Monday, June 28, 2004
Hatebeak It had to happen. A death metal band... with a PARROT on lead vocals! How completely and stupidly brilliant! We love it! And so will you. The music is furious and blasting death metal, grinding riffs, pounding drums and crushing bass. Only, the usual cookie monster grunts are replaced by the evil squawks of Waldo the parrot. And Waldo does a pretty decent job, offering lots of unintelligable grunts and growls and other birdlike vocalisations."Unfortunately, you'll have to actually buy the 7" coloured vinyl EP to hear evidence of this bird's vocal abilities, as there were no song downloads or samples as far as I could see. This is an American band, in case you were really wondering. UPDATE! BoingBoing have posted this link to an mp3 sample (lo-fi, at that) of the Hatebeak song 'God of Empty Nest'. Listen and be afraid. [via MsBehaviour] # | Saturday, June 26, 2004
England v. Portugal: Euro 2004 What a game. Thank god I'm not English (or Portuguese) , otherwise the sheer drama of that penalty shoot-out would have had me in about the same state of hysterical nervousness (and then, after the final whistle, outright deflated defeat) that I felt when the 1995 Rugby World Cup Final went to extra time. Instead, with no real emotional investment in the game (enjoyable though it is to watch the English go down, we had just spanked them at rugby, so I was willing to let them have this one) it was just pure, unadulterated high drama.As if the game itself wasn't full of enough talking points (Rooney, disallowed goal), the penalty shoot-out was a classic. Poor old Becks (at least he got it out of the way early - unlucky Darius Vassell would surely wish he had gone first, and then at least have the tentative excuse of not knowing the turf was a bit cut up). And how cool is Ricardo? Makes the stop, then steps up and bangs the winner home. Just the sort of thing I imagine goalies around the world dream about, and which Ricardo got to live out. Fantastic. What. A. Legend.  And the disallowed goal. Looked a simple decision from here. John Terry was all over the goalie, stopped Ricardo from jumping, and Sol headed home unopposed. Foul. Pretty simple isn't it? The readers of The Sun certainly don't think so...THE referee appeared to be in a world of his own. Please tell me why our goal is disallowed when a player jumps on our own player's back. This is sheer stupidity.Ooooh, unhappy. At least one Premiership ref has come to Meier's defence, and one imagines the English will eventually get over the feelings of being wronged in much the same way the Italians will with their scandanavian conspiracy theories. Or maybe not. # | Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Sick as a Parrot Gutted. Well, not too gutted actually, as Sankt Pauli - the virtual team I manage over at footiemanager.com - had hardly got out of first gear all season, and ended up in 13th spot, well out of the relegation zone (although, I suspect being Div 2 of a 2 league competition, there's nowhere to be relegated to, so, really, I just avoided the wooden spoon), but nowhere near contending for a spot in the top league. Oh how different this season was from the last, when a strong late run had me lose out on a promotion spot on the goals scored differential. I was sick as a parrot that day, I tell you. This season, thinking some savvy off-season buys had made my team stronger, I was full of hope of securing and holding onto a top 3 spot early, but it seemed my team had other ideas, and totally lacked the ability to finish teams off - we finished the season with the dubious record of being the team with most draws: 16 from 34 games. Thankfully some late season transfers bolstered the squad a bit, and we got some late wins, which augurs well for next season, at least.# | Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Archangel Well, everyone else is doing this one, so I'm going to be one of the sheep...Rafael. You're most like the ArchAngel of Healing. You want people to shape up, and you nag. But you mean well, and you're well loved despite it. Or because of it. You bring the donuts even as you tell people to eat more veggies.Eh? Oh well, at least he looks like me. And the Political Compass test is doing the rounds at nzmusic.com as well (having done the nz blogosphere a few months back). Aka is hosting the graph of nzmusic members results here. And, no surprises, we're (mostly) a bunch of liberal lefties. There's also an updated graph of NZ Political Leaders at No Right Turn. Turns out I'm in the same area as Helen Clark and (noooo!) Jim Anderton. # | Friday, June 18, 2004
