Posts by webweaver
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Wow - how cool was that?
I wasn't even planning to watch it - I happened to surf by, at about 10 minutes in, and thought - why not? let's watch this football thing for a bit....
By 80 minutes I was on the edge of my seat praying we could hold it together for another 10 - and then they tacked the extra 3 minutes on the end - and the commentator kept mentioning the Bahraini player who scored in the final minute of another game... and... and...
THAT WAS SO EXCITING! And the crowd - well, it makes me proud to be a Wellingtonian all over again.
Awesome!
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To be honest, and this might sound wanky, but the only people's opinions who matter on this subject are those who produce creative work of their own and put it out there. Not the critics.
OK maybe the critics don't matter, but what about the comment that I've heard many artists and creative people make, which is that a piece of art (whether it's a piece of writing, a painting, a film, whatever) really belongs to the viewer once the artist puts it out there?
That whatever "meaning" or message the artist originally intended to make is necessarily coloured and re-defined by the person viewing it, who is seeing it and relating to it through the lens of their life experience. And that the artist essentially has to let it go in terms of the original meaning to them once they put it out there for everyone else to see.
How does that relate to what you've said - that the only opinions that matter are the artist's? Or is that different?
And what about the plagiarised artist's opinions of the plagiaree? Do they matter? Cos you did say yourself in your blog piece that it pissed you off when someone else nicked your upside-down NZ idea.
Just curious...
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mark t - I think you may have accidentally posted your missing post in the wrong thread - I just spotted it on page 3 of Hard News: It was 20 years ago tomorrow.
Or maybe Teh System did it when you weren't looking...
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Heh. Particularly with the joyful experience that is English regional accents...
Case in point: I used to go and see West Brom play occasionally (before it all got too violent), and as their home turf is smack bang in the middle of the Black Country (near Birmingham), with its exceedingly strong accent, my favourite chant was:
yaw'r gaowin' 'ome in a foo-kin' am-bu-lance
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Ooh yes that was an amazing time. I remember the days before the Berlin wall came down and then the day it did, watching on telly as thousands of ecstatic Germans pulled the wall down pretty much with their bare hands. I so wanted to be there.
And then when Nelson Mandela walked out through the front gates of his prison to an enormous crowd of (also ecstatic) people. Incredible. There was whole bunch of friends round at my house that afternoon and we put the telly on to watch it - and we all cried with joy.
I remember thinking that the world was turning on its head politically - so many enormously significant events happening one after the other.
I guess it was around that time musically that I saw The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Pixies (twice), Dead Can Dance, New Order, and I think possibly U2 (pre-stadium days). Very cool. It was a good time to live in England.
And then in 1990 we went down to London for the Nelson Mandela concert at Wembley stadium. It was an impressive lineup of acts, but the best bit of course was when the great man himself came on stage.
We went completely nuts, singing and cheering and yelling and screaming and chanting - and it was a full six minutes before we quietened down enough to let him speak. There's a very cool audio recording of the ovation here. You can't hear it on this recording, but a whole section of the crowd began singing the classic Liverpool football chant You'll never walk alone - Nelson had to ask Winnie what we were singing cos he had no idea what it was.
Seeing as it's Friday - here's the football chant sung by the Liverpool crowd in 1965:
And here's Free Nelson Mandela from the Wembley concert:
...and finally the BBC News report the day he was released (embedding disabled):
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Ah Keveeeeen how I love thee!
Glad to see I'm not the only one who has a bit of a thing for Grand Designs - and the ever-lovely Kevin. I don't think I'd win in a battle for him with Joanna tho'. Damn!
My fave ep ever (along with Craig and Tony) is the Ben the woodsman one. The Revisited version a coupla weeks ago was new to me and it was just so heartwarming to see how his life had completely changed since he first built the house - with the addition of a lovely wife and two lovely children as well as a completely beautiful house. I love the bit in that ep when Kevin arrives for a visit and he's almost stuck dumb by the unexpected beauty of the house - having imagined it was going to be "a bit hippie and wavy" and instead it's a poem to wood in all its glory. Fab.
The Yorkshire castle one is pretty cool - especially when the 600-year-old inner wall collapses on film while they're still digging out the crap from inside. Or how about the insanely isolated cottage up a hill in Wales (complete with outbreak of foot & mouth halfway through the build), or the disused waterworks in Chesterfield where they end up having half a Mini as a desk in the living room cos the scale is so huge. And I also love the Huf house epi too (the ultra-efficient black&white German kit house).
There are quite a few eco ones actually - here's a list of all the eps - scroll down to the Eco & Ethical Houses header to see 'em.
And then there's Grand Designs Abroad - the Irish church (gorgeous!), the Spanish villa in the Andalucian hills, with the amazingly modern architecture, glass everywhere and insanely cool pools (and long-suffering Spanish builder who thought they were completely mad), the Swiss chalet (where Kevin first uttered the immortal words "je suis Keveeeeen"), and one of my other faves - the artists' retreat handmade villa in Puglia with its vaulted colonnade and mosaic-decorated garden.
Just marvellous! I'll stop now...
ETA: Oh no I won't - worst houses? The make-it-up-as-you-go barge where they used whatever recyclable bits and pieces they could find and that ended up so ugly it got thrown out of the only mooring they'd been able to find, and the massively dreadful McMansion in Spain built at random by the South African couple.
