the Weasel. Part of the idea is to draw talent from the blogosphere: David Haywood, Graham Reid and Craig Ranapia will be making regular contributions and you'll also hear from, Keith Ng, Idiot/Savant of No Right Turn, Hadyn Green of the Dropkicks podcast and others.

The show will feature packaged stories and interviews, which we'll unbundle and make available as podcasts, while Radio Live will have the whole thing available online. We'll get a bit bloggy on it. It might take a week or two to find our feet, but I think we already have some good stuff in the can and I think you'll enjoy what we're doing. We have 10 weeks' funding from NZ On Air.

I'm in Wellington at the moment getting a few stories. My producer Ryan and I were taken out on the town on Saturday by the Wellingtonista, with Jo Hubris plotting an itinerary that began with Tupelo, moved on to Scopa for pizza (where I interviewed Enzo about the impressive toilets) and wound up at Mighty Mighty, where Mark Cubey was having a few drinks to mark his departure from producing Kim Hill's radio show, and Voom were playing. Well, I wound up. A number of crew members pushed onwards into the evening, and Jo, as is her habit, topped off the night with a swim in the harbour.

Like Annette King, I am not in the habit of taking the Sunday News, but the Hummingbird does make it available for patrons, so I was able to read what will probably be the tabloid scoop of the year yesterday.

There is so much out there that it was always likely the pasts of Shipton and/or Schollum would make headlines again, but I didn't expect something so explicit and damaging at this: a sex tape with commentary whose total effect is to make Shipton (if he didn't already) look like a dangerous, sadistic weirdo. Worse, it clearly implicates serving policemen, including some on duty, and it didn't happen 20 years ago but six. I wonder if Clint Rickards will be repeating his character reference for Shipton?

The Herald on Sunday, had to content itself with a shitty little lead story revealing that Mark Burton, whose murder of his own mother made headlines six years ago, has been working at Auckland Zoo as part of his rehabilitation. It's not a flash job - literally shovelling shit - but it seems to have been valuable to him, and he was closely supervised at all times.

The organisation Burton did the work for Second Chance Enterprises, provides employment opportunities for people with psychiatric disabilities, so the zoo management would have known that people with mental health problems would have been on site, but not specifically that Burton was there.

Burton was also allowed by the Mason Clinic to cycle to work unaccompanied. He did so via my neighbourhood, but if his father - who, of anyone, took the brunt of his son's awful deed - thinks he is well enough to work in the community, and that the job is helping him, then I'm not going to argue. It's a damn shame the zoo management has allowed itself to be spooked into terminating his employment on the somewhat spurious-sounding grounds that it has "a policy of not employing high profile people." That's a damn shame.

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DUM DUM DA DAT DA DAT DADA DAT DA DAT DA!! | Mar 23, 2007 10:43

I'm doing something exciting on Monday. I'm going to the media preview of This is New Zealand at Park Road Post in Wellington. Say what? Let me explain.

Let me take you back: It's 1970, and New Zealand's showpiece at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, is a visual feast called This Is New Zealand - a dazzling 45-minute film by Wellington director Hugh Macdonald that employs three synchronised projectors.

Rightly, or wrongly, the nation perceives that this technical and artistic feast has made us the toast of the Expo, and there are queues around the block when it returns for a triumphant tour of New Zealand cinemas.

Whole classes of schoolchildren are taken to see the film. Among them are myself and, I'm assuming Peter Jackson. Last year, Jackson granted the use of his Park Road Post facility, as a gift to the nation, for Macdonald to digitally remaster the film, which has barely been seen since the early 70s because of the technical challenge of staging it.

Older readers will remember the part that everyone remembers from the film - the aerial shot early on, belting over the Southern Alps to the fanfare of Sibelius' Karelia Suite: DUM DUM DA DAT DA DAT DADA DAT DA DAT DA!!

I confess, that film, and that sequence, probably had a major impact on the way I have seen my country since.

Gaylene Preston once told me about how she got to see it: on OE, in London, taken on a magical mystery tour by friends, gotten stoned, then plonked down on front of this unexpected, vivid torrent of images of home. Jack Body, the composer, told me how he'd love to re-score it, so that this film of New Zealand had a soundtrack from New Zealand too. People who were there remember this thing.