Surf the web, while, uhhh, surfing Technology hits the waves. Pro surfer Duncan Scott will be launching the new Intel Wireless Technology Surfboard at the 2004 Intel GoldCoast Oceanfest (a free sports and music festival held in Devon) which starts today. And it's not a total gimmick, the board should be good to ride, having been developed by Jools Matthews of Gulfstream surfboards, whose responsible for shaping over 15000 boards in his 15 year surfboard-making career. And the PC tablet installed in the board is a pretty useful machine by the sounds of it. It hooks up to any handy WiFi spots (so no joy for those of you surfing any of NZ's bigger breaks, I imagine), with the best feature being the ability for surfer's to record footage of themselves surfing (for streaming, or editing later on). Should be great for those lulls out the back between sets. Pretty anathema to the spirit of surfing though, innit? # |
Nickelback: talentless bunch of wankers
 "Nickelback, you lazy, talentless bunch of wankers. What, did you think nobody would notice that you're recycling your hideous dirge and selling it all over again to your deluded fan base? You bastards, you're taking advantage of those tone deaf MTV brainwashed twats who are too thick to notice you're releasing songs that are EXACTLY THE SAME as ones you recorded earlier. And here's the proof, people. Listen to their first godawful hit, played through the left speaker. At the same time, an equally shite single (released two years later) will be played through the right speaker. Can you spot the difference?"[via Ms. Behaviour] And while we're at it, here's a great essay on the phenomenon that is 'being a Tool fan.' There’s only one kind of Tool fan. The Tool fan who thinks that being a Tool fan lets them into some big secret that nobody else gets. They think that only a select few posses the secret Tool decoder ring. They’d love to believe that all the halfwits who listen to Tool actually don’t get it, but really they’re all listening to them for the same reason. The fact of the matter is, any moron can understand Tool, but the hidden appeal of Tool lies in the fact that they give the illusion of being a band for smart people. They do this, as any Tool fan knows, by throwing in jumbled references to high school psychology, obscure religious references, and miscellaneous meaningless nonsense. Bullshit or not, as long as there’s something there to figure out or interpret, it’s going to make some stoned dropout feel smart.[link found at nzmusic - thanks ernyst] # | Tuesday, June 15, 2004
48 Hour Furious Film-making competition Well, the 48 hours are up, and the screenings get underway in Auckland and Wellington tonight. It sounds like this years 48 Hour Furious Film-making competition was even bigger and better than last years, and with more of the teams actually managing to complete their pieces within the allotted time. About half, I recall (probably wrongly), of last years entries didn't get a finished film in - this year (with over 100 teams involved) nearly 90% of teams have managed to get something in before the deadline. Nice work. And busy work, by the sounds of it. My minor involvement was signing some permissions for some Debris and noizyboy music to get used in the film my mates Adam and Sam were producing/directing/writing (with help from other assorted friends). Sam came over with the music release forms (and to grab my latest noizyboy mixes - loath as I was to hand over the mixes without twiddling with them for another hour or two), and told us a few tales of the chaos so far. Painting his car black (so as to resemble an old-fashioned police car) with matte paint and plain old house paint-brushes was my favourite bit of sacrifice-for-the-cause. The official deadline was 7pm on Sunday night (things got underway around 6pm on Friday night), and Perkins Productions had their entry in with time to burn. Well, a bit of time to burn. Enough time, anyway, to organise a decent cast-and-crew-and-helpers screening at 8pm on Robert's fantastic inhouse cinema screen (and soup, yum). I went along to watch, and totally missed the nuances of the film, listening out as I was for all the music I had contributed (which was pretty much playing for the entire nine minutes). I'll have to watch again when it comes out (as it will, surely!) on the Best Of DVD the competition organisers will be releasing after the heats and finals. It looked the business anyway - you'd have no idea it had been thrown together over a frenetic weekend by a bunch of enthusiasts and ring-ins. Marvelous! And the whole thing got some good media coverage too - not surprising when a competition like this suddenly highlights the fact that Wellington and Auckland can, at the drop of hat, produce over 100 film and post-production crews for a weekend's work (and the infrastructure for them to be all filming and editing at the same time as well). My mate samflux got interviewed by TVNZ here, there's a good Manawatu Evening Standard article about a Palmy North team (who entered the Welly competition), and stories of trials and tribulations on the official 48 Hours discussion boards. # | Friday, June 11, 2004
