Robyn's Secret Passage

Someone had taken out most of season one of “Twin Peaks” at my local video shop, so I was browsing the shelves looking for something else to watch. And I saw her. Sweet Jessica Fletcher, staring benevolently yet determinedly from the cover of “Murder, She Wrote”.

It used to be one of my favourite TV shows when I was a girl cos I liked the murder-mystery element. I particularly liked an episode from season one, where an amusement park owner is killed in a locked-room murder.

So that was the first episode I watched on DVD. But rather than being the awesome locked-room mystery I remembered, it was kind of cheesy and lame. The crux of the locked room set-up was some stupid voicemail hacking.

It was this lame:

But this opened a new level of appreciation for “Murder, She Wrote”, and I soon found myself mesmerised by things I’d never previously considered, like the set dressing. Whoever did it – IMDB suggests it was several people – had a thing for covering walls with an eclectic selection of paintings and using pot plants galore.

Take this living room, for example:

To the left, you can see the eclectic paintings, positioned to cover the whole wall. And all around are masses of pot plants. It looks like the stereotypical apartment of a single girl in the big city but it is actually the abode of a hard-boiled police detective. (Jessica is walking over to pet his cat on that chair. His cat!)

Here’s another room from another episode:

As well as the eclectic paintings and the jungle of pot plants, this scene also goes one better with the horse sculpture and an artfully placed Lynn Redgrave on the sofa.

Actually, celebrity spotting is another fun part of watching “Murder, She Wrote”.

Here’s Kenickie getting arrested for murder, dressed as a lady:

:D

Don’t worry – he didn’t do it. He was falsely accused, but his fiancee stuck by him and pashed him to prove to viewers he wasn’t a gay, but sadly was unable to prove that he wasn’t a total douchebag. (The real murderer was Kotter.)

And who’s this cute li’l scamp?

Why, it’s none other than Oscar-nominated serious actor Joaquin Phoenix, here playing Jessica’s great-nephew Billy.

But what kept me going as I revisited all those DVDs were the mysteries at the core of every episode. Some of them are far-fetched, others are too easy to guess, but others were quite ingenious and made up for that lame voicemail hack.

So, I think it’ll be a while now before I get around to watching Twin Peaks.

ITEM: I went to the Cross Street Carnival on Saturday. The street was closed off and filled up with Craftwerk regulars, including Annette of Nut & Bee, and City the NZ Cupcake Queen. Even the local brothel was part of it. The K Road area has been in need of a carnival, but with K Road itself being a major city road and having the motorway so close and steep streets either side, it’s been lacking a good location for such an event. Cross Street is ideal. I hope it becomes an annual event.

ITEM: So, you know that Flight of the Conchords television programme? Well, I’d never got around to watching it when it was on TV. I felt like the only person in the country who didn’t watch it. I mean, I think even my mum knew what “It’s business time” meant. So now that it was finally out on DVD I bought it and watched it all over two days. It was good, and it didn’t wear thin. Go Kiwi, LOTR, etc.

ITEM: On Sunday I got the ferry over to Devonport, forgetting it was the weekend of the food and wine festival. They make an effort with the admission price to discourage people from getting pissed, but there was still a bit of staggering going on down Victoria Road. And then the added bonus of having Hello Sailor’s live performance in the park echoing around the streets. The New World car park took on a whole different feeling with slices of “Blue Lady” drifting around it.

ITEM: You know what’s cool and new? It’s the Aucklandista blog. It’s a sister site of the Wellingtonista, founded by Auckland-lover Jo Hubris, and hasa growing list of contributors. It’s all about the various aspects of what makes Auckland rather awesome. It’s early days, but it’s slowly finding its own Aucklandic take on things.

ITEM: Ok, let’s have a look at some photos from the Cross Street Carnival. (See how even the Mercury Lane car park looks festive?)

I was trying to avoid Valentine’s Day, but then a chocolate heart appeared on my desk (work-related, not <3-related) and I was lured into the delicious chocolately world of February 14.

So in order celebrate it, sort of, I set up a smart playlist in iTunes and looked at all the songs I had with “love” somewhere in the title.

There’s an interesting mix of the sweet and sour – for every “Love Will Keep Us Together”, there’s a “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. It seems a healthy mix of full-on love songs and songs for times when love has been ripped from your life, cos the latter makes the former that extra bit sweeter, y’know?

Looking at play count, the most played was the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” . It was almost ruined by the squelchy guitar bit being used in a Mariah Carey song, but it rises above that. It’s just a cute little singy rappy song that is just as much about love of music as it is about boyfriend love, and that’s just fine with me.

I’m a fan of the future. No, not the one beyond the present. I mean the future as seen from the 1950s – 1980s. When the year 2000 was going to be all flying cars and food pills. Whatever happened to that future?

One of my favourite relics of The Future is The Usborne Book of the Future, published in 1979. I had it as a child and I was excited to discover that it had been scanned and was online at The Pointless Museum.

When I was little, I enjoyed reading of the authors’ vision of the future. Was it to be a brown, smoggy dying world, or would we get our act together and live in a green, thriving utopia with robots to clean the toilet?

But the one thing that really confused me was an illustration of a hologram conference call – where some businesspeople see their boss across the table, only he’s a hologram.

It wasn’t the technology that confused me. It was the fact that is was daylight for the staff and night-time for the boss. I didn’t understand how the two states could exist simultaneously. My mum tried explaining about the shape of the earth and time zones, but it did not compute.

Now, maybe the idea of cyborgs with ESP or colonising Venus is still pretty far-fetched, but the Computers in the Home section (page one, page two) didn’t do too badly with his predictions – A giant flat-screen TV! A home video camera! Ordering goods off a computer! A video disk player! Electronic mail! A robot butler!

All of those innovations are now part of my everyday life (Except the robot butler – I threw my RoboButler2000 off a cliff after he gained sentience and started pilfering my Jack Daniel’s. What a hassle that was.) Though, unlike the future suburbanites in the book, I don’t lounge about in a jumpsuit.

But is is worth considering that the idea of email as we know it was too far out to be considered – email back then involved writing out a letter by hand, scanning it, sending it, and then printing out at the other end. OMG -fax!

And unlike the 1950s’ sexist vision of The Future, were women did housework in their space homes, bringing their husband his space pipe and space slippers, this 1979 vision of The Future appears to have gone one step future and has no women in it at all. Or – and I think this theory has weight – perhaps by the year 2000 the human race has evolved into one sex – everyone is totally gay for everyone else! (This doesn’t explain the abundance of jumpsuits, though.)

But I’m not going to be nostalgic for the future too much. I’ll just take comfort that while it’s the cybertronic year 2008, even though the lush, green solar-powered utopian future hasn’t happened, at least the dirty brown nightmare future hasn’t happened either.

Perhaps it’s most revealing that both visions of the future include brutalist architecture.