Not everyone remembers it fondly, of course. Sam Neill sniffed at it as a sign of our cultural immaturity in Cinema of Unease, but who cares? The new version has already picked up a gong in the New York Festivals (could someone point out to the Herald how to spell "Sibelius" though?).

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to it.

It's been quite the week for gems from the archives. I sat down last night and watched, in full, from TVNZ ondemand, Simon Walker's infamous 1976 interview with Prime Minister Muldoon. Man, TV was different in those days. Muldoon got all his questions in advance - they concerned a crop of dubious public claims he had made about Soviet military penetration in the Pacific.

Walker quoted at length, in the affected accent New Zealanders used in broadcasting in those days, from Janes's Fighting Ships, Muldoon (correctly, actually - the young man was quite the smartarse) called him a nitpicker and complained about a question he hadn't been given in advance, and the pair of them wrestled for control of the interview.

It's remarkably obscure in some ways, but it marked a turning point for the way broadcast interviews with senior politicians were to be conducted. It also reminded me quite a lot of the equally infamous Corngate interview, in which John Campbell was Walker and Helen Clark was Muldoon.

Speaking of TVNZ ondemand (I'm using the official marketing spelling, see?), the Public Address diaspora is reporting the ability to view all the free programming (and not just the "classics") from various places in the world - which wasn't supposed to happen. (Reader Paul Capewell, who had been happily downloading a range of content from the new site, reports that he's now seeing "access denied" messages, even when he tries to download ads from the site.)

The unexpected access may be a quirk in the Akamai content distribution network that TVNZ is using for the service. Speaking of which, how come TVNZ went with an American company for content distribution within New Zealand?

I gather there's a story to it. TVNZ CEO Rick Ellis and Theresa Gattung met to discuss Telecom operating the kind of cacheing network this kind of distribution requires. It was not a very happy meeting, perhaps because TVNZ's view was that Telecom should do the decent thing and peer with all other networks at the regional peering exchanges, like it used to. Gattung's view was that instead TVNZ should pay Telecom for the privilege of reaching Telecom internet customers. There was not a meeting of minds, even a little bit. Enter Akamai.

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Anyway, I'm just about recovered from the Hustle for Russell fundraiser on Monday night, which was fabulous and a bit overwhelming at times (and those who know me will know that I am not often overwhelmed in social situations). Thanks so much to everyone who came and contributed, and especially to Deborah Pead and her brilliant team. The $30,000-plus raised will go toward tuition for Leo and a couple of other projects, including a new website which will be a base for advocacy, support, lobbying and storytelling for and by the local autistic community and their families.

The website is humans.org.nz. The name comes from something our older boy, Jimmy, used to say: he'd talk about "humans" instead of "people". It's also deliberately intended to invoke the idea of human rights.

There's a placeholder and a mailto: link at the site now, and if you are interested and would like to help, you are most welcome to send me an email. Please also indicate if you'd like to be subscribed to a two-way mailing list I've set up (but don't expect any action on the list until some time next week).

I'm provisionally looking at launching the site in August, in Wellington, alongside David Cohen's book, A Perfect World, perhaps with a Hustle-type event to benefit autism-related causes. But gimme time …

I've actually been really busy this week. Yesterday, I made my oral submission to the select committee considering the Copyright Amendment Bill. If you read this blog, you'll have a good idea of what I might have said. I was also joined by Mike Hodgson from Pitch Black, and it may have been that the members enjoyed a break from hearing from intellectual property lawyers all day. Shane Jones remarled that I had been "iconoclastic and forthright as usual". Heh. One tries …

I also heard some of TVNZ's submission. The most interesting thing is that TVNZ says it actually doesn't want the proposed new provision removing the right to time-shift (ie: record for later personal viewing) TV broadcasts where there is an on-demand version of the programme available. Its lawyer said such a provision was unrealistic. Which was nice, but I think it's a good illustration of the draft bill's overly indulgent approach to rights holders.

