Public Address - Hard News (Home)

The roof was on fire | Sep 11, 2009 11:33

When I flipped open the laptop last night to discover that the Mt Smart Supertop was on fire, I thought "Bloody hell!" When I checked later to discover the tent had been saved, I thought "Bugger!"

The old tent has long been an embarrassment, if a necessary one, given the lack of other options for large venues in Auckland. But the "necessary" part went away with the opening of Vector Arena – except, of course, for the Big Day Out. I imagined last night that Campbell Smith would be on the blower to the ARC, and pricing temporary structures on the internet. Perhaps he was – but, in the event, it looks like the SOST (Same Old Sodding Tent) for the Boiler Room next year. Oh well …

We're due soonish for a first reveal of this summer's lineup. I'd like to see Daft Punk in the tent, please and thank you.
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Thanks for all the interest in the Freeview DVR ffunnell project – lots of people told me why they should be writing consumer diaries. But in the end, I had to make a choice. Our diarists will be: Joanna McLeod of Wellington; Pauline Dawson of Dunedin; and Mark Dansey of Auckland. They're being sorted out now.

I do have another little giveaway – another two double passes to Every Object Has A Shadow, the Pitch Black/Pig Out multimedia club show at the Transmission Room tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to this gig, a lot. I'll have to get the names through this afternoon, so if you want to be in, click "Reply" and email me soon with "Pitch Black" in the subject line.

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Some video. The Throng TV teaser trailers are great – I'm looking forward to the full reports. But for now, Teaser 1:

And Teaser 2:

I'm told the text on the first frame is a direct quote from the TVNZ internal memo about the show. Good times!

The Gregory Brothers have done an auto-tune special for current MTV it-girl Alexa Chung, with a healthcare Town Hall vibe. Not the best thing they've made, but it does ask the crucial question: Can we fix our problems with keytar solos?

Over at NZ On Screen, the 2002 Flying Nun Records documentary Heavenly Pop Hits is available for viewing in its entirety. Do let your offshore indie friends know.

And also at NZOS: the 1981 Landmarks documentary episode A Land Apart, presented by Kenneth Cumberland (nicely described as "donnish but game" in the notes on the site).

And from the same year, Ep 2 of Damian's This Week in TV History, which laces the obligatory 80s cheese with some still-startling news footage of the protests around Eden Park for the final fixture of the Springbok tour, September 12 (and, usefully, a little bit of the rugby itself).

And, in Beatles week, a genuine oddity. Here's the Fab Four performing the play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night's Dream on British TV in 1964:

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Some music. Thanks to @dubdotdash for the pointer to Music Machines' rediscovery of a long-lost (and actually pretty good) piece of New Zealand electro from 1984: Snap's 'Sidewalk City'.

Over on Real Groove, the extremely swoony Haunted Love from Dunedin have an MP3 and a YouTube clip for you. The YouTube track will be of particular interest to librarians who would like to be thought alluring.

And this week's indie noisemakers I'd never heard of but am now obliged to be all over like a rash: Health. That's the band's name. They're from Los Angeles, but remind me of more than one British band (including 80s psychedelic groovers Loop). And they must be cool, because they've only made 500 copies of their new album.

There's a ton of Health listening this week at Hype Machine, including remixes that sensitive listeners may find easier on the ear than the original work (described here as "like having your brain turned inside out by machines, flushed clean by virgins, and then folded back into place by a handful of very large insects"). The same link includes a weird music video.

There's also a great piece by Nick Hornby for The Observer, on MP3 blogs:

It took me longer than it should have done to work out that the internet is one giant independent record shop – thousands and thousands of cute little independent record shops, anyway – and they don't actually charge you for the music they stock.

The MP3 blogs that stretch for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see, down that stretch of the net that isn't reserved for pornography, are staffed by enthusiastic and likable young men and women who absolutely don't want to rip the artists off: they are always careful to post links to iTunes and Amazon, and the songs they put on their sites are for sampling purposes only. (For the most part, they are encouraged to do so by the artists and their labels, who take out adverts on the more popular sites, and are clearly sending advance copies of albums to the bloggers.)

