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Notes for a Big Day Out | Jan 18, 2008 08:04

I'll look to arrive in time for Dr Octagon at 2.15, and give Havoc a wee look in (it would be rude not to) before meeting our host, the extremely gentlemanly Mr Slack (who intends to arrive at 10am with Mr Reid). Catch a little Dizzee Rascal before heading over to Billy Bragg. Then Unkle, a sit down, or, if we're feeling well, a little Turnaround Crew before Pluto?

The hidden gem on the bill is Lady Saw, a real dancehall reggae star tucked away on the Lilyworld stage around 6pm. Check her MySpace. I reckon she'll be worth seeing, especially if you don't quite get the Arcade Fire. 7pm is definitely a sit-down and Shihad.

The forecast (25 degrees, southerlies, a few light showers developing later, as a sub-tropical low arrives) sounds alright.

For some reason, there hasn't been much of a buzz from people I know about Bjork -- but the reviews last year were very good. It's not an art set: she does the hits, including the big, bouncy dance ones. We'll be legging it up to the tent at 9pm for LCD Soundsystem, about whom there is a buzz, amongst apparently everyone. I'm looking forward to this song.

I don't give a fig for Rage Against the Machine (although best wishes for a good show to everyone who does) so from there it's Carl Cox (at last, another house act to close) shared with the Clean (who I reckon might be blazing) and off out the gates before the rush.

That's a list as much for my edification as yours. This shit takes some organising; not least in finding a replacement for our child-minder, who last week confessed that he'd forgotten, and would be on Great Barrier Island. But all that can be done is done. I'm up for it.

If that's not your bag, Kate from the Bay of Plenty points out there are other Big Days Out. What a bugger it's going to rain at The Police tomorrow night.

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Grateful for 'Rain' | Jan 17, 2008 11:50

Many people said fine things about the late Sir Ed while I was away from connectivity (apart from John Key, who said something vacuous), so I won't write at length, but simply observe that he embodied -- flawlessy, so far as I can tell -- many of things we aspire to, or want to believe about ourselves, as New Zealanders.

Amid the hubbub of prepared-for-the-day media coverage, I think I enjoyed Radio New Zealand's the most. In the documentary about Hillary's Antarctic adventure, it was pleasant to hear the bold, authoritative, younger Hillary, rather than the kindly old chap we became used to.

And this morning, we farewell another great old man. I can't claim to be an expert on the life and work of Hone Tuwhare, but I've always found his poetry sensuous and approachable, and, years ago, when one of my schoolteachers read us 'Rain', I distinctly remember the excitement of hearing language used in such a way. It stayed with me, and I'm grateful for that.

TVNZ ondemand has a nice 15 minute profile of Hone, including readings. His website has several well-known poems. The home page quotes Bill Manhire on Tuwhare's "code-switching effects … He can sound within the space of a couple of lines as if he's both at church and down at the pub."

In other news, I am a psychic! Well, I must be, because I correctly picked five out of six in the sample test provided as part of Tony Andrews' Sensing Murder Psychic Invitation. I mean, what are the chances? Andrews is putting up $20,000 of his own money to lure the TV show's seers into a challenge.

Stephen Judd has some more on the topic.

Cameron Slater, aka Whale Oil and, more recently, the less attractive face of the anti-EFA lobby, has long struggled to meet conventional standards of behaviour in his blog. In the past he has threatened violence and mused about using his gun, photoshopped a teenage boy's head into a gay porn picture as some weird act of revenge against the kid, trumpeted his refusal to attend blogger drinks with "the enemy" and generally sprayed hateful invective on a daily basis. (He is occasionally amusing: as when he demanded the Commerce Commission investigate mobile roaming charges because he can't read terms and conditions without a grown-up to help with the long words.)

His latest jape? Driving around photographing the houses of people he doesn't like: first up, John Minto, who stands condemned of, gasp, home ownership in Auckland. Minto's offence was to say in the Herald "Property rights are there to benefit the wealthy and the middle class. They mean much less, if anything, to people in poverty." What Cameron seems to miss is that Minto would presumably regard himself as middle-class. I disagree with a lot of what John Minto says these days, but Mr Oil has, yet again, crossed the creepy line. Worse: he says this is the first of a series of such posts.

Update: Oh, hang on: it's not Oil himself but a new playmate on his blog, the inevitably pseudonymous "Steady Eddy".

Frankly, I'm more concerned about John Key's holiday house. It looks miserable.