Anyway, it's Friday and Leo has more Colin for you. You're going to have to wait until next week for the best one yet, in which Colin the Kitten opens a can o' whoopass on a Disney character, but for now there's 'Colin Scared of the Camera':

And 'Me, Colin, And dad (And a dingleball)':

PS: The latest Aye Calypso World Cup cricket blog missed this morning's mailout, but Part 11: Death and Weirdness in the Surfing Zone, is posted now and a top read.

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Some Politics | Mar 22, 2007 09:56

I gather this piece of work has been delivered to residents in Auckland City's Hobson ward. It's a letter alleging a conflict of interest on behalf of the sitting Action Hobson candidates Richard Simpson and Christine Caughey over their part in two council votes.

Simpson was a member of a council committee that voted on a $30,000 grant to the Digital Earth Summit on sustainability held in Auckland City last year. A Herald on Sunday story last year claimed he failed to formally declare his membership of the Digital Earth Society, which helped stage the summit.

Simpson should perhaps have formally declared an interest and excused himself, if only to avoid the appearance of a conflict, but his involvement in the event was well known, and he stood to make no personal gain from any grant to the non-profit event. Eventually - and this is a fact carefully left out of the letter - the committee declined the grant, which was subsequently awarded by the council's major events committee, in which councillors Simpson and Caughey have no part.

The other issue raised in the letter is that both councillors backed three years of $200,000 funding for the council to pursue a shareholding partnership with Beacon Pathway Ltd, a research consortium whose shareholders are currently listed as Fletcher Building, the Waitakere City Council, Building Research, New Zealand Steel, the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (which matches all shareholder funding dollar-for-dollar), and the very promising biomaterials company Scion.

The attack letter asserts that Beacon Pathway "will never deliver a dividend" to Auckland City. I'm pretty sure it's not meant to: the "dividend" lies in directing housing development towards more sustainable building practices, particularly through the use of new materials, and the pursuit of "warmer, healthier, more efficient homes". Given the housing horrorshows of the past decade in Auckland this seems quite a prudent aim. The letter implies that Simpson and Caughey sought to benefit associates involved with Beacon Pathway.

But here's the thing. The letter is authorised by William Cairns, the chair of Hobson Citizens and Ratepayers Now - the party tipped out of the ward by Action Hobson,

Now, you could hardly have missed this week the name of Dr Tony Bierre, who was described by a High Court judge as being "in a conflict of interest from the time he started sitting on the ADHB in December 2004," and participated in discussions on a new tender for diagnostic testing in the Auckland region, and who, said the judge "was making use of information that he had acquired in his capacity as an ADHB member that would not have otherwise been available to him."

Until he stood down in December - after the tender had been granted to Labtests, the company in which he had a substantial private financial interest - Dr Bierre was a Citizens and Ratepayers member of the district health board. His profiles appear to have recently disappeared from the various C&R websites.

So, really, unless you're deliberately trying to muddy the waters, this doesn't seem like the right week to be making conflict-of-interest allegations against other parties.

Staying with politics, here's the famous (or infamous) Hilary Clinton attack ad from YouTube:

The fascinating thing about this ad is that's a mash of a mash. It's a digitally altered version of Apple Computer's legendary 1984 commercial for the first Mac, which itself invoked the Orwell classic.

The ad, which concludes with an endorsement of Clinton rival Barack Obama, has racked up millions of views on YouTube, and had a sharp impact on the Democratic primary race, but it seems no one's quite sure what the impact is. Someone has already come up with a not-so-good version that bites back the other way:

The interesting thing is that this hit the mainstream headlines in the US two weeks after it was first reported, and only after the Drudge Report made it an issue for reasons of its own.

So you've got a viral video by an anonymous Democrat made into news by a longtime conservative hitman on the internet. And big media just follows whatever happens on the internet. Fascinating.

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TVNZ on Demand actually doesn't suck | Mar 21, 2007 10:11

Having been critical of aspects of the original announcement, I'm actually quite impressed with the TVNZ On Demand service that launched yesterday. It helps greatly that the website isn't subject to the hulking legacy of the main TVNZ site, and, although it's partly a matter of necessity, the all-local slate of programming is a good look.

