I’m on the eve of going home to Scotland with my son for the first time and it’s stirring up the strongest emotions I’ve had in ages -as the more eagle-eyed of you will have perhaps deduced! TSO is away in Bougainville for at least 5 weeks, we think. This, it is becoming apparent, is not nearly so glamorous an exercise for her as it may sound to you, but that is another story. It affords me the most beautiful of opportunities – to be able to take an extended holiday home along with Rory, who will turn 3 on our first full day there together.
It’s at my parents little house and it’s going to be cramped and awkward and too warm and I’ll eat too much and gain weight – all of that but I find myself unaccustomedly excited about it. I can’t fucking wait, to be perfectly honest with you. I’m so, so very keen to show Rory places and secrets from my youth in that milkily familiar place. I mean, part of me knows he’s not going to get it and not going to understand what I’m telling him but I don’t even care. It’s all about me, of course it is, what’s wrong with that? I’ve never experienced any of this parenting thing before, it’s all so very new every day but I flatter myself I might be okay at it, you know? Every time I look at Rory – his perfect little features there – I get such a massive, massive swelling of pride in a job I’ve had a hand in as I’ver ever had in anything in my funny old, long-leggetty-life, that I just… want to share everything inside my… head with him, if that makes a lick of sense?
Being at home, I suppose, will give me living, moving props with which to tell him the first chapter in the story of me, and maybe that’s why I’m excited about it. At any rate, I’m missing TSO awfully this evening and the lack of sleep I had last night is the only promise of sleep tonight I have to go on. I’m emotional like a chick on her bad week also. But writing this feels good, feels like starting up a favourite car after you’ve been away your holidays and drinking up the familiar note of your trusted engine. I love writing, you see, but there’s this laziness, this unreasonable need to feel completely alone in order to do it. Meh.
I have the right to cast my vote here in Auckland very soon and it’s been a long time. I’ve been living away for ages and not had the right to vote much in my life, despite being very outspoken about who I would vote for. So I’m going through the candidates in my ward one by one and right now, I have to say I’m fascinated by Nga Dave though I fear his chances may be limited. Still, you have to vote with your conscience and not as if it were a horserace, trying to predict the winner, don’t you?
The other possibility for me has to be Penny Bright who has utilized the classic Home Front poster-ism from WWII. She’s on the left of the field like me, and that itself is a rarity in this day and age. The ‘Public Vs Corporate” platform is bang on the money – in fact it’s what’s wrong with national politics here too at the mooment.
These two will no doubt be consigned to the dustbin of local political history but you know, I kind of hope for the day that we start voting for people that care about the rest of us rather than picking based on education, business background, career history and cleanliness of moral fibre. Maybe we need someone that smokes, someone that talks turkey instead of gobbling up our taxes. If Nga Dave is still out of jail come the big day, he may well get my tick!
The latest advert to grab me here is one for Anchor Milk featuring the premise of anchor being a huge cooperative chain from cow to farmer to shop fridge to customer. It’s an unremarkable ad but for the steamy, grinding country-tinged chug-funk of the song under the images. I’ve loved it since the first hearing and have even dashed from another room to hear it again. Finally tonight, I looked it up cos although it sounded so like a thousand tunes I’d have pounded somewhere in my record buying past, it wasn’t coming to me. Think early ’70s Elvis, Tony Joe White or Jonny Rivers’ stuff – bad talk about country livin on the po’ side of town from a white man’s POV over a really black backbeat. I’m a moth to a flame with that stuff. Anyway, first search result was this article which not only ID’d the track but turned up a really flimsy, possibly media-slow-day-created story. Prisons! Scary! Our taxes being used for prison songs?!! What’ll be next? Songs with gunfights and klondike-town-dancing gals?! Perish the thought.
But yes, this song is absolutely up my alley. My dark alley on the smelly white side of a poor southern town, you might say. Hope you live it as much as I do.
