Posts by Simon Grigg
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It takes a certain lack of human empathy to delight in other people's tragedies.
Unless of course they want you to, and one would have to be naive to think that Britney did not assume that the world would do so.
Right now we have a girl with a lot of money taking a few drugs, partying hard, shaving her head and getting a tattoo. Apart from the money, it sounds like my niece.....except this girl is doing so in the knowledge that the cameras will click.
From her manager:
“Britney has been through a tragic thing that hopefully will never happen again, shaving her hair was a sort of therapeutic thing for her. Britney knows that she needs help and is already going through counselling, she knows what needs to be done and is slowly re-building herself step by step.”
the cynic in me smells a new "comeback" album very soon...I simply don't buy that the minders, lawyers and such that have controlled her every step to date, have put their hands up and walked away from their primary asset.
Coincidently this is the most recent look for Joan Jett, who wrote one of Britney's biggest songs.....
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Britney, however, debuted with a worldwide number one single, aged 17.
yes and they'd (the machinery that made that single) been working very hard towards that for a very long time. There is of course too, a vast gulf between Madonna's role in her own career and Britney's.
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I can't help but feeling that a part of the Britney fall is the inevitable, with someone as manufactured as her (and she was despite the "co-writes" little more than an image and a person who provided part of a vocal to a digital machine), realisation that it's more or less over. The money is still there, and the grasping paparazzi, but the career is over bar a slow ugly decline.
Then there is the cynic in me that says that this is part of the new repositioning of Britney..all of this...she has a new album due and its no secret that Jive is wanting to rebrand her as a bad girl.
But, that said, I don't think there are many left in the fast collapsing American msuic industry able to pull such a thing off (there are no more Don Kirshners out there) so I tend to lean towards the first explanation.
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Another annoying feature of Auckland businesses is that few commercial premises have streets numbers visible so you can spend a long and fruitless search driving/walking up and down a length of road to locate the right building.
This gives me a faint twinge of nostalgia for New Zealand. My house in Bali is 51X...number 51 is two km down the road, next to 16 and there is no 51A-W. We are next door to 28. You build a house, you assign the number you like. Roadway chaos of course and finding a house or a business anywhere is a challenge (that coupled with the fact that if you ask a local if they know where No.XXXX is, they inevitably smile, answer yes, and then walk away).
But the nostalgia is soon banished by the thought of the bloody rules that accompany the street numbering order. I know thats an overstatement, but I don't miss the rules, by-laws and over regulation that swamps so much of the western world, and in particular NZ which is approaching Singapore in its omnipresent and growing regulation of everything. I think of the ACC parking warden that gave me a ticket (!) some years ago for my shops sandwich board, located inside the door of my shop because council rules said no such boards anywhere on High Street, and she took this to mean including inside my doorway. And I think of the board of rules that covers a simple visit to the beach. I think I'd rather live next door to number 28.
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And you could throw India into the mix when it comes to Churchill...he deliberately refused to assist the Bengal region during the famine of 1942-3 as some sort of twisted punishment for the earlier rebellions against British rule (Bayly's "Forgotten Armies" documents this fairly well) thus condemning many millions to a death. Amongst many things, this is part of the reason I don't consider him a great man.
James, your point about Churchill is well made though. I can see something of him in Bush. He held his nation together in a moment of crisis but his foreign policy thereafter, and indeed most of his policies were a disaster. The Allied nations, and Roosevelt in particular, effectively sidelined him after 1943.
I too read the Australian..we can buy it new here in Bali, however its editorial slant is shallow and unpleasant, more akin to Murdoch's other outlet, Fox.
And you slant my statement about the relevance of WW2. I'm slating the continual rightwing barrage of "we saved you in WW2"...its an irrelevant statement..the stance of a nation in WW2 has no relevance to how they should be perceived in 2007...Germany for example. That aside, the statement (made by yourself in these pages too) is less than a half truth.
The only parallel I can see to that conflagration is as you say, a battle between good and evil. It seems most Americans now have an inkling, too that perhaps the dark side of that divide controls the White House these days. That perception, which that op/ed in the Australian tried and failed totally to argue against, is widespread, which may be why European common policy vis a vis Iran now seems to be a quiet containment policy aimed towards Washington.
Oh, and as others have said, and you still don't seem to grasp, Iran has a damn sight more right to be there than the fly in the ointment, the USA.
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Peter,
yes I agree. I used to be something of an Isaacs complete-ist some years back, and own about 40 albums I guess, but the downward spiral that began back there, whilst it was arrested somewhat (as he was too, several times) during the quite wonderful Gussie Clarke era, was always evident, especially as he headed into the mid nineties.One of the stories I heard from the Roots Radics was that there was never any money to settle up with the band after a tour, as GI had spent it all. They were continually lured back with the promise of settlement and the odd part payment or advance on the next album, only to be let down again. It was an ongoing cycle, but as was pointed out...he was Gregory...and in Jamaican musical terms he was the closest thing they had to royalty.
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United 93: Seriously, how the f*** do you CHAT LOUDLY through the final climatic seconds of this movie?! Some people need a tasering.
U93's fictional German-as-a-coward sequence was appalling, especially when one considers that this poor man a) died in the crash, and b) has living relatives.
Why the filmmakers felt some need to add this as if to appease those who cried about old Europe's Surrender Monkey ways, is beyond me. That alone ruined this film IMO.
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That Gregory Isaacs clip is a wonder. I saw him at a London Reggae Sunsplash, circa 84/85 and he was truly mesmerising, and I got to meet members of the Roots Radics about the same time....although I was told by others I was with that he was well off form..serious substance problems at the time, not that I could tell. It's always bemused me how such a bad boy can have such a voice, but I guess that is simply part of the attraction....the voice of an angel with a flick knife in his back pocket
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I don't think James is a troll and I think it's unfair that every time he posts - usually with a lucid viewpoint and links to support his claims - people pile on and dismiss him as a troll or right-wing nut.
I agree, but the problem tends to be with the links posted are often rather suspect, rather nutty, right wing spiels. The one yesterday, the op ed from Murdoch's broadsheet in Australia (the same paper which employs the odious Greg Sheridan as its Foreign Editor) was a litany of faux logic ("the American haters even hated Carter"), and half baked dogma including the standard "America saved you from the Nazi's" nonsense that always gets trotted out as if it really has a relevance.
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And here I go again :
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what Pace said twice was a calculated moment of dissent from the official line.
edit function....some of us click post rather too quickly...