Rotary accessory watches / hire-purchase signet rings

First essential film of 2010? I think so….

 

Ain't been round since you know when / Christmas time is here again

A million or more words must've been put to screen about Avatar since Dec 17th. I'm about to add to them. Sorry.

Christmas Day in Bangkok seemed to be the obvious time to see this. It's a Buddhist town, and a working day, so, we figured, we could celebrate in our own unhurried way. We'd do the family thing, the Skyping and the gifts, the big breakfast and then, having dispensed with all that, wander onto the Skytrain and rattle down to the cinemas at the Paragon, where the IMAX is reputedly the most advanced anywhere, with a gobsmacking sound system, and often sparsely filled on a weekday afternoon. I booked a bunch of the best seats in the place online just to be sure. Row F, 19 to 21, smack in the middle one row in front of the deluxe ($12) seats.

On arrival the queue went halfway across the 5th floor dome and the PA was loudly announcing that there were only 2 seats left. We'd lucked in by being prepared, and reflected that it wou'd've put a shitty cloud over our observance of some ancient deity's son's make believe birthday if we'd not been able to get a seat. There were lots of very moody looking people wandering away.

After a family scrap over the amount of popcorn we'd bought (there was no point in rejoining the line to get more, as it too seemed to grow by the minute), we were seated. Best seats in the house, aside from the big loungy things with waitress / waiter service up the back, but they feel like a waste of money and you just know he / she's gonna return with the beer when just you're trying to get your head around some complex love triangle. No, we had a coke (it wasn't even zero, being Xmas and all).

There is a lot that could be said about the movie: the plot is very hackneyed and a little offensive (and we expect more from James Cameron? On what past evidence?); it has more stereotypes than the average Fox News Hour; the attacks on every facet of the American sense of entitlement and the way they go about grabbing that entitlement reflected on their history from Pocahontas & John Smith to Manifest Destiny to the winning of the west to Vietnam to Iraq and beyond, was however both predicable and a little bit fodder-simplistic. I'd argue that it likely largely went over the heads of much of the US audience who simply wouldn't get the link (and one has to question the usual assumption that the American Empire is still dominant in 2154); the white man as the saviour of the noble savages had an awful arrogance about it and the implied racism really made me struggle at times; then there were the scenes that felt like The Lion King in 3D, most specifically when the tribe was sitting around the magic tree singing...It felt like a wimoweh moment was a comin'....as did the African accents (as in Oprah goes to Africa styles) of the 'people'.

But, for that I loved it. I felt like I was there, if a few days late (sorry I'm not as culturally immediate as many others out there), witnessing a pivotal moment in cinematic history. The technology now means that nothing will be the same again. Draw a line out from 1900, the history of the cinema, and you can point your finger at maybe ten-fifteen moments when a film completely changed the the way movies were made and the possibilities of the cinema as both entertainment and an artform. In my life I've seen about 4 and I'd argue that Star Wars, and maybe the realism of the opening salvo of Private Ryan (forget the rest of the movie) were others..and of course, the early Pixars. Of course, this is not a brilliant movie in the way that, say, Raging Bull or The Godfather was, but it's, as is being almost universally said, a game changer and one that you feel yourself drifting into, so much so that I periodically snapped out of what felt like complete involuntary absorption. And I'd realise that, yes, I was just watching a movie, albeit one with a very average story (and for that reason why, oh why would you ever bother to see it in 2D or on DVD, although the thought occurred to me later as I passed the pirate DVDs near the Skytrain station, that if they had been filmed in theatre, 3D that is, would the effects kinda work if you had the shades?).

The two and three quarter hours passed in a flash, and almost had to slap myself at the end. At one stage a guy a few seats down from me returned from the loo, and I watched as he emerged from behind parts of the movie to take his seat. I'd not realised that he wasn't in the film until he sat.

As we left, the lack of conversation was notable..I've only left a cinema surrounded by such silence twice before..Once Were Warriors in Auckland circa 94, and Apocalypse Now in Sydney in '79. Of course this was not the cinematic mind fuck either those were once you strip away the technology. Maybe (or maybe not) it was because the audience was 99% Thai and the sub-titles were slapped in badly in 2D and appeared only faintly at the back of the screen image, often being overshadowed by things that moved past them..still, as said, if you went for the story...

But what struck me more than anything was not the film itself but the fact that in studios and in minds all over the cinematic universe, and indeed in bedrooms and teen minds, ideas are forming to take this to the next level, to take the possibilities to the next strata, to exceed the achievements of what was very ordinary, and largely ignorable Hollywood cliched fodder, dressed up as a show case for mind boggling technology.

And that big parts of it were made in NZ.

Oh, and the hongi was well cool.

