Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
It's a common mistake to think that, when Key says he is "embushus for Nyu Zillund," he actually means that he is "ambitious for New Zealand." The truth is that those words mean something else entirely. The phrase is perhaps best translated as "Bron and I are taking the kids to Hawaii now. See you in a bit. Byeee!"
-
And let us not forget the new Supreme Court building, opened this very day by Prince William the Balding. Apparently, it is a tree, a Pohutakawa. This probably explains why it looks crap.
Yeah. To me, the pohutukawa motif just comes off as defensive cladding. It looks like it's built in anticipation of a truckbomb.
The problem with a lot of "visionary" public architecture is the pressure to make a "statement." Which is a category error. Words, sentences, books, make statements. Buildings do something else. If you try to do with a building what's best done with a printed manifesto, you're going to miss the whole point of what buildings are actually for (other than "expressing discourse" or "contributing to an ongoing conversation about national identity," etc., etc.)
-
I think the 6 o'clock swill crystalised the intergenerational abuse of that drug our society has today.
Unintended consequences of the prohibition cause.There are some pretty staggering graphs in Miles Fairburn's Ideal Society and Its Enemies (1989) tabulating alcohol statistics for New Zealand in the nineteenth century. The rates of abuse and alcohol-related crime and violence were way higher then than they are even now. Why do you think the prohibition movement here was so big and, initially, so successful?
No, what really "crystalised the intergenerational abuse" of alcohol then and now is one thing -- supply, and the unwillingness of a paid-off, sorry, successfully lobbied, government to regulate it properly.
-
And then there's the racial aspect to Woods's peculiar brand of celebrity, which shouldn't be underestimated in a culture as viscerally racist as America's. Part of Woods's appeal to his sponsors and those who consumed his celebrity was the fact that he seemed to negate certain long-standing racist stereotypes of black masculinity. His weird apparent sexlessness was part of this.
The fact that he can now be read as embodying -- and therefore endorsing -- those same racist stereotypes of black men as OMG!-sexually-rapacious-horn-dogs-who-menace-teh-white-women is part of what's made the anti-Woods backlash so stinging. It's all part of American culture's pornographic obsession with the spectacle of miscegenation. Depressing, really.
-
Yeah, they've totally nailed that. I'm not sure what'm going to make of Florence and the Machine and the Xx -- most of their tunes that I really like are remixes.
I'm with you on Florence and the Machine. It's like listening to Studio 99 covering P. J. Harvey. You keep asking yourself -- why does this thing even exist?
-
I think next year is going to be turbulent - but not necessarily in a bad way. A bit like the late 60s. Turbulent activism, turbulent protest and probably turbulent weather.
Good call, Hilary. It's also forecast to be the hottest year in recorded human history. I'm thinking a global Do the Right Thing moment, though what the pizzeria will be remains to be seen. The environment? The global economic system? The possibility that complex human societies will be able to remain on the planet long term? I shudder to think.
I also think that there is something really nasty brewing in American politics, and that we will see the first real fruits of it next year. Ugh.
-
And for music, this one had me in tears.
Yeah, it's a great song. Here's the original Kristin Hersh version, which oddly enough I was listening to over and over again this morning. Synchronicity, I tells ya:
-
This was the track of the year for me. Long, harrowing, unsubtle, unpredictable, and loud, but kind of ... transcendent. That was 2009.
-
Thanks, everyone. I got a text just as I was leaving the house this morning, and the day at work seemed correspondingly strange and unreal. PAS helped. She was 97, blind and almost immobile towards the end, but still lucid. We all knew that the end was near, but she'd held on for such a long time.
By no means an easy or straightforward woman, she nevertheless led an extraordinary life. She witnessed a zeppelin raid on Edinburgh; graduated from an American college in the '30s; saw some of the jazz greats in Kansas City; and never lost her soft midwestern accent despite over 70 years in New Zealand. I'll miss her.
-
My grandmother died this morning. I just wanted to say that the little moments of grace that happened on page 6 of this thread made the day seem slightly less unbearable. (That and repeated spins of "Sunny Border Blue.") Thanks everyone. I'm Edmund, btw.