Via No Right Turn: perhaps time to hold that talking point about how global warming can't be real because the Antarctic ice is expanding.

Reader Andrew Hubbard noted The Guardian's Tom Hodgkinson going postal about Facebook and its backers.

And do want. It's even green.

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Castoffs of Waiheke | Jan 16, 2008 10:50

I like buying old books on the island. You'll sometimes find interesting inscriptions in the dust jacket: a poet's dedication to a friend, her book now discarded. At the Ostend market on Saturday, there was a cache of alternative publications in storage since the 70s (most of them deservedly so). The Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics. A collection of essays entitled Scientific controversies: Case studies in the resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology.

And then, at The Junk Shop, there was The New Zealander. Issue two, September 1980: someone kept it for a long time.

Deborah Coddington gazes out from the editor's page, impossibly winsome in her Lady Di hairdo:

But the rhetorical style is already in place: "It is long past time for people who choose to live in this country stop their servile acceptance of glibly strung-together negatives about New Zealand," she rails. "Kiwi modesty is fine, but self-flagellation with nihilistic criticism is simply a waste of time. We are tired of the whingers who fail to contribute then moan about the state of the nation. The New Zealander is the showpiece for all that is best in New Zealand and proof that New Zealand has a lot to be proud of."

Proof? I'm not so sure. It's a bit of a hodge-podge, an opportunity for Alister Taylor to junket his way with the wife through various restaurants and Huka Lodge, then write, really dreadfully, about it. But the contributors' list is amazing: John A Lee, Robin Morrison, Dick Frizzell, Marcia Russell, Julie Dalzell, Louise Callan, Marti Friedlander, Hamish Keith, Rosemary McLeod, Tim Shadbolt, Judith Fyfe and others. I can't say if they all got paid.

The best thing in it is Maggie Tully's fascinating profile of Eva Rickard (photographs by Friedlander). Then Hamish Keith, the groovy old bastard, hails "the incredible flowering of New Zealand pop music of the past two or tree years," arguing that "the hard, gritty and challenging urban rock and new wave sound that rolls around hundreds of New Zealand pubs and clubs is a genuine cultural manifestation."

Lee, before expounding on the theory of import substitution (perhaps our ultimate economic period piece), has this to say: "We wrestle with explosions in liberated countries, while oil states too long treated as second-class nations bring industrial states to their knees. Mohammendanism is suddenly a political faith riding a tide of economic upheaval."

Judith Fyfe flits through a summary of a busy past year: Erebus … Arthur Alan Thomas gets his royal pardon … expulsion of the Russian ambassador, accused by Muldoon of interfering with domestic politics … Matt Rata resigns from Labour to form Mana Motuhake. Lange bumps out Bob Tizard as deputy leader … A rahui is placed on "the use of drugs by Maoris".

Our first million-dollar lottery, the "double-banger" Golden Kiwi, induced New Zealanders to queue down the street to pay $20 a ticket ("reminiscent of the 1930s dance marathons", ventures Fyfe ... the price of gold spiked (this was headline news over the course of months) … the "drug conspiracy" was the subject of a documentary that was withheld from broadcast …

And … we had a Commission of Inquiry into Chiropratic?

You may have detected that I'm fascinated by these fin de siecle years, which lie the far side of the river of no return. I was there, but young enough to be blameless.

The magazine is an affirmation that the aspirational culture was in place even in the latter days of the Polish shipyard era; pre Metro, before the market cowboys. "Lots of money and style - or so they thought," as a Trade Me vendor put it last July in the billing for the three issues.

There's an advertorial shopping section called It's Only Money. Curiously, most items are unpriced, but the National NE5640 microwave oven is listed at $799. (You'd have been better snaffling eight copies of the limited edition -- 125 -- screenprint of Gordon Walters' 'Arahua', offered to readers on pre-order a few pages later for a staggeringly good $95 each.)

There are some breathtaking food horrors. Carthews of Ponsonby Road (speciality: Cajun) offers the Budapest Starter: camembert and apple deep fried in batter, and served on a bed of apple puree. Eew. Even the Huka Lodge feels obliged to offer its wild boar in the ubiquitous "sweet and sour" preparation.

The ad creative is a surprise: some of it is rather nice, and artistic; gloriously dated. A great collage ad by Bremworth (carpet) and Ashley (wall coverings) stands out. An ad for Lion Export features a wiry, discombobulated chap called Mark Champtaloup (a rag-trade name who apparently needed no introduction at the time), looking, I fancy, like a youthful Steve Braunias ("During my two years away, I tried lots of lagers. After my first Lion Export, I knew what I'd been missing"). Modernity intrudes brashly with a Steinlager ad featuring a woman's torso. The 80s loom.