I’ve never seen a second of a Twilight film, not even clips, although I’m highly aware of the whole phenomenon. I found TSO weeping openly at the end of the first one a long time ago, but I never saw what had riven her nerve from nerve. Well, we’ve just sat through about an hour of the second one “New Moon”. TSO is at least able to join me in spurts of disbelieving laughter now and again but she remains glued and my attention is beginning to slip. These kids are misery gutses eh? I mean I liked Morrissey and my bedroom and pondering and Oscar Wilde. I sat and ached that Ian Curtis could have done himself in. Sure, I was a bit sad for some years in the ’80s. But this Bella one in this film?! By jesus this is a sullen article all together, isn’t she?! I mean she not only cries into her pillow – she’s screeching like a hyena into hers, here! Lying there with the Romeo and Juliet book at her sleeping hand! And kids are into this stuff, too, eh? They’ll all be feeling like her for a hobby now – that’s a certainty. Where will this leave the world – a teen population all lying about in locked bedrooms howling at the walls – too sad to wash themselves or lift a finger to ponder another page of Shakesperean romance? Lord deliver us all.
And the thick-faced one – the wee werewolf chap – he’s a cool one eh? He’s as manly shirtless little devil isn’t he? He’s hardly a shirt on the whole film. Someone drops a fork? He whips the top off. A thundercrack fills the pissing wet sky as Moanyguts above pleads with him still to be her friend and boof! The singlet hits the floor again as his eyes scan the horizon! His hair at the start is a natty old $2 shop nylon hair mullet, sitting askew of his face even! Suddenly, under the flimsiest soupcon of a pretext, it’s razor cut, framing his (suddenly) lantern-jawed face. The 2″ broad prosthetic nose is suddenly gone – he’s about as handsome a specimen as you’ll see and the reason for it happening is so rubbish you’ve forgotten it anyway, 2 minutes later. There is no more shirt for him for the rest of the picture.
Every minute a new fundamental of cinematic rule-bookery is trampled underfoot and there grows a drystone wall of 100% pure teenage dejection in its place. Fresh misery and romance is packed tight into every chink, crack and fissure in this wall.
I mean, I suppose it is only the latest in the cheap exploi-teen flick pantheon but come on! Must we be so slapdash about it? In the ’80s when I was being conscientiously forlorn, the teensploit flicks were Flashdance and that kind of thing – St Elmo’s Fire. Teens danced it out in my day. Man. There was no need for anybody to be roaring and gnashing into their pillow that some starving, white-faced little proto-Luke-Perry prick was moving to another town on them. Can we not exploit our teens with dance any more? Do they have to be ripping each other’s hind legs off as wolves and bloodsuckers in the woods? This movie has all the parts: The ancient truck to signify cooler-than-caring teen individualism. The goofy, rubbish would-be suitor. The wispy vamp. The kid-from-another-town. In place of the dancing, however: shirtless muscles, fangs, blood and bottomless fucking despair.
And what’s with the gigantic muffins in the werewolf house? They’re like a cuddly toy! A family of chinchillas could live inside one muffin, for fuck sakes!
I’m not a huge fan of The Arcade Fire nowadays but I remember being blown away by them once and it’s good that they have lent their name to an amazing project like this. Basically, it’s an interactive film that utilizes Google Earth to personalize a little film to the current viewer by taking an address of their choice and inserting it into the imagery. Maybe interactive film is already a thing and I’m way behind the onion here but I got quite excited at first view.
The places I grew up in are not big enough to be listed with Google Earth Street View or anything like that but after TSO showed me this, we typed in the area we live in now and the results are really fascinating. I could imagine being someone who grew up here, living far away overseas, finding this project and getting dewy-eyed watching their beloved streets fill with birds and trees before their eyes. I then typed in the last address I lived at in Calgary, Canada and could hardly breathe at the amount of emotion it stirred up in me. I’ve never thought about the closeness of memories to the physical places we live in. I’ve always been about moving forward and not looking back. Sometimes looking back isn’t a bad thing.
If you grew up someplace big and mappable, give it a whirl or else just type in some place you have strong memories of (good or bad) and enjoy.
Now and again a contemporary artist hits on the never-go-dry vein of pure soul and channels successfully the classic soul pantheon without resorting to pastiche and resisting the obvious temptation to impersonate. Toni Tony Tone, in their heyday did it perfectly. Outkast in brief moments like ‘Hey Ya” or “Miss Jackson”, say, had it in their grasp. It doesn’t come along often, but when it does, it fills me with glee. My old mentor Michael White, a few months ago, hipped me to the new young star currently harnessing this soul heritage energy vibe and boy, it’s really something. I’d only seen her videos so I dug around to find a live performance because I had a suspicion she could literally walk the walk. I was right, of course. This is cleanest, purest, alive-est soul music. Never mind the fact that she appears to believe she’s from another planet.
