Doan harass me for not behavin' correkkt when I only wantta slide mah arm roun' yr neck

In other news, after spending months twatting on about mai new house, lo and behold I need a new house. I also need a new painting studio. These two things may be at the same property, or they could be at different but relatively adjacent locations. I'd like both to be in Newtown, but that's up for negotiation. If you're reading this and you've got a lead on a good studio, or a flat and/or a useful garage or a shed/sleep-out kinda thing PLEASE let me know. Ugh.. is any of this making sense? My heads in a bit of a spin...

Kode9 - Victims (feat. The Spaceape) (2.63 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

... from Kode9 and the Spaceape's amazing Memories of the Future album.

Try to take Dawn Raid away from me and I'll show you the G in me!

Characteristic humourlessness from the anti-anti-terrorism raids lot:

You can distinguish this from the previously reported "non-tagger tagger" guy because that guy was funny.

Got your cue lines and a handful of ludes

Now that the Asian Haven in Millward Street is going to be diversifying into haircutting...

I might pop in there for my next trim. I trust it'll cost a little less than their standard rates, too (30 Minutes : 100$, 1 Hour : 140$).

Stuff: Brothel may offer fringe benefits (ho ho ho)
Clients of a Newtown brothel could soon purchase extra services from its menu, with plans afoot for a hair salon to open in the bordello.....

And red mutant eyes gaze down on hunger city

There's been a run on:



Taggers in pink while cleaning up their work
Forcing taggers to wear pink vests as punishment reduces tagging, says Eastern Suburbs Community Constable Theo Gommans. But councillor Iona Pannett said the scheme was akin to Nazi Germany's persecution of gay men during World War II and would reinforce prejudice against gay and lesbian people.

Pink Vests for Taggers Divisive
The Wellington community police constable who is making taggers wear pink vests as punishment has prompted alarm from the youth group OUT THERE.

“Wearing pink tagger vests draws on homophobic fears of wearing pink, and the whole concept of embarrassing young people rather than strengthening them is appalling.” said Nathan Brown, National Coordinator of OUT THERE, a youth development organisation for non-heterosexual and transgender youth.

UPDATE
Stuff: Anti-tagging crusader-cop Theo Gommans nominates himself for Intellect of the Year 2008: Gommans said the culprit did not fit the usual tagger's profile. "I put money on the idiot who has done this is not a tagger. Taggers do it for their own fame; this guy is just a clown who wanted to be a smartarse."

Y'think? Cos, like, "Vest Wanted" is an awesome tag, tru dat 4 realz.

The perverse irony is that the culprit is surely now more famous than any tagger would ever hope to become.

Every kayaker needs a compass

Tonight there was quite definitely the sound of a cicada coming from the bush under the sign by the carpark outside the Newtown Sportsbar and liquor store.

I shit you not.

One solitary cicada, months out of season, rubbing his little noisemakers and exhibiting a longevity that would do a centennarian proud.

I really wanted to stop and say something to the plucky little blighter. "Look, what are you DOING? It's the middle of winter. GET BACK TO BED!"

Instead I played him some Glen Brown out of my headphones.

Glen Brown and King Tubby - Father For The Living Dubwise (1.86 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Didn't shut him up, though.

So take off your hard hats boys, in a moment of silence

The night after the fog, everything was back to normal. Five second exposures at f2.8, looking west:


... and north:


The green light looks great on these long burns.. of course it's not green to the naked eye, but you can only really successfully "white balance" for one kind of white light at a time, right? Unless you wanna go "automatic", which I didn't.

Iggy Pop - How Do Ya Fix A Broken Part (1.96 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Another track off New Values, which I seem to keep on coming back to.

How come the sun's too bright to live

Last night I was walking home across Newtown about 1am and boy, it was foggy. Not exactly a pea-souper or anything -- I could quite easily see where I was going and whatnot -- but it was doing that weird and neat acoustical thing where the slightest sounds are amplified out of all proportion. Was having a lot of fun strolling down Lawrence Street while sounding like the BFG or something tromping along.

The cell-phone camera really didn't do the business, though -- it's really quite shit in the dark:


When I got home I set about taking some photos with my digital camera -- improvised tripod (stack of books on the window-ledge, anyone?) and all. This is looking west with a 5-second exposure at f2.8:


It's not a completely accurate representation of the scene, but it's as close as I could get. I tried to stop the shutter down but the field depth was too great and the resultant image not as effective.

One thing which alarmed me somewhat was that the flashing red lights on the cranes at the new hospital building site were completely invisible in the fog -- to the naked eye, anyway. "So," I thought, "let's try burning-in a loooooooong exposure to see if the camera can pick them up". This is a 30 second exposure looking north, using f2.8 again -- this time to get as much light as possible:


"Hells bells," thinks I -- "not a smidgeon of a trace of the warning lights. What happens if a plane comes flying down the valley and smacks right into the cranes, or worse still -- one of the hospital buildings!? It'd be like a re-enactment of the bloody Erebus disaster in my back yard!"

