Posts by Stephen Judd
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Emma, are you serious? Please tell me you're joking, because I can feel the intracranial pressure building already,
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Yup. I think conflating Muslims who live here with their co-religionists elsewhere is a grave mistake. And treating them as some sort of subversive, fifth column force of evil is reprehensible.
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Ben: I started being aware of a live music scene, even in piddly Hamilton, in the late 80s, and for me about 1991 was a high water mark. After the benefit cuts and tertiary student funding changes musicians were being hassled to work , the drinking audience declined, and students had less spare time. Now perhaps the taxpayer should not have been funding a bunch of beer-drinking, freeloading noisemakers, but anyway I reckon there was a sharp discontinuity there.
Perhaps a change of fashion towards DJ-based dance gigs was the reason instead.
OK, it's not even a theory, it's a hunch.
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Is this where I can air a pet theory of mine? The benefit cuts and the student loan scheme were a 1-2 punch for New Zealand music from which it has a taken a long time to recover, as both the producers and the consumers of live performance were forced back to their day jobs and their study carrels.
Just a thought.
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AAC, MP3, OGG - let me put in a plug for Rockbox, which is finding its way onto my iPod any day.
I still buy CDs, but the first thing I do is rip them for use on the iPod and PC. Generally to MP3, but my plan for the future is to rip a master to something lossless like FLAC and then transcode to a compressed format, prolly Ogg, as required.
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And on the poetry front: when I was in my second year at university, on impulse I bought an anthology of poetry in English that had been remaindered from some course the year before. With a couple of friends I used to smoke with at the Wailing Bongo we formed the beer and poetry club which met one afternoon a week at the Hillcrest and recited verse while becoming steadily drunker. Malcom got the girl, I didn't, but the poetry stayed where the lust had faded. And in that anthology Curnow and the Baxter and Tuwhare held up well against Tennyson and Browning...
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The problem is, Deborah, a lot of books have carved a notch on the bedposts of my easily-led mind, and I keep wanting to say yes! Me too! Uncle and the Moomins! Hoban! and so on. And a whole lot of "me too" would be too much.
But returning to the topic itself: one series that has really stayed with me was Spike Milligan's war memoirs. I was in my late teens when I discovered the first one. ("Hitler: my part in his downfall", I think it was called). Very funny and sad at the same time. It was the first inkling I ever had that war was by and large not a noble enterprise, and those books have soured all accounts of modern military glory for me ever since. His account of how impossible it was to discuss what he had been through with anyone at home made me wonder about all our tough old guys who made it back.. (And of course relatively speaking he got off lightly and early, retiring to a jazz band behind the front lines).
When I learned even later that Milligan was a manic-depressive arsehole who managed to hurt most of the people who ever loved him, but couldn't help it, it made me think even more.
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Oh boy. I want to keep wading in but then it would be all about me. I admire your collective taste, folks.
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A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?