An old friend had a birthday yesterday and I sent him this song. He and I played in a band we thought might make it big, once upon a time, and for me this song really captures that feeling – not just for us – for the artist as well. It’s sonically messed-up and recorded under very amateurish circumstances, the tempo is all over the place but boy did we love it and man alive, did we want to sound like that. Happy Birthday Doggie. We’re getting old.
We’re currently watchingDexter Season 4. Have you seen Dexter? It’s about a splatter analyst in the forensic dept in Miami Metro copshop who’s an extracurricular serial killer. I know. I read the premise the first time and went “horseshit” too. I now sit waiting new series’ in the way I used to with The Sopranos in its golden era.
Michael C. Hall (6 Feet Under’s David) plays Dex as a nervous, awkward, socially bereft geek in the daytime and a steely eyed death machine when alone, in the middle of a kill, or to camera. When you think about it, a character with split personalities must be an actors nightmare, no? To do both well is no mean feat of board-treading but Hall makes it look as though he were born to it. He has the benefit of absolutely beautiful dialogue and an almost ridiculously well-written character.
Season 4 sees Dexter now married and a father of 3 and the extra pressure this adds to trying to keep his nocturnal peccadilloes under wraps has my guts in knots as a viewer. Dexter’s precisely planned murders are now interrupted by cellphone calls to hurry home with medicine for Baby Harrison’s earache etc. A once-fastidious Dexter is now crashing his car on the way home from kills with bags of human body parts and sharp knives in the boot. We are rapt. We can hardly wait for nighttime to allow ourselves another episode.
I’m somebody that has never, ever liked animation or what I like to call ‘kids stuff’. When the whole world was going Shrek crazy, I was writing articles about why we’re regressing, demanding more and more lowest-denominator entertainment, rattling on at length about Hollywood’s dumbing-down of society . Harry Potter? Oh how I have railed about seeing blocks-long lines of adults in costume waiting for their first glimpse of the new nerd-flick. Let me just say, that I still hate Harry Potter but am finding that, as my son grows up, I’m forced to sit for the odd hour in front of a screen flickering with, yes, the Shreks, the Toy Stories, the Madagascars, the Happy Feets. I’d have never picked it but the kid genre is kind of growing on me.
I mean, I’m not ever going to queue around the block to see a new animation flick (Lord, please don’t make me eat those words) or anything but I can kind of appreciate the adult-aimed gags and the sight gags at which Rory and I laugh equally hard. I’m just a little worried that it’s all so terribly Ameri-Centric, you know? There should be more kids’ entertainment I can watch with my boy that has accents and humour like his Granny has, or his mum. The kids books that become worldwide classics are quite rarely produced in the US, which I find interesting. Recently The Gruffalo has been made into a little TV film. Nice combo – English writer, German illustrator and…non US film adaptation. Better yet, it’s terrifically well done. Rory is absolutely rapt at the little mouse walking through an extremely realistic natural woodland set, dodging predators like a superhero. And the music?! My God, the music is pure classically-influenced, Peer Gynt-ish stuff that could easily come from Mark Mothersbaugh and John Williams collaborating – I’d buy the soundtrack.
But my main point: last night some friends hipped us to Fantastic Mr Fox by Wes Anderson. I’m ashamed to say that even being a huge Anderson fan for years, this film had slipped my notice. Shame on me because it’s simply the most amazing stop motion/animation type thing I’ve ever seen. The Roald Dahl story is of course historically proven. The adaptation for film? Pitch-perfect. The puppets and their little costumes are so sublimely ‘antiqued’ that it almost made me want to become a modeller. See, I hate that we nowadays feel kids’ films have to be completely nonthreatening and must not include anything scary. Kids LOVE to be scared, man! I scare the bejeezus out of Rory any chance we get. Him and me we’re like Clouseau and Cato: trying to get one over on each other with the endless frights. I of course comfort him if (as in the seal scene in Happy Feet) he gets a little scared at his first sight of something. I’m just not about never, ever letting him see that thing again. I’ll even go out of my way to help him through it on a second viewing.