With its soft, plucky profiles of New Zealanders doing well overseas, The New Zealander connects, perhaps with Planet and Pavement a decade later. But these are people petitioning for admission to the establishment, not celebrating street culture. The generation that a quarter century later looks to outrace its own children down Ponsonby Road seemed to want to grow up. It's all so, so baby-boomer.

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About a Cat | Jan 08, 2008 07:58

"Your problem, Colin, is that you think everything is for you," I said, as he nosed around amongst my evaporating single malt collection. "Then again, perhaps, so do we all …"

Colin is not a bad bloke. He's not a bloke at all. He's a cat.

It has been a matter of concern to me that our most active discussions this holiday period have been, whilst immensely informative, quite high-flown; perhaps even intimidating. We needed a blog about a cat to relax everyone and be inclusive.

Enter: Colin, who has made me from a pet curmdgeon to a man who indulges in regular flights of anthropomorphic fancy and speaks to a cat who no more understands English than he does Klingon.

I think he is an unusual cat. He's much better than Kits, the waif whose nearby owners left him with a jumbo bag of kibble and went to Brazil for six weeks. We had to hand Kits back, and so fill the gap in the younger boy's heart, his friend gave him Fluffy. Fluffy was not a cat. He was an elderly guinea pig who I would often find brought indoors, sitting on the lounge floor, quivering and shitting all over the place. You couldn't really anthropomorphise Fluffy. He was just a guinea pig who shat a lot.

Then one morning, he wasn't even that. We came out and his cage had been shifted, perhaps by a dog, and he wasn't in it any more. We never saw him again. We clung to the hope that he'd scampered under the deck, then consoled ourselves that it would have been quick -- the poor little bugger would have died of shock before any foul jaws closed upon him.

But there was wailing in the valley, and we needed another pet. Not a bloody guinea pig, said my darling, and took the boys out to the SPCA, where they picked from a litter the kitten that seemed most active and adventurous.

"What shall we call him?" said the kids as they carried their box of kitten to the car.

"Colin," said my darling, ironically.

"That's a good name!" they chorused.

Colin is a year old now. He has a touch of the orient about him: long, lean, his sleek coat strikingly, symmetrically patterned. He is singular. He does not miaow, although he can. Instead, he utters a little trill -- brriiii! -- when he embarks on a course of action. And he purrs. When he is pleased and excited, his respiration accelerates and his purring goes all jazzy.

He does not sit on laps (Mr Litterick was an exception), but he is always angling to be picked up and raised to human height, where he will nuzzle ecstatically. Otherwise, he will make sweet love to his sleeping blanket. If we let him, he will tiptoe in and sleep on our bed, sometimes stretching out full-length between us to sleep, as if he were one of us. What exactly does he think he is?

He has moved on from the manic kittenishness of his early YouTube adventures (17th most popular English-language video in the Pets and Animals category, he was) but he has a cat friend, a fluffy version of himself, with whom he gallivants in the back yard. (The idea that obtaining a cat will drive all the other neighbourhood cats from your property could not be more wrong.) The fluffy friend returned yesterday from what I presume was a stay in a cattery, and they chased around the back yard until Colin flashed up one of the trees. FF sat at the base as if to say "homie don't play dat" until Colin came down and the chase resumed.

He seems quite clever. He opens doors, and we have to block one door with the laundry basket so he doesn't go walkabout and wake up the kids during the night.

He may not have any bollocks (we tease him about it) but he is clearly the hunter in his head. He has progressed from cat toys and pieces of plastic to the odd living thing. He has killed two birds (common sorts, and non-native), which grossed us out and, I fancy, rather alarmed him too. And I have relieved him of two skinks. If he wants to swallow a live cicada, that's his business.

But mostly, his day is routine. Sleeping, surveying the garden from a series of high points, sleeping, climbing trees, sleeping, eating, sleeping. This is his first summer, but he knows all the shady spots on on the deck.

We love him, and he seems to love us -- although iz not so grate when he shows it by padding into the bedroom and nuzzling our faces at 5am. And now, we're leaving him for a week. I've explained to the younger boy that our housesitter, Paul, who volunteers at the SPCA, is the perfect person to look after him. He won't miss us that much, really, and when we come back, he will be there, urgently gliding around our ankles, angling to be picked up, and purring all jazzy.

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