Posts by Ian Dalziel
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Houses of illusion…
When I arrived in Christchurch, the square was basically completely surrounded by movie theatres.
A handy historical (and chronological) list of Chchch cinemas
so you’ll find the Westend under Everybodys Theatre
roll dem jaffas n snifters and sniff back the tears…(h/t to Canterbury Film Society )
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19th floor elevations...
Here are some great photos from inside the Hotel Grand Chancellor posted on today's Press website (click through on the photo) -
Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Kate Hannah,
I'm always looking for more texts that attempt a fictional account of all aspects of the Holocaust & Armenian genocide.
You have probably seen this 1896 poem
reproduced here in case it falls within your ambit :FOR ARMENIA.
TO THE WOMEN OF NEW ZEALAND.
["Can we not create a huge wave of public opinion that will rouse England to a sense of her duty? .... Cannot the women of Australasia unite in a monster petition to the British Government on behalf of their tortured and outraged Armenian" sisters ? " -Dolce A. Cabot.]Wake ! awake, ye women of Zealandia !
From' the hearth, from the city, from the lea;
Cry ye out for the burden of Armenia
The burden of the.desert of the sea.Is it Mammon or Jehovah that ye worship?
Will you take the huckster hand and think it well?
The white Saxon hand that held the flambeau
To the red, high carnival of hell.To the glozing of the He at San Stefano
Will you set your seal of silence, and be calm,
While your brethren, betrayers of Armenia,
Are raising the Meisiah-mocking- psalm ?The blood-wite is counting for Armenia
In heaven for a many hundred years ;
Like a river by the throne of the Eternal
Her martyr-blood is sanguining the spheres.When the blood-wite iis reckoned for Armenia,
And Islam is bowing to the stroke ;
God help her in her paying Christian England,
Who sold the Christian neck to bear the yoke.Then, druids of a craven cult politic ;
Then leeches of the consol and the scrip.
In London at your very fetish altars .
Shall the seething cup be given to your lip!Sweet women, cry ye out, or Celt or Saxon :
In this shame we have not either lot or park.
In the far, far islands of the morning
There lingers yet the soul of Lion Heart ,"Out, out upon the years of peace and vileness
When the blue and white, the boast of Britain's - flag.
Were swallowed in the red of San Stefano,
And its honour was a dust-bedabbled rag" We will not bear the curse of Armenia
When the white Christ cometh to His own |
When the blood-wite is laid upon the Saxon
The idol and the fetish overthrown !Look out and see the women wards of England
On the ghastly mountain, coverless, forspent;
The lords of hell have risen and are watching ;
For Islam can teach them to torment !Sweet women, men may bear it, but we cannot.
Cry ye out to the heavens, and be clear
Of the vileneas and the curse of acquiescence ;
Cry aloud and let the craven nations hear IJessie Mackay. -
Fairlie, S. Canterbury, July 1896.from Roots web ancestry
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from a William Gibson interview:
INTERVIEWER:
For someone who so often writes about the future of technology, you seem to have a real romance for artifacts of earlier eras.
GIBSON:
It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.
INTERVIEWER:
Was television a big deal in your childhood?GIBSON:
I can remember my father bringing home our first set—this ornate wooden cabinet that was the size of a small refrigerator, with a round cathode-ray picture tube and wooden speaker grilles over elaborate fabric. Like a piece of archaic furniture, even then. Everybody would gather around at a particular time for a broadcast—a baseball game or a variety show or something. And then it would go back to a mandala that was called a test pattern, or nothing—static.We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did something—did everything—to us, and that now we aren’t the same, though broadcast television, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence of broadcast television, but I can’t tell what it did to us because I became that which watched broadcast television.
The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination.
my bolding for emphasis
(h/t to my brother for forwarding it to me) -
a coupla dips into past of Chchch...
'60s colombo street
and
The Real Cathedral Squarefrom Dave Welch's excellent NZ in Transit / Bus Watch blog
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(filmed by Ronnie van Hout, with Bob Scott looking just
like one of his illustrations! And showcasing an alley that
no longer exists in the same state...) -
The new Catch 22...
Section 38 the National Party! -
Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Bart Janssen,
No place like ohm...
No no it’s pointless science … especially topology
Science communication fail :(not so, you just opened a whole new Torus Industry...
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Big Think...
What Marsdenable science has is quality first and foremost.
Ahah! So Marsden is science that has a Point,
puts the good oil into the system,
& keeps the big cities running...
:- )(of course we won't mention Marsdens A & B )
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it takes a village to raise a child
and to help ease an old person out...
we need to commune with dignity.