Seemed like there should have been more people there to dance it out in an old stamping ground. Hadn’t been there for aaages, and a flood of impressions and memories came back. End of an era. Something amazing happened there a decade back. At least it seemed that way. Long gone, long gone. Everything changes. And now. And now?
Filed by billy at 2:03 pm under new zealand,the moose
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that’ s what this country needs.
Filed by billy at 8:32 pm under new zealand
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Have been mostly off the music scene for the past year or two. Over the past couple of months have reconnected a little, and seen a few things that impressed jaded me… nice to be reminded of the awesome talents lurking in the underground of this town. Here be some reviews.
Elisabeth DiMaria @ Watusi
How to describe this solo act? Unique captivating storytelling set over laconic beats, repurposing a three wishes/genie motif into a shattered fairytale journey through love, madness and despair, with a dancing costumed anime creature as your guide. Musically, elements of hip hop, ambient atmospherics, trip hop; vaguely Coco Rosie-esque. As performance, it had a vigor and spontaneity all too often sorely lacking live; crazed creative genius fizzing at the seams trying to get out. One suspects that you will never get the same thing twice from this lady.
Beastwars @ SFBH
Slow deep groove metal by some old hands who know what they like. Immediately appealling and familiar yet totally its own thing – like they have internalised heavy music and know what they like and can channel it out in an original form. Led by piercing growls and bass swagger, this beast strikes for and from the belly.
Stif @ Bodega
Three piece (drums gat keys) post-hardcore experimental madness. Very talented and experienced musicians (recognisable: a percussionist from Strike, and a Black Seed) having a blast. Varied between hardout and hardcore, and long slow atmospheric passages, with a range of stuff in between. Good shit. They have gigged maybe three times so far? Well worth catching.
Anthony Milton @ Freds
Experimental music stalwart. Gig was video (with Hilarious subtitles) of his travels in South America, set to music made of sound samples recorded along the way – jungle screeching and indigenous soundscapes, melted into intense building drones and crescendos, with random flute and distorted toy guitar. Inspiring stuff.
Filed by billy at 8:49 pm under culture,new zealand
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This looks interesting.
38 GHUZNEE ST
OPEN FOR TRADE ON SATURDAY 22ND MAY
CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME FRIDAY 21ST MAY
Free Store is a free grocery store at 38 Ghuznee Street Wellington, stocking a range of fresh produce and general grocery items. It looks and feels like a small, vibrant and cared for independent business but offers a full range of products for free. How useful is a product to us? How much do we need or want it? How much do we think we deserve it? For producers or suppliers who agree to take part in Free Store participating will challenge and hopefully inspire. The basic economic principle of Free shop is redistribution. Many of the products at Free shop will already have been paid for several times over, every loaf of bread or bag of apples we buy includes the unseen cost of however many are wasted.
Filed by billy at 11:53 am under culture,new zealand
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Yesterday I read the internet for the first time in a while. Some Things for your consideration.
Metiria Turei has an interesting post about inequality in NZ., with a promise of more to come.
Where does New Zealand rank amongst its peers? We’ve moved rapidly from one of the most equal countries in the OECD to one of the most unequal. The OECD now ranks us 23rd out of 30. The UN ranks us 18th out of 23.
Inequality has risen rapidly in the last two decades. The good news is that if inequality can rise this quickly, it can also fall just as quickly if we set our collective minds to it. And there is good reason to. Inequality is both damaging and costly for us all. In my next Inequality in Aotearoa blog, I’ll explore some of the specific costs associated with inequality.
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Turkish archaelogical excavation discovers stone temple that predates Great Pyramid and Stonehenge by 6-7000 years. This pushes back the start of civilisation as we know it a fair whack, and will someday filter down to mess with our origin myths.
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This reminds me of a quote from a guy in 1800s London, before the burroughs had combined, viewing the growing sprawl and realising that one day they would all link up into one city: the world’s biggest cities are merging into mega-regions.
The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast “mega-regions” which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people, according to a major new UN report.
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Research shows that the world’s largest 40 mega-regions cover only a tiny fraction of the habitable surface of our planet and are home to fewer than 18% of the world’s population [but] account for 66% of all economic activity and about 85% of technological and scientific innovation,” said Moreno.
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The cities that are prospering the most are generally those that are reducing inequalities,” said Moreno.
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This is just cool: solarbeat. Music made by assigning each planet a tone and then having each tone sound when it completes a revolution of the sun. You can play with the speed the planets rotate.
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This is bizarre. Introducing: Death Bear.
A shadowy, masked New Yorker relieves people of painful remnants of their pasts: love letters, photos, even underwear. To the man under the giant bear head, it’s performance art.
