Category Archives: LJ

Posts which originated over on my LiveJournal site.

Music is magic

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After work today, I went downstairs and watched the Magic Numbers play. Their lovely three-part harmonies gave me goosebumps.

I ended up on telly for a little bit, in a fuzzy, background, out of focus sort of way.

Here is me and Romeo from the Magic Numbers on the telly:

(I was smirking because Romeo was talking about the song they were about to play, and I realised that it’s totally true what James said, that while the Magic Numbers have this image as cuddly, lovely hippies, their songs are rather quite dark.)

Here is me and the Magic Numbers and Sainso and other fans:

This is probably the most I’ve been on TV. The second most was my brief background appearance on Tonight in 2004 in an item about Idol Blog, and the third was an even briefer appearance in the audience at an Idol taping also that year.

Those were pretty rad experiences, but weren’t as rad as the Magic Numbers.

Plated

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Sometimes I think the universe is conspiring to make all my dreams come true.

For example, discovering that there was a metal/hardcore/other band in the Hawke’s Bay called Gunt, and episode one of the BBC’s language series “Balderdash and Piffle”, where they looked at Polari, the 1960s gay London slang, while Morrissey’s “Piccadilly Palare” played.

And I have found another instance. It’s this plate:

It depicts Trellick Tower, a block of council flats in London, designed by Erno Goldfinger in 1966. It is in the Brutalist style, which I ♥ very much, though many people don’t*. So I’m glad to see it’s been immortalised in china by the People Will Always Need Plates potters.

Sadly they don’t have a stockist in Aotearoa, but just knowing it exists makes me very happy.

* Ian Flemming hated it so much, he named one of the Bond villains after the architect.

Tom-cockery

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The strangest thing just happened outside my flat.

I heard a scrubbing sound and voices – someone saying they needed more water – so I peeked out the window. There were three teenagers – they looked Chinese – who were scrubbing chalk marks off the footpath with water and a broom. Next to them was the neighbourhood old drunk guy who kept saying, “Chalk? You don’t have to do that. Don’t bother doing that.”

Then suddenly all three of them stopped and took off across the road, all sprinting in different directions, taking shortcuts to get away fast. It was as if they were running for their lives.

The old drunk guy staggered off home.

Checking the footpath, there was just a wet patch where the water had been, and a rogue chalk X they missed.

WTF.

UPDATE: It was Christians!

This morning I examined the scene of the scrubbing. There were smudged chalk marks and a few X’s all along the footpath, as if forming a route. The marks continued around a corner and down a side street where I found this written:

Christian graffiti

But this doesn’t explain why they suddenly sprinted off so quickly.

Melyn’s Hag Do

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Last night I went to Dylan and Melanie’s stag do/hen night, which for convenience’s sake we shall call Melyn’s hag do.

We started off at the Pearl Garden Chinese restaurant in Newmarket, and had many plates of many delicious foods. I think my favourite was the cashew chicken, but then I’m a Pakeha, so I would.

Unlike stereotypical stag dos and hens’ nights, there were no plastics boobs, blow-up sheep, nylon bridal veils or penis necklaces. No, the hag do was far more civilised than that. We had 10 pin bowling.

We went up to the bowling alley atop the car park on Khyber Pass. From the outside, the bowling alley stop the car park is somewhat of an architectural monstrosity, but on the inside it’s got everything you need for a good night out.

I played a couple of a games, got a couple of strikes (see, all that Wii bowling has payed off), but also managed to suck. I shocked the lads with my left-handed bowling. OMG. I’m left-handed.

After that we taxied up to Forde’s bar on Anzac Ave. I’ve always been curious about Forde’s. It’s on the top floor of the old Station Hotel, offering panoramic views of Foodtown, the stadium and some apartment buildings. But, due to a quirk in downtown Auckland’s coastal geography, it’s also on the ground floor, so there were no stairs to climb.

Forde’s is an awesome bar. If I was going to be an alcoholic and I need a regular, this would be it. Mr Forde, the proprietor, is everything you want in a pubman.

We all played a bit of “I have never”, with the unsurprising conclusion being that we are all awful people.

Afterwards the party was reduced to me, Melanie, Dylan, Morgan and this guy called Glen. We all wandered down to Showgirls, and this is where things got really exciting.

There was a large group of girls standing outside Showgirls. Now, having spent a year catching the 11.40 bus across the road from Showgirls, I know that usually the only people who stand around outside it are the sort of men who are regular at Showgirls, and strippers on fag breaks. So it was obvious that something was up.

And there he was – Lukas Rossi of television’s “Rockstar: Supernova” fame. Dylan took some pics. OMG!

Lukas is really short and I could totally beat him up. He was surrounded by heaps of excited girls who all seemed to want to have sexual relations with him. Why? He’s short. He’s not hot. It can’t just be that he was on the telly and he was in a band.

Knowing that nothing could really top that, we had hot chocolate and then called it a night. And a rad night it was.

All filler, no thriller

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Last year Peter at Dub Dot Dash asked me and some other folks to make a prediction about what the music scene would be like in the future world of 2007. I said:

Now that the New Zealand iTunes Store has opened, I expect that downloading music will finally become less teenage/geek and more mainstream. But this will mean that people can buy one song without having to buy the whole album.

Well, you know what’s happened? CD sales are down. Smaller, independent music shops are closing down because it’s just no economical to stay in business any more.

Today Mr Slack alerted me to this piece at Ars Technica about the possible reasons behind the decline in CD sales.

The writer theorises that music buyers aren’t just switching from CDs to a digital formats, but instead of buying a whole album, they’re just purchasing the individual songs they want. This probably means happier customers but it results in fewer overall music sales.

But what impact will this have on the sort of music that musicians put out? Will bands stop releasing albums and just release singles? Will this put an end to those awful, unfunny skits on hip hop records? And will this bring back the concept album, daring the customer to be considered an uncultured oaf if they just buy one song?

Over at Digg, in a discussion on this subject, a fellow named catfud shares a solution that we can all use:

if you arnt listen to full CDs you may want to think about changing the kind of artists you listen to i listen to only the best metal and every album a band comes out with is 100% awesome

im talking bands like nevermore, pain of salvation, dream theater, blind guardian, death, dragonforce, katatonia, ,astodon, meshuggah, symphony x, wuthering hights, and communic just to name a few

In this spirit, fans of Hamilton’s premier rock act, Prime Devastation, will be pleased to learn that their upcoming album “Night of the Beast II: Rock ‘n’ Roll Terrorist” will now be 110% awesome and have no crap tracks.