It works for me. I listen, and then I buy what I like, because owning music is still important to me. If the music I like stays out there in cyberspace, as it does on Spotify, then somehow it cannot indicate character and taste in the same way, although I doubt that younger generations will feel like this, and good luck to them.

Righto, post stuff …

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America: Chill out! | Sep 10, 2009 11:55

"Could it be," asked our American commentator Tracey Barnett on Media7 last week, "that the entire country is pre-menstrual?" She was referring, of course to the craziness around plans for US healthcare reform. Frankly, I think the comparison does a great disservice to premenstrual women.

But one thing in particular has puzzled me, and that's the readiness of both sides to internalise the idea that the Obama presidency is teetering, in crisis, or at least at make-or-break stage – with today's speech to Congress being not only the critical point for the success or failure of healthcare reform, but the whole Obama project.

Huh? Because he hasn't yet achieved something that has defeated every other Democrat in history in his first seven months in office? Well, apparently. AmericaBlog, which I usually enjoy for its energy if not always John Aravosis' sense of measure, has become almost unreadable on that score.

A useful point of comparison might be Bush II's calamitous attempt to privatise Social Security in his second term. That was really an abject failure, and it helped set the tone for his term.

Sure, the White House will be wondering how it could have strategised better, but those "plummeting" approval polls are still largely in positive territory, and some substantial reform will still pass. Couldn't they all chill out and show some patience?

A large part of the problem remains the crazy-assed way they legislate over there. The bill everyone's being freaking out over is the House version, the Senate version only showed up yesterday, and Obama's proposal will emerge any moment now in the Congressional speech. You can read some advance excerpts here. It seems appropriately stern.

Tracey made a really interesting proposition on last week's show: that for all its failings, the Obama strategy seems aimed at avoiding the fate of the failed Clinton attempt at reform. Hillary Clinton foisted a bill on Congress, which got antsy and tore it apart. It failed. Obama has let Congress fail first, and then come with his plan.

It does make some sense. Anyway, feel free to discuss, post links etc, though the day …

PS: Tonight's Media7 is a light-rather-than-heat show -- useful discussions about science and the media, and the Google Books Settlement, and an interview with Carol Hirschfeld about leaving news and current affairs to become director of programming at Maori Television. I enjoyed making it and I hope you will all enjoy watching it. 9.10pm, TVNZ 7.

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Screen Wars | Sep 08, 2009 12:12

The least appealing aspect of the television business is always the politics, as this week's flap over the unscreened footage of the Qantas Film and Television Awards amply demonstrates.

TV3, it would appear, is being petty in refusing TVNZ access to the parts of the awards it left out of its coverage – which, of course, largely consist of news and current affairs awards won by TVNZ.

On the other hand, it was TVNZ's year to be the awards broadcaster, and take the commercial blow of screening a programme that isn't exactly a ratings winner. It didn't, so TV3 stepped in.

Now might be a good time for both parties to remember that they are both stakeholders in the Television Broadcasters' Council, which runs the awards, and whose very reason for being is to facilitate co-operation between free-to-air broadcasters.

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Nearly everyone likes District 9, right? Can you think of who might really, really not like it?

Yes, the Nigerians, for reasons which will be understandable to anyone who's seen the film.

This should not, of course, be construed as simple racism. As I understand the situation in South Africa, Nigerian immigrants don't tend to be flavour of the month with locals of any hue -- some of them are major players in organised crime in the republic. Still, giving the gang leader the same name as a former Nigerian president would seem to have been a step too far.

Meanwhile, it looks like the success of the film has taken its owners by surprise. It didn't get the near-simultaneous release accorded to marquee films, and would-be moviegoers in slowcoach territories are pirating it in very large numbers, especially since the so-called R5 release (Region 5, taking in Russia and other high-piracy countries, tends to get DVD releases sooner than others) hit the wires. My advice? Stump up and see it at the cinema if you haven't already

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And so to this week's Media7, which will unfold thus:

The media and science: featuring a panel of the Prime Minister's chief science advisor Peter Gluckman, Science Media Centre manager Peter Griffin (whose new SciBlogs platform is eagerly awaited) and the Herald's Chris Barton.

The Google Books wrangle: with digital-savvy publisher Martin Taylor and authors Lynley Hood and David Slack.

