Posts by David Herkt
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The Metro Restuarant Guide is just crying out for analysis. It is one of the crucial documents in Auckland social history - for none of the reasons the editors, its writers, or reviewers envisage.
Year after year it is a record of pretensions that have little to do with food. it would be nice to have an immutable standard but too often the Metro Guide simply reflects the prejudices of people you wouldn't want to be - or dine with.
I loved the years it was sending everyone to Birkenhead for fairly average meals at The Engine Room.
It is the face of Auckland that entitles Wellingtonians to sneer.
And I have always wondered how SPQR maintains its presence on the Metro List. Then it hit me. SPQR is truly 'The Emperor Has No Clothes' Moment of the Metro Guide.
The Metro Guide is actually all about SPQR. It doesn't matter about the food. It is the context we're discussing. SPQR's food, if you could see it, and if eating it while being blasted by music appeals, is really really average. But, ah, the context of "success". the codings... That is what SPQR fulfills.
And I'm afraid that is what the Metro Guide is all about. Forget food. What we are talking about is commodification of the dining experience for Auckland's Chai-Latte Belt, for the sort of people who go to Body Tech for 'fitness'
I suppose, really, the 'Metro readership'. Note those quotes. But the crucial question is, does anyone anymore?
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First to BenWilson on a scale of good shit to bad shit? Great shit. Intravenously? Well a big wave of peace and stillness crosses the universe, add warm to that, and clarity (tending to muzz off a bit with increased doses).
And Russell? Loved the piece. I know how hard it is to write engagingly about hospitals. Really worked for me. Thank you.
As a side-note one of the best books I have read about hospitals is A Voice through a Cloud by English writer Denton Welch. it is hospital a la 1940s - Austerity Britain - but it is a little marvel. Gets everthing in there. The weird humiliations where your body is open to everyone. The strange quasi-sexuality. The effect of pain-killers. The glimpses of other's lives.