posted by Rob O'Neill at 5:30 PM
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Our muse this month is one-time Bollywood beauty Mumtaz Begum Jehan Dehlav and, as George Costanza was inclined to say, “I’m back in business, baby!” A truckload of lollies has been accumulating since last month, and I’m talking wide-load, long vehicle here.“Kevin can be cripplingly shy,” Shepard says. “He tells a story about arriving in Berlin in the early 1970s. He met up with Iggy Pop and a newly famous David Bowie, and the three of them scored some coke. Kevin had a 500-Deutschmark note—his only cash, to last him a week—and he took it out and rolled it up. He used it, Iggy used it, then Bowie used it and pocketed it. Kevin says that’s why Bowie became a rock star and he didn’t. Bowie had the balls to nick his money, and he was too shy to even mention it.”Here we have a post-modern computer game review, from Stephen’s man at the UN; and a debate on journalists’ ethics, with Vicky Pollard weighing in. The Stratford Theory of Numbers is being tried and tested again, this time on Stuff:
“Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of US adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.”Hmm... statistically that should mean, since there are a lot of frustrated people with web-obsessed partners, at least some of the remaining two in three are getting a whole lot more action.
“They never really tell you the reason,” he sighs. “You never get the real reason.”And in LA you can now map your travel plans to avoid stumbling into a high-risk area. It makes for sobering reading. Thank God for most days in New Zealand. Stay safe.
posted by Chris Bell at 2:02 PM
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Admit it, Auckland: you’re not quite sophisticated enough to have a venue like the Vector Arena. Underneath the yuppie threads and designer spectacles, behind all your chatter about “culture”, “fashion” and “city planning”, there’s a fat bloke with a mullet, trying to dance to Rikki Don’t Lose That Number (and no, the band did not play Rikki). You can tell this from the fact that the rest of the world figured out decades ago that acoustic baffles have to be hung from arena roofs before big rock shows sound the way they should. You can also tell this because the local security haven’t been told what to do in the event that unexpected dancing breaks out in the aisles and because the staff insist on turning people away at the main doors because their ticket shows a different door number from the one they’re trying to access (even though, on the other side of the door, everyone is in the same foyer anyway). You should only need a valid ticket to get into the main door of a venue, people; the self-sorting segregation occurs within, when people head for their seats. And I guess it’s just bad luck when the “Eftpos is down” at the bar and you have to walk for miles to find a cab to get home again because no one thought to kit the venue out with a taxi rank. But enough gripes about event organisation; here’s the real deal on the show, before the cloth-eared critics of the mainstream media get their mitts on it. Read on…
posted by Chris Bell at 4:30 PM
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I’ve been trying to think of something pithy to say about one of my heroes, Joe Zawinul, who died from Merkel cell carcinoma on 11 September. This photo of him at work is from his official website. Words don’t really do it; his music speaks for him.
posted by Chris Bell at 5:04 PM
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I’m up to the letter ‘L’ in Clive James’s book of over 100 essays, Cultural Amnesia, and I’m enjoying almost every page of it, so I’m also looking forward to seeing his one-man show at the Bruce Mason Centre on Thursday night. I disagree with him both about Robert de Niro’s acting and John Coltrane’s sax playing, but they are among the very few people mentioned in this book about whom I feel qualified to comment. One day, someone as well-read as Mr James, should such a person ever again exist, will write a book about insightful commentators of the 20th and 21st Century and, along with a number of other Clive James aphorisms, it will include this quotation:“The mass murderer is ever fond of theories that explain everything, and all the fonder if they can be acquired without study. There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. People are drawn into these enthusiasms by no mechanism that has anything much to do with rational thought.”
posted by Chris Bell at 2:32 PM
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posted by Chris Bell at 1:57 PM
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posted by Chris Bell at 4:43 PM
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In a parallel universe:
Wish you were Heretaunga
Hot August Nightcaps
Papamoa’s got a brand-new bag
Sign o’ the Waikato Times
Petone Bennett
posted by Stephen Stratford at 10:38 AM
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include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s?
Spy-only blogs are also proliferating. Amy Zegart, associate professor of public policy at UCLA and author of “Spying Blind: The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Origins of 9/11”, identified 23 moments when the CIA or FBI. might have stopped the plot. But she said she saw “almost zero chance” that the web would have made a difference, because intelligence officers didn’t recognise the significance of the information they had. “I think we overemphasise what technology can do,” Ms. Zegart said. “The most important fusion takes place inside people’s brains.”
Would that be confusion?
posted by Mark Broatch at 3:18 PM
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