And a catch-up with Carol Hirschfeld, as she looks forward to her new job at Maori Television.

If you'd like to join us for tomorrow's recording, we'd need you at TVNZ from 5pm. Just hit "Reply" and let me know. (To anyone who asked to come along last week and got no reply – sorry, the messages were lost because of a technical fault with the back end of the site.)

PS: We've part of a little ffunnell campaign for Freeview, which will involve some diary-writing by DVR (that's "digital video recorder") newbies. Three people will get -- to keep! -- different models of Freeview DVR to see what they make of it and share their experiences. Hit reply and tell me why it should be you.

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The conversation they want to have | Sep 07, 2009 09:49

His New Zealand hosts will have had mixed feelings about Dana Beal's interview with Kim Hill on Saturday. On one hand, his appearance started the conversation they want to have about a controversial addiction therapy: iobgaine treatment.

On the other hand, the longtime yippie activist seemed in perpetual danger of taking a wrong turn, and eventually did, with the story of how he was arrested last year with $150,000 in cash, on suspicion of money-laundering. Beal could certainly have handled the telling of the tale better, given that his only consequent conviction was for a possession of a tiny quantity of marijuana. The effect was not such as to benefit any attempt to get up a trial of ibogaine therapy in New Zealand.

Which is a shame, because there is certainly some evidence that the trance-inducing drug ibogaine, a derivative of African shrubs of the Tabernanthe genus, actually can relieve severe addiction to the likes of methamphetamine and heroin, primarily through memory retrieval in the trance state and certain physiological effects. According to Wikipedia, it is already used in clinics in 12 countries.

This isn't an unprecedented line of inquiry: until LSD was made illegal in the 1960s, it had shown real promise in the treatment of chronic alcoholism. (The research was also undermined when another, more sceptical research group thought it would be a good idea to tie up and blindfold subjects before giving them the LSD. I'm guessing this didn't work out so well.) The 1960s research was recently re-examined.

I am wondering why the Herald's reporter thought it was a good idea to consult non-doctor Mike Sabin on his thoughts about ibogaine. There may be some risks in the treatment; the point would be whether those risks were really greater than those of continued methamphetamine addiction.

Anyway, it helped make for a somewhat unusual Saturday Morning with Kim Hill, up to and including a rather odd Playing Favourites with Graham Reid, in which Kim seemed insufficiently interested in Graham's new book, and overly interested in pursuing a discussion about whether Zak Starkey is a better drummer than Ringo.

The Erowid vault on ibogaine contains a great deal more information.

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At the other end of the drug debate, the former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, weighed in at the weekend on Latin America's developing and radical rejection of the war on drugs: decriminalising possession of small quantities of illicit drugs to focus on curbing supply.

It's controversial, especially in the US, but the conventional war is out of control in the region. The Mexican drug war update logged 149 violent deaths last week, making a total of 4736 for the year. Mexico's government, while continuing its frightening war with organised crime, has also ceased prosecuting people caught with small quantities of drugs.

And finally, on this topic, the (AFAIK) unnamed Amsterdam citizen who's been calling Fox News' Bill O'Reilly on his fact-free pronouncements about the city has another video. It's quite good:

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Unless you count the amazing organic raw chocolate and whatever the people from Uncensored were on, there were no drugs at yesterday's inaugural Grey Lynn Farmers Market, but, blessed with a brilliant morning, it still did a reasonable impression of the New Suburban Woodstock. The crowds came from everywhere, and the venue barely coped. It wasn't perfect – and there aren't yet many real backyard veges for sale – but it was a great start.

The organisers originally wanted to stage the market at Grey Lynn Primary School, but consent issues got in the way and they downsized to the community centre. I hope they have the capacity sorted out by summer, because I think it's clear this is going to be a very popular market.

Personally, I was delighted to see the young Chinese woman who sells bags of fresh rocket at La Cigale was there. If she could convince the young woman who makes fresh pita breads, humus and falafel for sale to follow her west, I'd be very grateful.

Update: In recognition of comments in this discussion for this post about people bringing their children to what's meant to be a serious market, here is a picture of a horde of the little blighters on the day:

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