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May 14 2014
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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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Jan 29 2009
Love0

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.

Dec 15 2008
Love0

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.

Jul 29 2008
Love0

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!] 
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