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Call to Arms

By Blogging, Cinema, meta

As they say in the movies, “It’s quiet… too quiet.” Yeah, sorry about that but I’ve had a lot on recently.

Here’s the deal. In October last year (2013 if you are vis­it­ing here via Google and the date is not oth­er­wise obvi­ous) I had to stop edit­ing ONFILM magazine due to the incon­veni­ence of not being paid and had to find anoth­er gig. Cinematica was tak­ing up a lot of also-not-being-paid time and, even though it was an enorm­ous amount of fun and enjoyed by many people, it was impossible to jus­ti­fy fin­an­cially the amount of time it took every week. Kailey leav­ing was prob­ably the final straw.

FH_COVER_May2014Since Christmas I have been work­ing as edit­or of FishHead magazine in Wellington, firstly as inter­im, then as former, and finally appoin­ted to the per­man­ent pos­i­tion in March. Learning a new magazine and a new mar­ket as well as get­ting a handle on the busi­ness side of things has meant that I haven’t had any time to keep these pages up. This may shock you but I haven’t even been able to watch as many films as I used to.

Anyway, FishHead is almost under con­trol, Nine to Noon is chug­ging along and the private life is in the best shape ever, so it’s time to rein­vig­or­ate my  per­son­al expres­sion engine — Funerals & Snakes. In June you will see a new look here and a return to reg­u­lar review­ing. Subscribers to the email news­let­ters will also get their weekly updates once again.

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Nacreous

By Asides, Blogging

Tee-hee. Hamish Macdouall just used the word “nacreous” in his Googlies & Grass Stains blog on Stuff. I ven­ture it is the first time that word has appeared on Stuff ever, and that it would­n’t have sneaked past a Dom-Post sub if it was going in the dead-tree edi­tion. It’s rare that any­one these days uses a word with which I am unfa­mil­i­ar but this was one I had to check. And the first defin­i­tion offered by Google (via Merriam-Webster) is spec­tac­u­larly unhelpful:

: pos­sess­ing the qual­it­ies of, con­sist­ing of, or abound­ing in nacre ;

Well, yes, obviously.

Ebert on ... writing

By Asides, Blogging, Literature

Roger Ebert writ­ing about writ­ing (and speak­ing) at his blog:

The nov­el [McCarthy’s Suttree] is writ­ten entirely with that atten­tion. You haven’t even star­ted it until you’ve star­ted it the second time. After weeks of depres­sion, hope­less­ness and regret, real­iz­ing the oper­a­tion had failed and I would prob­ably not speak again, after murky med­ic­a­tions and no interest in movies, tele­vi­sion, books or even the morn­ing paper, it was the bleak, sad Suttree that star­ted me to life again. Spare me happy books that will cheer me up. I was fight­ing it out with Suttree. I did­n’t want a condo in Florida. I wanted a fuck­ing bas­ket of coal.

Is it me or is Ebert writ­ing bet­ter than ever?

Update: Posted before I’d read all the com­ments. Read those too.

Mamma Mia! postscript

By Blogging, Music

The Day Before You Came single sleeveIn my rush to upload my Hancock and Mamma Mia! etc. reviews earli­er I for­got that I was always intend­ing to offer up a digit­al copy of my own favour­ite ABBA tune, “The Day Before You Came”, as it is rarely heard and quite marvellous:


ABBA – The Day Before You Came [right-click to download]

And as an added bonus, as I feel so sorry and so gen­er­ous at the same time, here’s the song as I first heard it (by English pop band Blancmange from 1984):


Blancmange – The Day Before You Came [right click to download]

[And curse all blog­ging soft­ware includ­ing ecto and MarsEdit and WordPress as this post should have taken about 10 minutes and instead took an hour. Gah!]