..The anguished individual had turned to Death Bear, a macabre performance artist who silently walks the city streets in a one-man quest to relieve people of painful remnants of the past: love letters, photos, gifts, dog tags, underwear — a lot of underwear, it seems — anything that might reduce an otherwise well-functioning person to a sniffling wreck.
The mask is what makes it for me.
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And, of course, what you have always wanted from your favourite psychopath hiring private mercenary army contractors bent on holy war: that’s right, a blackwater christmas tree ornament.
Filed by billy at 11:32 am under culture,new zealand,the world
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Today the National misGovernment announced they are sacking the democratically elected councillors of Environment Canterbury, replacing them with an appointed commission, presumably of bugfuck rightwing cronies if the first two members are anything to go by, and suspending local elections until 2013, because the issues are “too complex to be resolved in the democratic cycle”.
This is about water, which we have ranted about before. Control of water is going to be vital in the years to come. The wrong way to do this is privatise these assets. Solutions to the crises the world faces require cooperation, not competition or coercion. And control, for half of NZ’s water assets, has just been ripped out of public control, and given to an appointed commission with special powers – appointed by slick millionaires who don’t give a damn about our country (for instance, choosing to overturning conservation areas to allow mining), and whose preordained solution will probably involve privatisation, since their blind faith in a peculiar economic ideology prescribes that solution.
I don’t know the substance of the report that led to the sackings; maybe there is good reason for the move, and maybe we will see a sane responsible outcome. I doubt it.
A year or so ago I described life under a National government unleashing its never-announced policies by ramming laws through under urgency in these terms:
It’s like discovering that not only is your mild-mannered, freshly pressed date a rapist who has already drugged you, but that they’re really into stabbing you in the kidneys with a rusty corkscrew while they ream your ass.
Ain’t no fun to be right about this.
Now I am wondering how much damage this government can do to this country and its future…
The mining protest was interesting today. An actual issue of identity at stake. The first time Phil Goff has seemed remotely like a leader. General open talk of direct action to stop the bulldozers as a normal course of events.
Fuck this government.
Filed by billy at 11:16 pm under new zealand,no mercy for john key,oblivion
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Unexpectedly have seen three documentaries at the movies in the last week or so.
This Way of Life
Film about a family in the East Coast of NZ, doing their best to live off the land and independently of the system. Fascinating as a case study in the balance between integrity and survival. Sort of a car-wreck as crazy shit occurs in their lives. Pretty choice, though the narrative feels like it has pieces missing.
The Road to Jerusalem
Film about J.K. Baxter. Told as a mix of his poems, and recollections and interviews with family and friends. Paints an interesting portarait. I didn’t really know much about Baxter beforehand. This is definitely a useful coverage. Seems like a sincere spiritual man with raw talent. His trip to India in the 1950s seems pivotal in his development.
Contact
In the 1960s in Australia they were testing rockets. They were supposed to burn up then land in an uninhabited desert region. The government sent out a patrol to make sure no one was there, and discovered about the last aborigines living in the desert. The patrol had a video camera… The kids among the aborigines are now elders, and they tell the story of first contact with the whitefellas. The juxtaposition between giant computers and rockets and naked in the desert is pretty mind-blowing. A fascinating wee movie, though sort of no more than what it is.
Contact is on at the Documentary Edge festival and shows again on Thursday.
Filed by billy at 10:03 pm under culture,new zealand
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Back from my first WOMAD experience. WOMAD was actually a pretty sweet festival. Really nice location and layout, well organised, good tunes. Took a couple of days to figure out how to interact with a consumer festival – burns have ruined me a bit in terms of the level of participation than seems intuitive and natural – the key seemed to be not trying to do too much, rather than running around trying to see everything.
But yeah. Met some nice people. Got turned on to some choice new bands – Mariem Hassan, Ojos de Brujo, Dub Colossus, and Ross Daly in particular. Saw a bunch of other stuff that was pretty intersting.
Was there with a stall. Drank and sold an unexpected amount of yak butter tea. It is actually pretty good. More like a super-nutritious drink you can live off than a cup of tea.
Hippie peacenik moment was during the final all star gala, realising that people of all cultures could come together and agree over music. Just witnessing it in action was kinda beautiful.
Returned in need of sleep.
Filed by billy at 11:17 pm under culture,new zealand,the moose
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Celebrating our creative capital and cultural uniqueness by making a giant derivative sycophantic piece of shit seems a particularly unimaginative failure.
Did they consult any creative people in creating this concept, or was it just a producer/politico move?
Couldn’t it at least be a 50-ft tall radioactive weta? Seems more honest.
How much will the ongoing repairs cost?
Why not a neon mosque or something to honour Bollywood, since they make the most films in the world?
Please can we have an original idea that expresses our place in the world, rather than an actually cringe-worthy exercise in being the little brother trying to show off to the big boys.
Filed by billy at 8:39 pm under new zealand
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