Fantastic Mr Fox is an anomaly in that it completely straddles the adult/kid entertainment line. It’s chock full with real life lessons that will bear repeat watchings as Rory grows older without a doubt and the dialogue is so beautifully written, the characters each so distinct and rooted in reality that I’m certainly up for watching it over and over. I couldn’t recommend it more to anyone who’s ever seen worth in a Wes Anderson film or anyone who wants their children to cut their little cinema teeth on quality film.
I’m still not sure, after reading about it so much and then watching the trailers, whether it’s a pisstake or a portrait of an artist going off the rails spectacularly but by golly I’m keen to see I’m Still Here. One morning years ago I was having my cornflakes watching some breakfast TV show in Scotland and Joachin (Wack-EEM) Phoenix was doing a live promo interview for Walk The Line live from some sunny poolside location. He was perhaps the most spectacularly drunk film star I’d ever seen interviewed and the two polite figureheads of the show on their immaculate couch hadn’t a bloody clue what to do. Second only to 9/11, it was the best Breakfast TV experience of my life. I became a fan not of the harelipped actor but of his apparently hopeless addictions and excesses. I hunkered down to wait for future installments from his trip to the bottom. I was thrilled, then, when he started to show up pissed for every affair in Hollywood and proclaim himself a rapper. Then this humourless Letterman appearance came along and I became fascinated. The whole falling-off-the-stage footage did little to slake my thirst for his apparently imminent demise. Even the fact this film is directed by ‘Cardboard’ Casey Affleck can’t dampen my enthusiasm.
A few years ago my old pal Snowman sent me a mix tape of Nuevas Canciones from south of the border and it introduced me to a few styles of music I’ve grown to love: Cumbia, The Chilean New Song Movement and most unique of all, Mexico’s Drugrunner Mariachi – country music about legendary cross-border mules. Tonight I watched an amazing Doco with Ace Fopster Alex James investigating the coke business at every level in Columbia – putting his extremely white frame in harm’s way repeatedly. The final segment featured Los Tigres Del Norte – the frontrunners of the style and whoo boy do they cook. Here, have a taste…
Addendum: there was a moment during the running of the show where James was in interview with a facially obscured guy who makes his money as a hired assassin for the druglords – the real thing. A week between interviews and the guy had done several ‘jobs’. James, struggling to make the doco poignant, asking ever more searching questions about the morality of being involved in the trade, was flummoxed when the guy, with remarkable insight said: “take your own case – you said you spent a million pounds on cocaine – you shared with your friends right?” Yes, gulped Alex. The man continued, looking right into his eyes “how many of those friends now would share a million dollars worth of cocaine with you now”. James looked into the camera, swallowed hard and said “I think we’re done here, the interview is over”.
It happens frequently that I think the struggle to change people’s antiquated racist ideas may never reach any manner of a conclusion and that we are just sad, desperate Archie Bunkers ar heart, regardless of our pelt colour or favourite church. Would we all maybe enjoy a good hangin’ or lynchin’ were it to suddenly be back in favour? Are we fat, white middle class people of privilege the only ones in the world that even think racism is a problem? Were he to rise tomorrow, would Dr King be all that terribly pleased at how far along the road to freedom and fairness we have come?
Tomorrow morning, thanks to some wonderful people we know, we are driving north to a little paradise called Rangiputa to stay in a gorgeous little batch for, uh, as long as we want to?!! Sure, it’s late winter. Sure it’s been pissing down for weeks. Sure we’re cabin feverish and unemployed. Northland, that far north, is a haunted and spiritual place and I cannot wait to explore it, I’ve longed to since the first time I went to Elliot Bay camping with TSO and her group of friends. I find it only gets more and more ‘real’ feeling the further north you go, in New Zealand although I can’t really qualify what I mean, precisely, by that. You need to feel it.
So the new Volvo, the new black, sleek, leathery, clean Volvo is getting packed and we are getting into it for a road trip. That feeling makes me shiver. And you know what – best of all is that, if it rains and blows a gale from the moment we leave to the moment we get back, I couldn’t care less. It’s the journey. I know nothing about Rangiputa but it looks perfect from the images I found on Google and at this time of year it won’t be stinkin with tourists. I plan to visit Cape Reinga, the northernmost point, and Spirits Bay. Expect photographs and reports later.
