Posts by philipmatthews
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We haven't had the festival down here yet but people in Auckland have been saying good things about Afghan Star, a doco about Afghanistan's Pop Idol. I think I'll be looking at Che in its four-hours-plus version, Broken Embraces, The Limits of Control, Encounters at the End of the World and Land of the Long White Cloud (Herzog-Habicht overlap), the doco about All Tomorrow's Parties by the guy who made the mindbending Tarnation. Might even sit through The Edge in action just to get to Jimmy Page and Jack White in that guitar doco. Plus, Samson and Delilah has been widely recommended. Curious to see Disgrace and The Baader Meinhof Complex: two great books that probably won't be improved by being filmed. Interested to hear any opinions of Graeme Tuckett's Barry Barclay film.
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Garth's column is wrong in so many ways, of course, but there's one thing that really leapt out -- a reference to "this vast wealth" handed out to iwi after Treaty settlements. I wrote about Ngai Tahu last year, ten years on from their $170m settlement. I had a par that went:
Did $170 million seem a lot of money? Not to Mark Solomon. He remembers that, as far back as 1988, Tipene O'Regan warned that Ngai Tahu couldn't expect to get more than 1 per cent of what their lost assets were worth. The Crown's 1980s value was to put Ngai Tahu's loss at between $12 billion and $15b. Ngai Tahu gave the same documentation to Credit Suisse First Boston, which came back with a value of between $18b and $20b. So O'Regan was about right: Ngai Tahu got 1%.
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Adding to Tom's list, for those who remember the NME in its glory years: Steven Wells. Sadly, I doubt a Jackson/Wells encounter ever took place.
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Tragic, utterly. Despite how completely off the rails it all went, the first thing I pictured when I heard the news was the clip for "Billie Jean" -- unquestionably one of the great songs of the 20th century. So I suspect that we'll remember the talent and come to forget the weirdness. And I feel like the reverse will apply to Phil Spector.
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FYI, the letter from Brian Priestley that Jonathan Maze referred to:
Thank you for Martin van Beynen's summing up of the Bain retrial (June 20). This was journalism of the highest class.
In contrast to much else that has appeared on the same subject, this piece was intelligent, logical, clearly argued and courageous.
Perhaps Van Beynen is not the only one who deserves our gratitude. Bearing in mind the likely reaction, many editors would have thought up pretexts for tactfully leaving it out.
BRIAN PRIESTLEY
Sumner -
For those interested, there's a good doco about the whole Judas Priest backwards drama called "Dream Deceivers". The song in question apparently had "shoot! shoot!" running backwards. I don't think Black Sabbath had one but Ozzy solo got pinged for a forwards message -- a song called "Suicide Solution", I think.
The other day Steven Price had a link to a site -- I'm too lazy to look it up -- where there are MP3s of the forwards and backwards versions of songs. I heard the "Here's to my sweet Satan" in Stairway to Heaven as "Here's to you, Clayton". Couldn't detect anything in Hotel California. Too scared to listen to the Britney Spears. It seems ludicrous but the anxiety around backward masking came out of 80s fear about Satanic conspiracies: if those Satanists think there is some power in saying the Lord's Prayer backwards, then reversed speech would also have some effect ...
As for Bain, I definitely thought I heard a "pr" sound.
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Something seems to have happened to those stories about suppressed evidence. Do a google for "Bain suppressed evidence" and you get a handful of results but none of the links actually bring up the story, including the Herald one and TV3's.
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Few would actually remember this, but Laws is also a published novelist. Back in 1999, HarperCollins followed his my-life-in-politics memoir The Demon Profession with a novel called Dancing with Beezlebub. Perhaps a few excerpts from Iain Sharp's SST review can give us the flavour of it:
"MICHAEL LAWS'S fictional debut is a tough modern thriller in the Patricia Cornwell and Thomas Harris mould _ salty dialogue, graphic sex, graphic violence, definitely not for the squeamish.
It opens with a scene of father-daughter incest. Then the body of a young boy is fished from the Whanganui River, eyes gouged out, genitals hacked off. This is just the first of a series of grisly killings. The plot builds, through many twists, to a suitably chilling finale.
... Although he can summon forth a smarmy line of patter when need be, his attitude towards Wanganui _ and everyone in it _ is basically contemptuous. At various points he refers to the city as a "dump", a "dung heap", a "creepy little place", "a shithole" and a "provincial slum".
... Given his fondness for turning other people's prejudices upside down, it's tempting to examine some of Laws's own assumptions. While gruff Maori cop Ru Willis is probably the book's most likeable character, I think there's an element of condescension in the way Laws writes about Maori people. Nor is his depiction of lesbians as vicious, dildo-wielding loonies likely to win him much popularity with gay women." -
Someone who used to do a bit of reviewing for the Listener thought that the current version should be renamed "Luxury problems". As an ex-staffer, I couldn't possibly comment ...
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Close-Up really did make a balls-up of that, didn't they? From Cameron Slater, who looked like he wandered in from an audition for a Fast Times at Ridgemont High remake, to Therese Arseneau, who confessed at the outset to having "no inside information". She's a very good analyst of poll data and voting history but has never pretended to be a press gallery insider. Where were their political reporters? Campbell Live wiped the floor with them: good stuff from Duncan Garner and Colin Espiner who had actually spent the day covering the story.
The only saving grace: Sainsbury gave Slater's blog address as whaleoil.com, so at least the hundreds of thousands of viewers who want more of his valuable insight won't be able to find it.