Posts by Greg Wood
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Oh I am really, really fucking angry now. Later I'll write a polemic about teaching to the test, and another vitriolic spew about this government's blind arrogance and insensibility, but for now I'm going to go and be very very fucking angry for a few minutes. And once I calm down even slightly I'll probably make some more phone calls about leaving the country, too.
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Hard News: Friday Music: More Finding, in reply to Russell Brown,
Done – Watercolours has my vote – but a single vote with no mechanism for intensity is barely scratching the surface on this one. Can we have a "vote what you like" model, maybe with a rolling balance of say 30 votes, shared by percentage over the month? What say I like this 100% today, and tomorrow I find something I like 50%, or 200%? How do I express "mm, that's nice" vs "OOOOH HOLY SHIVERING PANDAS!"...?
Whoops, garbled rant... I mean, can I vote with one vote but colour it in nicely?
Or something.
<beer>
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By all that's holy, that Watercolours stuff is GOOD.
Meantime, up here in Singapore: no iTunes Music Store, no Apple TV on the shelves - in case someone's Aunty has a VHS recorder, apparently.
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Wow - theaudience is a nice thing. And that She's So Rad track is the best thing since sliced Cocteau Twins on toast.
(Humbug moment: voting for a song without having signed in takes me all the way through the registration process with the tune happily playing in the background but on confirmation spits me back onto the home page with no easy way to re-find the track I was liking. It's the teeny things...).
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Amazing, but unsettling: the uncanny valley of a real person not being there, in so many ways. That said, the spectacle, the technology and the performance came together to make a pretty impressive experience, hence the outpouring.
William Gibson's prescience (pre-science, yep) in his early work is similarly spectacular and eerie, but for my money it's not so much Idoru you should bone up on (although it is astounding for its accuracy in portrayal of the social interface between virtual and real worlds and as Jolisa noted, the freak-out of the sheer volume of information contained in a virtual being is well grokked; as is the blind character's visual-aid-interpreted view of the Idoru as "a grey box on the floor"). Where was I? oh yeah: read Idoru, but try Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for the nuance and politics of a live performance captured and transmitted between consenting adults...
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Oooh, Vector's crapness almost made me forget to say:
Damian: Pixies play their first ever gig in New Zealand at the Powerstation, a venue so perfect and intimate and energising that it felt like they were actually playing in my heart -- and you didn't like it?
Er.
What?!
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Vector’s bar set-up is absurd
Completely ruins every event I attend there.
Which is to say, even though the sound is genuinely shit (Foo Fighters: I couldn't even tell which song they were playing at one stage (yes, yes, ha ha) -- although Massive Attack seemed to get it right) and the atmosphere can be weird and the lack of decent public transport sucks and the weird dead-of-night location is creepy, it's the popping out to a brightly lit school canteen of a shabby bar with a single ugly not-cold-enough fridge half-full of HIDEOUS AUSTRALIAN BILGEWATER that gets hand-poured (badly!) into a nasty-to-the-touch plastic cup that has stopped me going there ever again.
And yes I am serious, and stop calling me Shirley etc.
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to Russell Brown,
That ('96) was my fave year, largely for the searing memories of the fucked-p storms both above and inside the stadium. Nearly got crushed opening the gates live to air for bFM as a member of the Friday Night Allen (following on from Mikey's inevitably joytastic Breakfast during which I interviewed what might have been Chris Schofield on the vert ramp, both of us on helium); had a ball for most of the day but freaked out at the rain and got my purple tie-dyed Soundgarden tee ripped surfing on one of the pieces of ply, so I hid up in the Immortals watching that storm; headed down for the subsequent spectacularly dangerous slush-pit explosion for RATM, got smashed up in the crowd crush during stage switchovers, totally panicked along with 50 or so others around us who could not breathe; passed a few passed-out girls over our heads, then hid in the immortals again to watch Porno for Pyros then left early.
Went back one other year to take 13-year-old Sam to see Marilyn Manson. Not pleasant.
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"...that you’re never going to drink in the Dux again" - it's that sort of thing, isn't it, that really gets you.
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I almost literally barked with joy on spotting the snowflakes out our Parnell window yesterday, like some kind of crazed puppy; "SNOW! SNOW!! SNOW!!!" I yipped quite unconsciously.
Today I have all kinds of sad / nostalgic family feelings; I think one of my earliest childhood memories was hearing my Nana and my Dad discussing snow on the Rimutakas ("What's a Rimutaka, Daddy? Daddy? Daddddyyyy..."), and I deeply regret that my dear Dad didn't get to see snow in Auckland in his lifetime.
Me, though, I did -- and I feel, as I said, like a puppy. A 41-year-old puppy with three kids and a headache, but I saw it snow in Parnell.