Paid downloads of imported programmes arrive in a couple of weeks, but I still think TVNZ will struggle there. Their market - people prepared to download very large files - is used to getting episodes of The Sopranos six hours after they screen in the US, not six months. They're unlikely to be persuaded into buying long-after-the-fact episodes that expire seven days after first viewing. The whole business of TV licensing will have to change sooner rather than later to take account of reality, but for now, TVNZ can't do much about it.

Yes, all the paid programming is trussed up in Windows Media DRM, and is thus unavailable to Mac users. Don't expect that to change soon: with all the will in the world, TVNZ has yet to find a robust DRM solution for the Mac, and Apple isn't going to license FairPlay. On the other hand, TVNZ has already had discussions about an iTunes Store presence, if and when Apple can be bothered with such a thing.

Everything but the "classic" archive content appears only to be available to users within New Zealand, although any distant readers who want to have a poke around are welcome to do so. I spoke to the project head John Ferguson this morning and he confirmed that TVNZ is quite keen to be selling local programming to expat New Zealanders, subject to various practical and rights issues being worked out.

The big - and very welcome - change from the original announcement is that archive content is not subject to Windows Media DRM. It's available as progressive download Flash video, and at a 300k bitrate, it looks rather nice, even at full-screen.

The performance of the site has been up and down a little in the past 24 hours. They've opted to use Akamai for content distribution, and it was flying for me yesterday morning. But other people are reporting long load times just for the ads that screen before the free clips.

It was interesting to see Julie Christie and John Barnett both speaking at the media launch yesterday. I think we can take that as indication that negotiations on the paid content were satisfactory and, probably, that TVNZ's difficult relationship with the independent production sector is on the mend.

The next phase of development will see the addition of social features: ratings, comments, blogs. For now, there is apparently some embed code for third parties, but it's top-secret. So I thought we'd help out a bit there. We've posted one of the new "classic" clips in OurTube on Public Address System (I couldn't work out how to play the ad first, sorry). Look, mummy! It embeds! A prize to the TVNZ staffer who can work out where they're exposing the URLs of the .flv files …

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As David Slack rightly points out, my friends are good bastards. And I'd like to thank everyone who turned up for the Hustle for Russell fundraiser at Blowfish Sushi (aka the bloody old Windsor Castle!) on Monday (being my friends, they mostly weren't in any hurry to go home either). I'll write some more about the evening and what it means in the next couple of days, but let it be known that a very good night was had by all, a lot of money was raised and the artists who gave their time on stage were universally excellent. The Clean played their three songs, and then three more, and three more again. And they played 'Point That Thing' for something around 13 minutes. Awesome. And there are some pictures to look at.

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The Clean are The Clean are The Clean | Mar 19, 2007 09:08

I have a few things to do before the big event tonight, so I'll keep it brief, but if a wannabe politician can review The Clean, then surely I should too.

They're in good touch. It might have been Hamish's 50th birthday on Saturday night (yes, there was a cake and, yes, everyone sang 'Happy Birthday' for him, and yes, he's looking good for it) but they sounded positively youthful. Their songs - so many of them now - are not so much tunes as spaces in which to move their three elements around, never quite the same way twice.

They played 'In Love With These Times', Hamish's iconically-entitled song from the first Bailter Space EP, and wound it up into a throbbing belter. Ditto for 'Tally Ho' and 'Getting Older', which both climbed into big, rhythmic grooves: the drums petitioning, the guitar crunching and the bass, as ever, binding it all together. Even a swoony number like 'Stars' had a rockin', propulsive feel to it. You can stick your Arctic Monkeys up your arse.

My personal highlight came when they let rip a storming version of the Velvet Underground's 'I Can't Stand It' to finish the first encore, and I can't even remember what they played between that and the final song of the evening, the twinkling 'Safe in the Rain'.

I wondered if there was anyone in the room who was coming to it fresh; who wasn't comparing tonight's version of 'Point That Thing Somewhere Else' with those committed to memory. (For the record, a dirty lead sent three or four loud cracks through the PA, which broke the spell a bit.) How would it sound to them? How does a McCahon look to someone who's never seen one?

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