OK I really will stop now...
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Aww thanks, Matthew... Yeah there is one thing to be said for a) having been born in the UK and b) having been born such a long time ago - at least I got to have punk as one of my seminal musical influences and the genre in which I cut my gig-going teeth.
I still regret never seeing the Pistols - but they were pretty scary back in '77 and their gigs were notorious - not really the place for a slightly-built 15-year old girl to be going late at night... And then there was the great Clash-gig-that-never-was in 1982 that I had tickets for, but which was cancelled due to JoeS going AWOL in Paris. Aaaarrggghhh.
But how about:
- Front row for The Jam in 1978 - The Jam being the first "punk" band I ever liked. I remember hearing them on Radio Luxembourg in the summer of '77 (in between the endless Elvis tribute tracks) and thinking "Oh! So not all punk bands are loud and rude and scary like the Sex Pistols! I could get used to these guys!"
- Front row for Elvis Costello & The Attractions in 1978 - and back then we could *never* have predicted what a huge and well-respected musician Mr Costello would become. Back then he was just a geek with a guitar.
- (Eventually) front row for the Tom Robinson Band in 1978 - who were supported by an as-then completely unknown Irish band called Stiff Little Fingers! Me and my friend Elaine went completely mental for SLF and danced our way right down to the front (we'd been sitting much further back) - and managed to stay there for TRB as well.
- Front row for Ian Dury and the Blockheads in 1979 - where I was boosted up on stage by some guy in the audience, stood there blinking in the spotlights for a few seconds and then was unceremoniously carried off stage and thrown out the back by Chaz Jankel.
A whole heap of Boomtown Rats gigs - in fact the Boomtown Rats was the first gig I ever went to. I have a bit of stinky old towel with which Bob Geldof wiped his sweaty brow and then threw into the crowd, where it was promptly ripped apart by voracious fans including me.
And of course every Stranglers gig it was possible to go to. I was rather fond of The Stranglers. I was always in the front row, whether it was a seated or non-seated gig, which meant that you always came out with a massive line of bruises across your midriff where the moshpit crowd had crushed you against the stage - and of course the inevitable hairdo full of gob. Actually, pogoing around under a rain of spit was something we all got used to - it was sometimes even quite refreshing in a twisted sort of a way...
Ah, those were the days...
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Heh. And I see that in the time it took me to compose that lengthy missive about 15 other people said pretty much the same thing.
Look! Another great blast from the past video - with some of my favourite ever lyrics:
And a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk
Bottles to their heartsThe Jam: Town called Malice
helllppp - how do I embed it?? I still haven't figured it out!
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Continuing the punk thread derailing...
Caleb, you've got it completely and totally the wrong way round.
As someone who was actually *there*, partaking fully in the 70's British punk scene, I can tell you that it was most definitely NOT skinhead and NOT racist and NOT all-white. In fact a great many of the original punk bands took an active part in the Rock against Racism gigs and demos of the time, as did we all, together with the Anti-Nazi League and other anti-racist organisations.
Russell's exactly right when he says:
The first-wave British punks liked reggae because it was seen as an outsider music. There was reggae played between bands at punk gigs -- Don Letts was the DJ at one of the original punk clubs, The Roxy, and subsequently made his feature debut with The Punk Rock Movie.
The Clash, for example, were well-known as a band who combined many cultural influences to create their unique sound, which can be described as a fusion of punk, rockabilly and reggae. There's a good summary of Don Letts' documentary The Clash - Westway to the World here, which amongst other things says:
As DJ at the Roxy, a gathering place for the nascent punk scene in the late Seventies, Letts spun reggae while pointing his camera on the working class musicians and artists -- among them future members of the Clash, Public Image, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Slits -- grooving to the underground dub sounds
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"It was definitely a cultural exchange," says Letts of his years side by side with the Clash. "We were both turning each other on to our respective differences; we realized that reveling in our differences made us closer."
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Letts makes the point that white rockers borrowing from black music isn't a new phenomenon, but he maintains that the Clash were different. "It wasn't people who were three thousand miles away that were influencing them; it was the people who they grew up with. The fact that they realized they could say things with musical reportage, that comes from listening to old reggae records."As a teenager I went to my first punk gig in 1977 and saw The Stranglers, The Damned, The Jam, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Stiff Little Fingers, The Boomtown Rats, Siouxie & the Banshees and many others many times over the next few years. I can assure you that the audience was without fail a multicultural and multi-coloured one, and the music had its roots in a whole range of cultural influences, reggae included.
Punk was a very political movement as well as being a music genre that spawned very strong fashion trends. To some extent, we borrowed the clothing of the skinheads (Doc Martens, skinny drainpipe jeans, shaved heads for some) and re-invented it to represent the complete opposite of what the skinheads were all about, and added our own twist (granddad shirts, belts galore, safety pins and rips, spiked hair).
The politics of punk was all about a celebration of the working-class, with front men such as Paul Weller of The Jam and Joe Strummer of The Clash taking a strongly political and vehemently anti-Thatcher line - both at their gigs and in the lyrics of their songs. Being a punk in the 70s was all about being a lefty, and it was about as far away from having "all the "black" elements systematically excluded" as you could possibly get.