NZ Album Art  Here's a couple of links that highlight some of the fantastic cover art that has been produced in New Zealand over the last 40 or so years. RE:COVERED - A history of New Zealand music cover design - a project put together by Kelvin Hayes - features artwork from albums by Fur Patrol, David Kilgour, Split Enz and many more. Kelvin asks the questions... What is New Zealand design? Does it have its own identity?Well worth checking out, even if the resolution of the scanned cover art is a little on the low side. Much more high-res, and a larger collection too, is the one over at at the NZ Design Archives. This is an impressive collection of cover art from the Flying Nun label, a couple of hundred 7" single covers (dating back to the 60s), and 12" releases (around fifty or so), and smaller selections of Pacific Island (don't quite know if that Weeds 7" really belongs in that category, but there ya go), Maori, Rugby-Themed, and, err, Kiri Te Kanawa covers. Thanks to Jessie and <spak> (via a thread at nzmusic.com) for making me aware of those links. # | Thursday, June 10, 2004
Gizza lift mate?Cool. Keith Coleman, a Kiwi WWII veteran over in France commemorating the D-Day landings, missed his ride back to Paris. An "important looking guy wearing gold braid" came up to him and offered to fly him back on his private jet, an offer Keith took him up on.Mr Coleman was whisked to another airfield, where he was served "the best red wine I've ever tasted" while waiting for the presidential cavalcade to arrive.Great. Turned out, of course, the 'important looking guy' was French President Jacques Chirac. Even better is the response from his wife, on hearing the news... "Oh my God ... I might have known that would happen. He's travelling alone and he is 86. Oh, no."Ahaha! Like he gets picked up by foreign leaders every time he goes on a trip. Seems the story is now doing the international newspaper rounds as a 'feelgood' story. # | Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Radio Active 89FM NZ Music Show Playlist: 8 June 2004broadcast: 2100-2300 NZST | TUE 8 June, 2004  Started the night off with a live-to-air from celtic/jazz/gyspy outfit Carousel, which had us in our usual state of minor panic with regards to which buttons and sliders to fiddle with in order to get the feed in from the downstairs studio. We got them on air - we think - at least, no-one phoned in to tell us we'd broadcast 20 minutes of dead air, so all seemed to go off without a hitch, until the end, when the band came to a sudden stop, Ju announced 'Carousel!', and the band cut her off with another minute of whirling strings. I've never really understood the false ending (especially in the live environment, and despite both my bands being guilty of it): the band does their false ending, the audience screams and hollers, and then the band start up again, leaving the crowd feeling a bit sheepish about having been sucked into premature adulation. And if there's anything worse than premature adulation, I'd like to know...Anyway, kinda set the tone for the night. Every time we do the show, the DJ immediately before has some new configuration of PFLs and Mutes set up that has us scratching our heads as to whether or not it's the sound we hear via our headphones and/or studio monitors which is what people on the outside world are hearing. Or neither. One day we'll figure it out. In the meantime, our apologies for dead air, miscued songs and songs that play over the top of each other. In competition with Ju's 'Carousel!' for best verbal gaffe of the night was me announcing the Soane song... "And here's one from Soane: 'All I Need Feat'. Odd name for a song, isn't it?" "I'll let you in on a secret when the song starts," said Ju. "Eh? Look at it. F. E. A. T. What are they on about?" "I think you'll find it's short for 'featuring'" Ju informed me. Duh. Anyway, here's the playlist, a short one again, thanks to the live-to-air and an un-chart-ed interview with Warren Maxwell. * the accelerants - lookin' at you * paselode - plant a tree * squirm - the monster under her bed * the fanatics - model * bic runga - delight * soane (feat. boh runga) - all I need * ghostplane - state hijack * the shrugs - underwater colour * cassette - nothing to do * bressa cretting cake - palm singing * heavy jones trio - free * fang - yellow * the users - lordy lordy * misfits of science - fools love * dj logikal - strickly thinking * the upbeats - view from the inside * aspen - this is why only teenagers can really love music # | Tuesday, June 08, 2004