I zoomed in to 3x optical (Carl Zeiss lens, thanks for asking) and tried another 30 second exposure:


Wait a minute... did you see that?


Ho ho ho etc. Actually, of course the reason that the warning lights on the cranes were not visible is that construction of the super-structure of the new hospital is complete and the cranes were taken down some weeks ago.

Phew.

I understand that you now are surprised

I quite like the idea of karaoke, but the reality never quiet matches up to the glory of the fantasy. One of the main problems I have is finding something that I actually would like to sing.

If it were up to me, I would have a karaoke room painted in the blackest black, with a rock-band lighting rig, and blacklights, and minimalist black vinyl and chrome accoutrements, and a karaoke machine stuffed full of my best and favourite music. Like Iggy's The Endless Sea, which I have been walking around singing at the top of my lungs for days now.

Iggy Pop - The Endless Sea (3.29 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

The Endless Sea is off New Values, which I wrote about the other day. What a song. Sometimes I even sing the backing vocals as well as Iggy's main part. And what is up with that keyboard part? Not the tweetily-synths (which are super-awesome in their own right), but the comping: it sounds like a Fender Rhodes run through a laptop running some sort of glitchtronica granulation software -- none of which AFAIK was available in 1979 (aside from the Rhodes). And who would ever have thought that baritone saxes doing an "oompah" part in the bridge would be so powerful.

I'll let you know if I ever get my karaoke room built, 'k?

o o o

I keep finding graffiti around Newtown that I myself must -- but without any recollection of doing so -- have executed.


That is the only feasible explanation, right? No two people can actually come up with the same ideas at the same time completely independently, can they?
Can they really?
Hmm....


Nope, didn't think so ;)

Above us is a dirty sky full of youths and liquors

I spotted another pair of Love Field Deviations; these ones are notable because they appear to have been infected by an alien virus:

This raises the issue of whether or not the infected vexed local Love Field Deviations should've been administered with inoculations and vaccinations against said virus -- or an alien so viral... living spaceapes creatures covered smothered in writhing tentacles stimulate your audio nerve directly... no-one conflicts with me... hallucinating senses individually insiduously or in any combination rhythmically shifting gears focusing intensity... no-one conflicts with me... mind starts slipping from familiar tracks bending warping interfering with the facts sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying... we are hostile aliens immune from dying...

Kode9 - Victims (feat. The Spaceape) (2.63 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Victims is another track from Kode9 and the Spaceape's amazing Memories of the Future album.

Expansionism FAIL

Once you were there, but now you are gone:

Evidently the Strathmore 44 aren't aware of at least one of the two World's Worst FAILblunders -- never get involved in a turf war in South Wellington [citation required].

o o o

Notice the real estate sign on top of Leo's "Superb Seafood"? I wonder if that means the building is being sold/scheduled for demolition/otherwise gonna disappear? Hope so. That way I won't have to write a really nasty post about how fucken awful their fare is.

How could some sexy-ass bitches walk around ride-free

This is a red Toyota Celica *snigger*:

In case you can't read the slogan on the licence plate, it says

SEXY BITCHES DRIVE RED CARS

Now, I've not seen anyone driving the pictured automobile, but rest assured that if I do catch a bitch in or in the vicinity of the red Toyota Celica, I will try to determine the voracity of their alleged sexiness. In the interests of science. And art.

Smog - I Was A Stranger (from Red Apple Falls) (3.89 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Reportback is pending.

Mouse vs. Magma

I just saw a mouse in my room. It looked a bit like this:

Actually to be more accurate, it was just leaving my room. And crawling under the door, not fiddling with a steering wheel boat-thing.

The funny thing is I had just put on a Magma album (1978's Attahk, since you asked) so I can only assume the mouse is not a fan of mental 70s French prog-opera. Did I drive it from my room? If so, to my mind that quite clearly makes it: mouse 0, Magma 1.

Magma - The Last Seven Minutes: 1970-77, Phase 1 [1970-71, Phase I] (5.16 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

I suppose it is beholden to me to try to exterminate this mouse. I am not particularly anti-mouse -- though I gotta wonder what the fucken cat has been doing -- but I am hoping that if I can kill the mouse, I will spontaneously cause the entire Disney empire past, present and future to vanish leaving no trace. Except for Vanessa Hudgens, she's a real keeper.

I will keep you posted.

