Posts by TracyMac
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If Mr Tamaki's god is so powerful, why didn't he pop up a volcano in the middle of Auckland, where most of us licentious (hah, I don't have a Merc, much less a fleet of them) queers live. Why did he make an MoD building rocky in its foundations, but not Parliament?
These morons wouldn't understand the word "logic" if you smacked them in the face with it.
That said, I do get very tired of the constant broadcasting of Trump's latest mouthfarts over and over. I disabled my Facebook a couple of weeks ago because of my feed being filled up with constant negativity and no action plan.
We all know what he's like now: sure, share the word when he targets yet another group. But stop the incessant whinging and come up with something constructive. Donating to Rainbow Youth is a splendid idea - you can share the reason why AND provide a direct benefit.
And yes, place a church's charitable status on a par with any other business. They can still offset their CHARITABLE activities; everything else, hello tax auditor.
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On the wry laugh front, today wasn't really the best day for Air NZ to be emailing their Aussie subscribers, "... It's time to admire NZ - 48 hour sale."
Email received 5:02 am Straya (east coast) time. :-)
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Regarding huddling in door frames, if your house is fairly modern, there's no point - there are no extra wall studs around them these days.
Civil Defence recommend crouching and covering near an interior wall away from windows, appliances, etc, if you can't get under a desk or table.
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For the life of me, I don't know why Obama didn't proceed with the Supreme Court appointment. He had time. What a disaster.
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Fantastic article - looks like the book is a must-buy for me.
Who knew that Lisa Ben actually released a single!
As for the Olivia Records genre - since I really think it is a genre of its own - it's something I personally struggled with when coming out (with one or two exceptions like Alix Dobkin). I liked disco, I liked post-punk/new wave, etc, while women a few years older than me were listening to Cris Williamson et al wailing on about "sisters" every second word.
I think many of us in the 80s went for what we'd call queer artists now - David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Joan Armatrading, Bronski Beat, Marc Almond, Tracy Chapman and so on. Michelle Shocked, before she became a "born again" Christian and started making bizarre remarks. As for Joan Armatrading, pretty much every lesbo in creation had at least one of her albums, and Melissa Etheridge's a few years later.
Then there were the dyke version of the gay music icon - instead of Kylie, we had strong/feminist female performers like Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Eurhythmics and Janet Jackson. There was the "cute guy" genre, typified by Terence Trent D'Arby and bands like A-ha (guys that sang good songs, and er, looked like they could be queer women, in a way).
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Here's hoping - assuming Key gives one toss about improving educational attainment, and thinks a deck-chair shuffling exercise in "behavioral economics" is better than directly funding the things you want schools to do (although of course they don't want schools engaging in non-sport extra-cirricular activities with the poors) - that if they did set up such an initiative, it'd be called something less juvenile and patronising than "Nudge".
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The poms really are the best at coming up with creative swearwords. I mean, I like the American "douchecanoe" (I feel it should be run together), but "cockwomble" and "fuck trumpet" are so Old English in their use of assonance in the paired words. And a nice spondee for emphasis. "Douchecanoe" has the assonance as well.
I've been particularly charmed by English swearing since I first heard someone described as a "bell-end" in a classic North London accent.
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I'm glad that my musical taste isn't stuck where it was when I was 25 either - I get bewildered at people younger than me who think the 80s/early 90s was the best. It wasn't (there is no "best", unless you strictly like some genre that isn't done any more - one good friend of mine remains devoted to hair metal).
That said, Kanye, other than a couple of tracks, epitomises style over substance to me. I like a lot of Beyonce's stuff, but not enough to buy an entire album. On the other hand, I think Lady Gaga (where is she hiding?) blows Madonna at her peak out of the water. She can sing, for a start. Longevity may be something else.
Getting to the main topic, Audioculture is a true taonga, and I'm grateful to Simon for getting the ball rolling, and the site so well established.
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Enjoyable piece on cultural history, thank you.
Interestingly enough, my own favourite piece of original art is a photographic landscape of trees in Taranaki, overpainted in an atmospheric style. Can't recall the artist right now, unfortunately. Piece is from the early 2000s.
In any case, some of us kiwis still rate hand-coloured landscape art on our walls!
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Hard News: Monday Music! Outrageously right, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's a great story.
One also has to wonder why TVNZ prices their footage so high, since one assumes it's not exactly a hot market internationally for NZ news footage.
One also has to wonder why price-gouging occurs when this footage was paid for before TV went commercial. Sure, Westside will be earning revenue, we hope, but I wish we treated our taonga paid for from the public purse and related sources more the way the Americans do.