FrontseatHow bad was Frontseat this week? For foreign readers, or anyone who doesn't watch TV1 on a Sunday night, Frontseat is "A topical and provocative weekly arts series that puts Kiwi arts and culture firmly on the agenda."So what did they discuss on the show this week? Vic uni throwing out old books, and the fact that some film directors have to make ads for a living. What unbelievable non-stories they were. Victoria University library haven't done a decent book cull in a decade, so have started down the path of identifying which books are going to go by marking ones that haven't been taken out for 10 years or so with a red sticker. These books are to be reviewed by staff and students for usefulness, and, if no-one wants them to remain in the library, they're going into storage. Now, when the story broke at the start of May (May! And Frontseat are covering it now!), there was a bit of a kerfuffle, for, as Deputy vice-chancellor David Mackay (himself former dean of humanities and social sciences) said: "...there are certainly some people who are just opposed in principal to the deletion of any book. They see them as being sacred." As a professional librarian, I can see where those people are coming from. Care of books, and keeping useful books in good condition is a top priority. But not all books. Culling is a reality in all libraries, and the Vic Uni Library has to do it. And come on people - these aren't the only copies of these books in the world! There's always the interloans department! Anyway, for this non-story they reeled in Vice-Chancellor Mackay and Library God Jim Traue (who was introduced by Ollie Driver as, ugh, a 'library fan' - equivalent to calling Colin Meads a 'rugby fan'), who amiably agreed that the cull needed to take place, but that perhaps (Jim argued this point) the process could be (and should have been) better organised. Mackay admitted that this was probably true, and that the deadline for reviewing the books to be culled had been moved to Christmas. Everyone was happy, except perhaps Ollie, who had totally failed in his mission to incite an on-air academic brawl. And what I can't understand is that while they interviewed some post-grad history students (why?), the vice-chancellor and Jim, no-one from the library itself was interviewed. I suppose that was the University's policy (with the VC stepping in to handle things), but it would have been nice for someone from the coalface to come in and point out just how bad storage problems are at the library (and, having organised a shelf-shifting exercise myself in the time I was working there, I know how bad it is). And why didn't Ollie ask, for example, that while Victoria University houses NZ's only Library School, and is thus the centre of professional librarianship for the nation, why the University Library that many of the library students study and end up working in hasn't undertaken as basic a routine collection maintenance job as this in over a decade? Hmph. And then, in a typical 'isn't-NZ-a-small-place' way, they interviewed a couple of my mates (Robert Sarkies and Peter Burger) and a non-mate-but-well-known-to-me (Greg Page) about their directing careers, and specifically their 'day jobs' making ads. Surely everyone knows this goes on? It's obviously a useful way to hone your skills using other people's money and resources. Some people might consider it 'selling out', but I much prefer the term, 'selling in'. Anyway, I cut my losses after that segment and went to bed, missing what may have been an interesting item on the new Douglas Lilburn compilation (but which I'd already heard extensive interviews about on National Radio). Talking about it with some friend's yesterday, we came to the conclusion that when TVNZ does an arts show, it tries to be 'popular'. It aims the shows at a level that 'the masses' can understand, and which are (ugh) 'accessible'. They should just go hard-core. As a mate pointed out, Sports Cafe means nothing to him, but that doesn't bother him, as he doesn't like sport, and he just doesn't watch it. Equally, Sports Cafe makes no bones about its target audience - it's not trying to suck in people who don't know a scrum from a maul - they assume you know your stuff before you start watching. Arts telly should be the same - it should target the group it wants to enjoy the show, and make shows for them, instead of this current system of making shows for what is very small group of people who might potentially enjoy an arts show, as long as it's not too hard to understand. Make it hard! We like that! Or is it that just me and my elitist bunch of cafe-dwelling central city mates? # | Thursday, June 03, 2004
