Posts by philipmatthews
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Also from that chillblue YouTube channel:
Shayne in a time of mullets.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Jackie Clark,
As a matter of fact, at the moment I have Martin Amis’ newest – The Pregnant Widow – sitting by my bed and I am avoiding it completely.
I'd continue avoiding it if I were you.
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Whilst I was at UoC I was recruited to help with filming GPP in Christchurch. I found the bloke who was willing to take out his teeth and eat an pie, and organise a string quartet to play in the Arts Centre. I think those scenes are still in the film.
They are. The geezer with the pie was very good casting. (The DVD I watched the other day was a North American release rather than the two-disc NZ one I saw a few years ago; it may be a longer cut?)
Actually, the most widely seen appearance of Chch on film was probably the Star's bit part in Oliver Stone's JFK conspiracy theory.
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Does anyone know what has happened to the Mysterex blogspot ?
it seems to have disappeared – which would be a crime against the frailty of human memory – well mine anyway…That was Andrew Schmidt, wasn't it? He has a new popular culture blog -- http://cautionweirdlode.wordpress.com/ -- but I don't know if he has archived Mysterex anywhere. Hope he has: it was a brilliant resource.
A few weeks ago, on Mysterex, he posted the clip for Suzanne Said by the Shallows, some of which pans around Cathedral Square -- another for the list. Wasn't there a Clean video in the Square too (Anything Can Happen)? Also, Ronnie van Hout directed a clip for Getting Older that looks like it's shot in pre-gentrified (pre-Henderson) brick warehouses, but I could be wrong.
One of these days I'll write up my notes for a long blog entry on Chch on film -- the lost city. Heavenly Creatures, the Henderson "biopic"/fantasy We're Here to Help, even the 5 minutes of old railway Chch in Goodbye Pork Pie. Are there others?
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Good on Jennifer Ward Lealand for reading the book twice – but couldn’t someone have edited out that spoiler?
Ending also given away in tonight's review of Franzen's Freedom. Everyone's already read it by now, but still ...
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
…in fact I no longer want to watch any TV3 or engage with any mediaworks outlets – having just given up watching the travesty they are making of their coverage of the memorial event in Chch …
I'm not watching it. I feel that while the majority of us are still unable to comprehend or experience the damage done to the CBD, and while there are still buildings we know and maybe love that will be demolished, it is far too soon to be memorialising the event. Surely six months would be more appropriate? I'm not cynical about the political will behind it but if I was, I would say that the Pike River Memorial worked so well for Key and the Mayor of Greymouth that Key and the Mayor of Chch wanted a sequel.
Thousands of people are there but yet everyone I know in Chch feels it's too soon. I feel like I'm still in the immediate aftermath, within a day after that has lasted almost a month. As though the event has only just happened.
As for boycotts, I would urge you not to boycott all Fairfax products! Speaking personally, and not as a Fairfax employee, I cancelled my (partly discounted) SST subscription about three weeks ago, when I realised that the only things I really enjoyed each Sunday were the columns by Finlay and Braunias, both dropped. Grant Smithies alone was not worth it to me, nor were Barney McDonald's film reviews (I think Barney's gone too). I discovered I can get a sub to the London Review of Books for exactly the same price as my partly-discounted SST sub. So one sub replaces another.
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Regarding the various discussions here (SST, Askew etc), I highly recommend tonight’s Media 7, where Our Russell gives the editor of the SST a right bollocking, and Len Brown a lighter bollocking.
Looking forward to that. Also, speaking of things TVNZ 7: the current season of The Good Word is, er, good too. All three critics this week (Braunias, Ward-Lealand, Bill Hastings) gave Bret Easton Ellis' recent Imperial Bedrooms a bollocking also.
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His long-form pieces in North & South on various “small towns” in New Zealand were often so funny, sympathetic and strangely revealing that I was reminded how much I missed his work in the Listener. Jane Ussher’s too, her photography for those pieces was equally evocative. He really should anthologise those articles, they’re among his best writing, which is saying something.
I have a feeling they might make up part of the book on New Zealand he's working on, the one he got a Copyright grant for last year -- something like 22 observational essays about NZ. Yeah, they were fantastic.
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Imagine a Christchurch that only had two- to three-storey buildings, and the church spires and domes sitting above the skyline, and the trees sitting above the buildings. When you looked from the Port Hills you would see the spires and you would see sculptures and you would see tree cover, and the houses nestling under it. A very different city.
I'm hearing a lot of people talking about the appeal of a low CBD; people are going to be very wary about going back into tall buildings, even new ones. Our heritage Press building was ruined on Feb 22, with one casualty, and there is an even sadder dimension to it -- we were less than two weeks away from moving into a new building around the corner. I imagine that's months away now for us, even if the new building has been unaffected, but the group I work with will be on the seventh floor. To say that there will be some nervousness on day one is an understatement. I've been more concerned about the failures of buildings like Forsyth Barr, CTV and Pyne Gould than the more predictable problems of heritage buildings.
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IN ALL disasters, the rubble attracts rats. Whether it is physical and fatal, like the Christchurch earthquake, or metaphysical and mystical, like the Paul Henry affair, there are always ferals prepared to feed on the misery of others.
The Paul Henry affair was "metaphysical and mystical". Do I want to know what he means?