I'm a bad man, you're a penis, and your whole crew stink like faeces

You can often get a really accurate idea of if I'm having a little period of out-of-control moodswings by whether or not I post little rants here which are barely coherent and generally come across quite poorly. So, to try to answer all the comments and questions received by emails and so on:

[1] I like Newtown. There are crazy people who wander around and they often have amusing slogans on their clothes. So do I. So am I, for that matter. I'm right at home!
[2] I wish that a lot of them were being taken better care of than I suspect they are. I also wish I took better care of myself, as well.
[3] I Am A Soldier In Christ's Army is, well, a pretty full-on thing to be walking around proclaiming, especially to anyone who's read some of the more obscure, extreme passages in the bible.
[4] Some other interesting slogans to wear on one's shirt might be :

• I Am A Soldier In Allah's (or Muhammed's) Army: this could potentially cause the wearer to be the target of everything from fear to disgust and even attract the attention of people like police and airport security.
• I Wish I Was A Stormtrooper In Hitler's Elite Schutzstaffel Units: you see these guys around occasionally. Usually they look like the sort of knuckle-draggers that would've been gang-raped and then killed by the real SS. And why do they shave their heads? They should grow it out, dye it flaxen-blonde and style it into really sharp haircuts using brylcreem or something.
  
• I Am A Veteran Of The New Zealand Army's Presence in Vietnam 1967-75: quite a topical one.
• I Am A Slave In the Nike Army: you see this sort of thing a lot, though not so much the slogan, just the icon. Also, for Nike substitute any sweat-shop child-labour exploiting global clothing franchise.

And so on.

You should be more like Merlin and walk everywhere

Many years ago now, when a friend moved to Newtown, she remarked that it "must be on the Mental Health Ley-Lines". This was because* of the high incidence of seemingly-crazy people who wandered the streets of our venerable suburb at all hours of the day and night. Presumably they follow the mysterious "crazy-" forces associated with points along the aforesaid Mental Health Ley-Lines, or something.

* (It is probably much more likely to have been something to do with the destructive health policies of the fucken National government 1990 - 1999, but that's beside the point.)

Years and years later, she's still there, and the crazies are still there too, picking up the force-fields with their built-in "crazy-o-meters" and wandering endlessly from point to point. Of course they are. Who ever wins votes by throwing money at improving community-based mental health care? Subsequently I find myself sharing a bus with this guy a lot more often than you'd expect to if you hadn't studied the statistics of chance.

If you can't read it, the writing on the back of his jumper says:

I AM A SOLDIER IN CHRIST'S ARMY

I didn't actually know Christ had an army. Depending on whether or not he's actually dead, I suppose they could be the "Army of the Dead" out of Army of Darkness, or The Lord Of The Rings. Or not. Perhaps he's just advertising the Salvation Army. I wonder if he's armed? At least he's not a soldier in Allah's army, I guess.

Anyhow, go him. He also wears a Placemakers beanie, and smells like a damp old couch that a large dog has slept on for about ten years.

o o o

If you're reading this and thinking to yourself "Fuck me, drinks-after-worker, that's a bit on the nose -- leave the old fullah alone" then fair enough, I take your point. But I've already pretty-much made mine; imagine the reinstatement of decent, comprehensive community-based mental health care. Wouldn't that be a bloody miracle, then?

The horse, the man, and his son?

One of the cool things about the shops in Newtown is that as a general rule, they make a bit more of an effort with the ethnic diversity of their showroom dummies. I particularly enjoyed this little hybrid/multi-cultural family in a Riddiford St window:




Especially the accidental pseudo-religious effect produced by my phone camera when trying to deal with the blow-out from the from-above lighting. Sorry about the crappy photos.

Tilahun Gessesse with the Walias Band - Untitled wailing Ethio-funk classic (14.4 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Awesome Tapes from Africa is not exactly my Favourite New Blog; more like a perennial favourite for a long time now. If I had time I'd possibly start one in kind: "Awesome Tapes from Newtown", or something.

I stumble into town just like a sacred cow

I've always loved how one of the Chinese takeaways in Riddiford street is called China Grill:


So much so that I thought we should have a little song:

Iggy Pop - China Girl (4.69 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

There's gotta be a name for this kind of thing -- like a greengrocer's apostrophe. It's analagous with the tradition (?) of suburban hairdressing salons bestowing such names as "Snipz" or "Cutz" or "Streaks Ahead" or "Hair Today Gone Tomorrow" or whatever upon themselves. Anyone reading this a linguist? An etymologist? A linguistic etymologist?

Misandry FAIL

Polite, though:

Be like, "Warriors! Come out and playiyay!"

I'm not exactly sure when this appeared, but it was very recently:

Evidence of expansionism by the Eastern Suburbs' Strathmore 44 gang?

What did they do to chill the joy away?

Apparently there is a "love field deviation" on the corner of Normanby and Riddiford Street, in Newtown:

Thank you to the person who posted this sticker and performed this valuable public service. I'll keep well away from this tree-protector cage thingummy, cos god knows I can do without a deviation in my love field.

I'm enchanted with the possibility that the sticker is is somehow a reference to the form of the tree-protector cage thingummy, which is more than a little reminiscent of classic diagrams of di-polar (electro)magnetic field-lines in (for example) geo-physics:

(click on the diagrams to read lots more)

But I expect that it is more likely a promotional tool for an exhibition of the same name by Wellington painter REMO (Roger Morris), held earlier this year.

I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour

Down at the local, the arm-wrestling competition begins tonight:

I'm hoping to get along to have a bit of a perve.