Robyn’s Secret Passage

Tonight I went to the fourth Public Address Great Blend shindig. This one was at Hopetoun Alpha, which is a splendid old building with panoramic views of the city sweeping over to the North Shore.

Anyway, the theme of this Great Blend was something along the lines of television and the internet and intellectual property - a few of my favourite things.

The special guest was Ashley Highfield who is the BBC’s director of new media and technology (yeah, I cut n paste that), who had apparently been flown out here courtesy of the British Council especially to talk to New Zealanders who spend too much time in front of computers.

The evening started with a short performance from Ladi Six. It was just her an an acoustic guitar and it was generally lovely, but she seemed a bit apologetic and unsure of herself, even after she’d warmed up and had people in the audience stealthily grooving in their chairs.

Next Russell Brown did an interview/discussion with Ashley Highfield. It was very interesting, because the BBC are doing some very interesting stuff. Fo’ example, they are trialing a system where viewers can download TV programmes to watch up to seven days after they have screened.

This sort of thing really excites me because I miss out on so much excellent TV that isn’t on at a time that suits me. There is no longer this massive urgency to watch TV show. In 1986 I might have made sure that I was in front of the TV to watch an episode of Macgyver because if I missed it, that was it - no DVD release, no BitTorrent, and certainly no ability to download a missed episode from the broadcaster.

But now, missing an episode of, say, Desperate Housewives doesn’t bother me so much because I know that sooner or later it’ll come out on DVD and I can watch it at my leisure.

After that was a panel discussion that went into those topics of discussion a little deeper and with more relevance to New Zealand. It seems that the wheels of progress and innovation can move rather slowly around these parts, but there are some really good ideas and people to want to do good things, so that makes me glad.

The evening’s entertainment concluded with a performance from Pitch Black, but it seemed that most people ended up moving outside to engage in some debate and discussion about the night’s events.

I was so caught up in too many interesting conversations that I didn’t even get to do the rounds and say hello to everyone I wanted to. A sign of a good evening, I think.

I’m amazed that such an excellent and informative event can take place at no cost to the audience - and not only that, but there were free sausages, which, in my book, is the hallmark of a good time. A bloody good time indeed.

The Auckland Museum had an open day. It wasn’t very well run, and this was evident right from the beginning when a volunteer directed a man to the women’s toilets. Fortunately a member of the public told him where he should actually be heading, but that didn’t stop another slightly confused-looking man emerging from the ladies loos, probably wondering what sort of strange unisex toilets the museum had.

For $10, men and ladies could go on a behind-the-scenes tour. This seems to involved following a yellow line on the ground. At first I thought the line was guiding visitors to the start of the tour, but then I realised that the line was the tour. Every now and then were printed sheets with various bits of information, but it was hard to tell if the places that the yellow line travelled through were noteworthy parts of the museum or just ways of getting from one noteworthy place to another.

Fortunately the yellow tape eventually lead to some interesting places. It lead me right into the middle of the courtyard (or what is left of it), and in the midst of the construction of the new bit, which so far is like a giant cone that’s been plonked down in the middle of the courtyard. There was lots of metal and concrete, which pleased me because those are my two favourite construction materials.

Eventually the yellow line lead me out the back door of the museum. Apparently they’ve put an underground car park out the back, which is a fairly impressive feat.

Out the back was a sausage sizzle that seemed to be surrounded by more volunteers than public. There was no indication if the sausages were for the public, and if so, what they cost, and the old lady I asked initially couldn’t understand what I was asking, and then finally took a long time to construct an answer to my yes or no question. I bet the Raglan museum’s fund-raising efforts aren’t this disorganised.

I finally escaped the yellow tape and went back into the museum and found the Zambesi exhibition. It was its last day, so I was glad to have seen it.

There was a collection of famous New Zealand ladies’ favourite Zambesi outfits and a little blurb about each one. Bic Runga wrote about how she likes to dress up when going into the recording studio, Fiona Pardington wanked on about Joy Division and a catsuit she wore on a date with her “lover”, but the best was Danielle Cormack’s mid-90s tale of being so empowered by her awesome Zambesi outfit that she went drunkenly skateboarding down Franklin Road, with skirt-shredding consequences.

The other part of the Zambesi exhibition was a collection of various garments from the last 20 years or so. They were displayed on armless, hairless, accessoryless mannequins. Strangely, the skinny-arse mannequins ended up making many of the clothes look too big (sometimes in shops they bulldog clip clothes tighter so they’ll fit the underweight mannequins). They might have been better off using coathangers.

The concrete was good, the frocks were good, but the yellow tape was frustrating.

Happy All Saints Day! The eve was somewhere non-eventful around the 630. It seemed like there were more fireworks than trick-or-treaters. It’s just as well. All I could offer would be sunflower seeds or mints.

I read this bit in the Herald:

“At the front door, [the group of trick-or-treaters] meet 14-year-old Madeleine … wearing pink fishnet stockings, a short leopard-skin skirt and bright red lipstick.

“‘Are you Barbie?’ one of the group asks.

“Not exactly, she replies.

Magic that gets sweets out of pumpkins - NZ Herald

Which immediately reminded me of this wisdom from “Mean Girls”:

“Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

- Cady Heron (played by Lindsay Lohan) in “Mean Girls”.