blog blog blog It's an addictive thing, blogging. It seems to be that you either set up a blog, make a few posts, and then forget about the whole thing, or set up a blog, make a few posts, make a few more, then, before you know it, you're sitting there watching a bad advertisment for toothpaste making mental notes about it for a blog post you're going to make later on (or, more than likely, right away). Some people, and although it's easy to say, they're probably nearly all Americans, have taken blogging to extremes. This NY Times article tells the story of several blogging addicts... Jocelyn Wang, a 27-year-old marketing manager in Los Angeles, started her blog, a chronicle of whatever happens to pop into her head, 18 months ago as an outlet for boredom.Four hours? Crikey - makes my half hour morning blog-scan and update seem pitiful. Some analysts have commented on the blog as being a new form of media, and specifically a sub-genre of journalism, in that... ...while most webloggers aren't journalists, we're at the beginning of a greatly expanded media ecosystem in which gifted amateurs, niche experts and eyewitnesses giving first-hand accounts are all engaging in a form of journalism.Goody, after being refused entry to Canterbury's Journalism School in favour of my better-looking writing partner of the time, I'm now able to access the hallowed realms of journo-land by merely recording my aimless day-to-day thoughts here. Or maybe not. George Packer argues against the information quality (although not against the medium as a journalistic genre per se) that bloggers pass on via their posts... ...if blogs are "a new way of doing politics," there is also something peculiarly stale and tired about them — not the form, but the content.Even when bloggers get off their arses and head out to 'report' real events via their blogs, there's something missing... When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary.The blog-geek was probably freaked out at being in a room full of people and lost his muse.  Not really related to any of the above is the rise of the mp3 blog. When I was starting out in the online world in the mid 90s, and mp3 started to raise its ugly head, there was a flood of illegal and semi-legal mp3 trading sites. I submitted my band's mp3s to every one I could find, just to get the music out there. I used to keep a folder of the sites that we were on, but they got closed down, moved, and shared their contents with others to the point that I just gave up, and concentrated on some of the bigger sites that were moving into the mp3 realm (also now mostly defunct: eg. mp3.com, amp3.com, garageband (been and gone and been again), mp3.com.au and the like). It may be that the illegal mp3 site has rolled along at about the same rate as normal, but a new variation on that sort of site has been spawned via blogs: mp3 blogging.MP3 blogs usually operate under a 'fair use' arrangement. They make mp3s available for a short amount of time, usually with a wee review or recommendation (definitely not a hallmark of the older illegal sites, which tended to just be eat-all-you-can directories), tend to cover a theme or genre, and will more often than not contain a link to a store where you can buy the CD or 'retail' mp3. Now that's fair use. They're great. For a good starting point, try here (link courtesy of dubber at the wireless). My favourite of the moment is Fluxblog (probably because of the tagline: Fluxblog is so hot right now). # | Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Sunday Star Times goes to the dogsHooray. It's not just me. I was reading the Sunday Star Times in the weekend and just couldn't get over how bad it was. Damian Christie over at Public Address had the same thoughts as I did with regards to the paper trumpeting its Qanta Media Awards wins...Speaking of No Credibility, why does the Sunday Star Times find it necessary to refer to the Qantas Awards as "the print industry's equivalent of the Oscars"?The Oscars? Hardly - it's much more like the NZ Film Awards: few contestants, no public interest, no kudos for winning. As Damian points out, with lots of awards and only a handful of papers competing for them, everyone's going to get a swag of awards to blow their horns about. Pointless. Anyway, reading through the paper, there was an article on NZ's teenage pregnancy levels, which, according to the SST, are the third highest in the world. "Third highest in the world?" I thought. Really? Compared to virtually any third world nation where they're marrying the kids off at 12 and 13? Oh, right, as I read an entirely different article on the same topic, it transpires that we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. Slightly different, isn't it? Russell Brown also gets stuck into the paper a bit here, and you can read Damian's full piece here (and, for the record, Damian was prescient enought to make the "SST is going to the dogs" call a couple of weeks ago). # | |
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