Which is all very well when this surveillance is being supervised by a force as benign and reassuring as the cast of The Bill, but what happens when the slightly darker cast of, say, Spooks is in control? It seems to me there’s an awful lot of trust involved here, because it appears that all…
For Bill, portraits were an occupational hazard and a source of income; workmanlike, but oddly at variance with his other work, i.e. landscapes largely empty of people. Had he painted only portraits he would have been a very minor footnote in New Zealand art, but fortunately he spent nearly fifty years defining the landscape of…
..taciturn demeanour would be interpreted today as at least pathologically reserved, if not downright stand-offish. His behaviour even seems a little odd in the context of the era, but perhaps because I missed some of the early series I’ve also missed the rationale for the apparent chip on his shoulder. I wasn’t alive then, despite…
..Enza Pantano’s voice supplementing the usual Bill and myself singing and playing nylon-string guitars. Serendipitously, one of the songs he discovered was one I thought that I’d lost for good in the transition from analogue to digital called Recycle Your Love. Every now and then I come across a reference to it but the musical…
..a glass of water. But after a few kilometres of uphill a rest was definitely called for so we glided in with all the grace of our combined one hundred and thirty-two years could muster. Which was limited. So there we sat outside on the sunny veranda, two OMILs (Old Men In Lycra), Doug with…
..also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe.’ These days he is a relatively unknown figure, but during WWII he pulled off one of the more extraordinary stunts of the conflict. It was made into a passable film with an entirely miscast Dirk Bogarde, but achieved true immortality…
I’ve mentioned the ABC TV show Big Ideas before. I tend to record the various episodes on IQ and review them at my leisure. There’s no particular theme to Big Ideas and I can easily be put off viewing a particular episode just by scanning the synopsis, but sometimes the description is so inscrutable that…
..incisors eventually surrendered. I could tell the difference between linoleum and the Italian tiles that they tried to imitate without needing to resort to a hammer and chisel. In the film ‘Stagecoach’ when the Indian fell amongst the team of horses, went under the stagecoach , caught the axle and climbed back onto the swaying…
..us with some unanswered questions, not the least being what is it about our society that young men find this the only way to express their frustration with Life, the Universe etc.? I dallied with the thought that perhaps as an only child, our troubled young man might’ve been accorded too much maternal affection, (is…
..Mother Lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. It was turned into a hotel in 1934 with the idea of Benevolent Elkdom remaining in the smell and the décor. It had achieved a certain notoriety because of its Grand Ballroom, where Kiss competed with cultural highlights such as the First American Sex Festival,…
Mal Logan and Enza Pantano have visited my studio recently and recorded some Hammond and vocals respectively on a couple of my new tunes – and of course in this case, a good time was had by all, and everything went down in one take. Great stuff! Thanks guys, I owe you one! (No, make…
.. expand its floor space) can be an exercise in angst and frustration as you sift through the many variations available in every conceivable item. Should you buy this version of raspberry jam because it’s an Australian brand? Or is it just packaged here while the fruit is actually from Korea? Or is some of…
..staggering Lear-like around a deserted caravan park. What legacy will he leave? Missed opportunities, doors closed that might have been opened, darkness where there should have been light. The opportunistic gall, the sacrifice of principle to expediency and the denigration of truth and transparency will rankle less than the utter mediocrity of the man and…
.. months older than I am. I’ll have to do some work on my avuncularity. Nigella Lawson is slightly more problematic. I find her simpering to the camera lens a little disconcerting, but if I’m so dog-tired I can’t even manipulate the remote, I’ll hang in to Nigella’s show till the family arrives with the…
I hope he had a really good time in his three days. As a by-product of my reading I tend to collect oddities of history. Apparently I am much older than I thought – and probably dead. The story was also mentioned obliquely by my brother some time ago. However what he failed to note…
..could access the music room, which was equipped with a grand piano and comfortable looking chairs with flower print covers – it probably doubled as a lounge / reception room now that I think about it. Our grandmother was a formidable pianist and we would spend many an evening singing selections from South Pacific and…
Our first regular dentist was the ancient Dr McIntyre, who was on the first floor off Cathedral Square in the then small but undiminished Christchurch. There was a clanking open-frame lift with pantographic doors, but one felt safer taking the wide polished wooden stairs up to the linoleum landings with their doors of frosted glass….
…shattering when you inevitably drop it, but they’re also bad because they tend to partially obscure the camera lens when you’re taking spontaneous shots for the website. A phone pouch doesn’t keep your phone dry in a toilet bowl either, as I discovered after peeling mine off the phone. My pretty little Nokia phone/camera had…
The idea of a Metaverse did not arise with Linden Lab, but had its genesis in a Commodore computer game from Lucasfilm called Habitat, Lucasfilm being the film production company that brought us the steadily declining Star Wars franchise. Habitat was made available in 1987 by the corporate progenitor of America Online, Quantum Link. It…
..found a story that I’d seen in on the NZ Prime News about a Kiwi musician, Don McGlashan, (whom I saw in the Comedy Festival a few years ago in The Front Lawn), who’d ridden his bicycle into an open car door, (somewhat ironically in Auckland’s Dominion Rd, which featured in a hit song he’d…