Posts by Craig Ranapia
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“We were not provided with a comprehensive list of requirements from the outset and this was thrown at us haphazardly over a large period of time,” says Liam, “with many delays in terms of them responding to our requests.
This is how local bodies make sure their communities can't have nice things because they've gone elsewhere, or worse, never happen at all.
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Access: Feelgood Flicks, in reply to Russell Brown,
When we had people around he was basically in his own bubble and didn’t interact.
First time I met Jimmy at your place, we startled each other when I literally bumped into him coming out of the bathroom fiddling with my fly. True story, and thank God things improved from there on in. :)
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Hard News: The Sky is the limit, in reply to Russell Brown,
That’s just ridiculous. Brewer is perennially on the margins. Getting your name in the paper a lot is not being “effective”. But I guess it does explain Orsman’s approach.
Let's be fair, Russell. Brewer's been a reliable rentaquote for The Herald's campaign to hound an elected Mayor out of office. By that bullshit metric, Brewer's been highly "effective". Otherwise, he's lied his arse off about the Draft Unitary Plan, beat up a budget crisis that doesn't actually exist while proposing precisely nothing useful to address the long-term financial challenges facing Auckland and his very public obsession with Len Brown's penis would be more usefully addressed in a therapeutic setting not around the Council table.
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I still don’t understand why these glamor convention centers are so important
I can perfectly understand why San Diego is rather keen to spend an awful lot money expanding the San Diego Convention Center (largely financed with an enormously controversial hotel tax that has been tied up in legal challenges for years), when over four days San Diego Comic-Con alone has attendance in excess of 130,000.
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Hard News: The Sky is the limit, in reply to Russell Brown,
The rebates for the films cost about the same as (or a little more than) the economic activity they generate, but I don’t think tourism is counted in that.
And Auckland got a notable infrastructure boost as part of the Rugby World Cup (how much economic activity the RWC generated is another matter).
Yeah, but there's still reasonable expectations for a LOT more clarity about the assumptions -- and rather dodgy spin -- involved in economic benefit guess-timates that tend to be quoted in the media as holy writ.
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Hard News: The Sky is the limit, in reply to Russell Brown,
He really wants a safe National seat, doesn’t he?
I'm quite happy to do my bit to make sure he doesn't even get shortlisted for one north of the Harbour Bridge. (Which reminds me I've got to collect some Kate Sheppards from some folks who were a tad over confident that Colin Craig was going to be "gifted" East Coast Bays. Beats working...)
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Busytown: Tell You What: A Nonfiction Giveaway!, in reply to JacksonP,
Having said that, there have been a few photographic collections I’ve enjoyed this year..
I’d suggest you pop over to the library website, and put a reserve on their copy of Schirmer/Mosel’s close-as-its-ever-going-to-get-to-complete-in-one-volume reprint of August Sander’s legendary photo-documentary project People of The 20th Century
The son of a carpenter, August Sander was born in 1876, in a farming and mining community east of Cologne. His introduction to photography came while working as a young apprentice in the mines, when a visiting landscape photographer asked the boy to serve as his guide. Despite his provincial background, Sander became involved with many of the avant-garde artistic ideas of his day, among them the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement led by his friend, the painter Otto Dix, which advocated a return to realism and social commentary in art.
Around 1922, Sander conceived and embarked on a magnum opus to be called People of the Twentieth Century, intended, as he stated, to be “a physiognomic image of an age,” and a catalogue of “all the characteristics of the universally human.” His portrait images were grouped into seven categories, which, in and of themselves, reveal Sander’s views of the German social order. Sander prefaced the project with a “Portfolio of Archetypes” (Stammappe), which he then expanded to form the first group, the Farmer (Der Bauer); six other categories followed: the Skilled Tradesman (Der Handwerker); the Woman (Die Frau); Classes and Professions (Die Stände); the Artists (Die Künstler); the City (Die Großstadt); and, the last and perhaps most compelling category, the Last People (Die Letzten Menschen), comprising the elderly, the deformed, and the dead.
Sander’s inclusion of these and other marginal elements of German society—gypsies and the unemployed also figured in his work—incurred the disapproval of the National Socialist party. In 1936 the Nazis confiscated his first published version of the project, Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit), and destroyed all the printing plates. Some years later Sander left Cologne and moved to the relative safety of the countryside, taking with him some 10,000 negatives. The remaining 25,000 to 30,000 negatives were destroyed by fire before he was able to transport them to the Westerwald. The project remained incomplete at his death in 1964.
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Sacha,
Nah... socks are easy. Tracking down a suitably fugly petroleum-based necktie-and-pocket square combo that will refuse to look appealing in tandem with anything a human being would willingly wear is a true test of resolve and dedication to the dark arts of Christmas shopping. I believe in you, Sacha! I know you can do it!
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Sacha,
ah, is that what upset Craig, perhaps? Fair enough. Will delete the line.
Nah, the whole fucking thing upsets me basically, because this is just Slater doing what Slater does and he depends on other people to spread the muck. Same old same old, and honestly I don't think there's anything " un-self-aware" about it. Anyway, can I just have a hideous matching tie and hanky set for Christmas like a normal person? :)
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And #dirtypolitics has eaten itself, with Slater now delivering homilies about ethics.
Did that really need to be quoted and linked to here, Sacha? Cameron Slater’s m.o. of conviction by innuendo is hardly a mystery, but he’s got more than enough useful idiots spreading his shit without the help of anyone around here.