You know, I don’t often think about it because it kind of blows your wig a bit, but isn’t it vain of us to think that we’ve already discovered every creature that walks, barks, growls and shits on the planet? The oceans alone, prove repeatedly that they hold more than we’ll ever chart. The term “– known to man” has always had an arrogant ring to me. Who does man think he is, exactly. So I love it when something totally wack shows up in some far flung corner of the jungle. I think it’s called Cryptozoology – there’s a radio program on here at weekends featuring Rhys Darby as one of the hosts dedicated to the week’s news in this field. Anyway – this is the best one I’ve seen in a while that has recorded photographic evidence. Is it the product of two disparate species having enjoyed a moment of animalistic carnal pleasure? Worse yet, the byproduct of a human-mammal interaction?
God bless you and thanks for your mail.Sorry for my late response as i have been little ill.I want you to know this transaction is real and genuine and i am a christian and intend using part of my share for charity purposes.
The deceased left no documented next of kin nor beneficiary and that is exactly what i want to do placing you as beneficiary.
I had the grave misfortune this afternoon to catch an episode of a reality TV show that absolutely sucked the will to live right out of me. I’ve seen the My Sweet 16 US thing in the past (for about 16 seconds before it got the best of me) so I thought I was semi prepared for spoilt rich little bastards making absolute dicks of themselves on MTV in front of a few hundred people. But there’s something about UK rich kids trying to be US rich kids that is absolutely heartbreaking. Young Jordan here, son of pools winners I presume, has absolutely not a shred of taste or manners in his body and he comes by it easily – his mother is a tottering schemie slag who has nurtured spoilt arse-ness in young Master J.
This story tickles all the right giggle buttons for me. Plus I hope Puddu stands up to McDonalds – nothing better than a Dave/Goliath scene, especially when Goliath is mired hopelessly in the moral low ground.
I’m delighted and amazed at your offer first of all – what a splendiferous opportunity for you and me both! However, I have a few concerns, to wit:
As a conscientious opponent of the Iraqui war, there is a part of me that is hesitant to profit from it’s ill-effects so directly. I am heartbroken, Eric, at the thought of me sitting in the lap of luxury in the south of France (for that is where I am going to go) and some poor relative of Hanoun who was not tracked down may be living in abject poverty and deeply reduced circumstances in a country torn limb from figurative limb by what amounts to an expansionist, empire building exercise by the bloated west.
Thus, Eric, I would like a few more details on just what methods your fine organization has used, how much effort has been made, to find living relatives of poor Haider? The country, as I understand it, has been in such organizational strife for such a long time that there could be a (possibly fortunate) relative left alive that has simply not been tracked down. I hope you will forgive my hesitation in this matter but I would find it hard to enjoy my champagne and oysters as this possible Hanoun family member lay in, say, a rubble-strewn hovel in occupied Karbala. Uncontionable.
Also – I’m left in some conflict over what your organization might think about you and I enjoying the proceeds of misery in this way. I know that certain details may be ‘obscured’ from their watchful eye and that alone does not scare me. However, Hang Seng is a big organization and I worry that they may have the ways and means to track me down, even though I plan to live out my days in wealthy obscurity.
I’m thrilled that you have chosen me as your reliable foreigner with whom to execute this cunning ruse, Eric, I truly am and I hope you don’t think me ungrateful. I would just like to hear what you have to say on these two points before you and I go into business together.
Also, I’m not interested in anything less than 70% – 30% in my favour, if that’s not too much trouble? I feel my risk is bigger than the one you are taking and it’s only fair. I would be willing to take 65% plus goods to the value – say a car or property in a country of your choosing?
I’m on the eve of going home to Scotland with my son for the first time and it’s stirring up the strongest emotions I’ve had in ages -as the more eagle-eyed of you will have perhaps deduced! TSO is away in Bougainville for at least 5 weeks, we think. This, it is becoming apparent, is not nearly so glamorous an exercise for her as it may sound to you, but that is another story. It affords me the most beautiful of opportunities – to be able to take an extended holiday home along with Rory, who will turn 3 on our first full day there together.
