Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: SpinCity, in reply to Stewart,
Besides, you’d get shot for taking your golf cart onto 1 of the greens.
Excellent point.
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Here's the Finlayson Twitter account if people want to catch up. To be honest, it doesn't help his case at all, and it demonstrates an obsession with funding decisions as an end that ought to be anathema to a conservative politician. Poor.
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Hard News: A Golden Age for the Arts?, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Actually it kinda is a pretty good time for the arts in NZ. There’s a bunch of Clark era good stuff floating round still, and while Finlayson has been meh at best, lots of things have been just quietly continuing.
This is an important point. What the Clark boost did was build capacity. I know about this in the music industry context and NZ On Air funding and the deal with radio on voluntary local targets, as flawed as each was in some respects, provided a degree of certainty that made it viable to learn to be a manager or a specialist lawyer, or to take a punt on new ways of working at the major labels.
The so-called "artists' dole" (actually an exhaustively-accounted skills development grant) has genuinely helped too.
And I'm personally proud to be involved at a governance level with NZ On Screen and Audioculture (which launches on May 31). But if you keep strangling the funding, you're not going to see any of this kind of innovation. Five years of frozen NZOA funding is a long, long time.
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Hamish Keith wrote an interesting take on the operation of the arts in New Zealand back in March. Worth reading.
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Hard News: A Golden Age for the Arts?, in reply to Shaun Lott,
you are pretty much describing the case for the basic sciences also.
I feel your pain.
It is a bit like they're distrustful of professional skills.
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Hard News: Friday Music: In the neighbourhood, in reply to bob daktari,
Jesse Sheehan’s Jesus I Was Evil is brilliant
It is!
Although I initially read that as Rhian Sheehan. That would have been really weird.
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Hard News: Friday Music: In the neighbourhood, in reply to George Darroch,
That's something to note. A venue set up for loud guitars and sloppy drumming isn't going to do well when you want crisp notes across the spectrum and clear sound at lower volumes.
That's it in one. The Watercolours showcase at the KA last year was just a debacle.
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Apparently Len Brown gave an odd and distracted speech at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival do last night. I'm guessing this would be why.
The housing initiatives in the Budget appear to dump all over the government's draft agreement on housing with Auckland Council. It sometimes seems that these people wouldn't know good faith if it bit them on the arse.
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In a footnote somewhere, funding for Public Broadcasting Services has been cut by $3.08 million. Sigh.
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This is good: in Myths of the Unitary Plan, Ben Ross fact-checks both a fearful press release from an anti-Plan group (No More Rates -- although wtf that has to do with the Unitary Plan is beyond me) and the council's own myth-busting messaging. The council washes up rather better.