Afterwards, unable to face a heavy and inappropriate Christmas dinner in Bangkok, and having battled through what felt like a milion people in the malls (it took 15 minutes to walk 200m on the skywalk) we retired to what may be my favourite restaurant on the planet right now, Pla Dib, in Ari, for some Thai-Japanese fusion (Salmon Sushimi Larb..yum) with Belgian beer..it seemed like the right thing to do.

dunga dunga dunga dunga dunga dunga dunga dunga

We went to The Dark Knight tonight..wowee, a movie that actually lives up to it's hype. We've been trying to get tickets for days but it was worth it...I loved pretty much every cheek-slitting moment of it, but a couple of thoughts

• I was well pleased to see Maggie Gyllenhaal get blown into a million fragments. If there is one actress who makes, me cringe it's her..I don't know why, maybe it's the Sunday Hallmark Channelness of her smarmy smile. The one miscasting.
• I do enjoy being able to take the family of three to the movies and spend a grand total of US$7 for tickets, drinks, popcorn and parking. It's one of the pleasures of Indonesia.
• I love the way the film continually caught you off guard, the slightly predicable conclusion to the bombs on the boat aside, and the 2 1/2 hours went without a single moment when I looked at my watch.
• On the way home Brigid asked why Batman was no longer called Bruce Wayne...uhh he was we said. Her excuse: we were sitting too close to the screen. I've since insisted she have an early night.
• I loved Jack Nicholson's slightly comic Joker in the last series but Heath Ledger, bless him, just kills it. He was incredible and mesmerising, it's just a shame he will never know it. Hollywood desperately needs male acting talent. You know the talent pool is not healthy when Leonardo Di Caprio gets cast in what should be credible roles. Bets on an Oscar?
• Where the hell was Robin? I'm a traditionalist..I like Robin..gothic and a work of cinematic art it may be but I like Robin.

Technorati Tags: Batman,The Dark Knight

And with my anger / accidently caused apocalypse

First up, from Boycott-riaa.com comes this: I don't know about you, but I despise those extended piracy warnings tagged onto the front of some dvd I 'm wanting to watch...especially when, as always seemed to the way in NZ, we ended up paying more for the bloody overdue fees than the DVD we didn't ever watch.. But far more important than that, is this track, for download, which may or may not end upon the forthcoming album from The Others / Los Othros Something Error Happens Download: Los Othros - Static I'll leave this up for a few days then post another......

We could steal time / just for one day / We can be Heroes, for ever and ever / What d'you say?

At the hotel down the road from they are about to celebrate the wedding between Fanny and WeWe (as per the photographic evidence). Which one is the boy and which one is the girl is anyone’s guess but I think they’re probably well matched.

It bought to mind the movie we watched last night, a fairly highly touted biopic of the absolutely iconic Bettie Page. I enjoyed it, thought it a little fluffy, but it was pretty watch-able and it had an ending that made some sort of sense. However a quick Google indicated to me that, if the film was not exactly dishonest in its portrayal, it was at best economical with the truth. There was a fair bit of importance missed out during the era the script portrayed, and the ending gave no indication of the pain she had to endure in later years (I love the photo half way down that linked page…even at 80 years of age Bettie has something those two could never hope to aspire to). Quite the opposite was implied…the truth was, not unusually for these things, manipulated for dramatic effect. No big deal, you come to expect such things, which is why I tend to do a wiki or the like after watching a “biopic”.

And you have to wonder that if Bettie had a dollar for every girl out there with a hairstyle inspired by her, or ten cents for every photo of her used anywhere since….one of the true iconic images of the fifties, and, until recent times her life has been a struggle, a total mess actually. The books, the pens, the postcards, the t-shirts……I can’t even begin to imagine what she’s been, to turn a phrase, screwed for.

But it then brought me to the movie we watched the night before, yet another critically hailed dramatisation of recent history, the heroic, and, I’m told, inspiring (or something to that effect if the comments from Arab hating Yanks on it’s IMDB page are anything to go by), United 93.

This, in case anyone missed it, is the cinematic representation of the aircraft that went down over Pennsylvania on the way to The Capitol on September 11, 2001. We all know the gist of the story but this movie dramatises the gist and is, despite everything, a work of fiction based on educated guesswork. Not a lot more, and at times somewhat less. Take for example the German passenger who, without any evidence to support it, or even a hint of such, is portrayed by the filmmakers as a dastardly foreign coward. And will forever, herein be publicly known as such, and his family will have to deal with that. I was absolutely appalled at that, and yet it still got the reviews.

And then there are the cellphone calls. I know some of the calls on the 9/11 planes came from those grossly overpriced phones you get on many aircraft, but some allegedly also came from cellular telephones. Now I don’t think I’m a conspiracy nut. I think that somebody probably flew the planes into the WTC and I think they were probably Al Qaeda operatives…and I think man landed on the moon.

But no-one has successfully explained how, at 30,000 odd feet, cellphone calls were made out of these planes. There is a very good evaluation of this here which intrigued me for an hour last night as I read it and followed the links. And having had this discussion with a friend who is a cellular engineer of some repute, plus having searched the web at some length, it’s a question that has never satisfactorily been answered by anyone anywhere. I wish someone would help me here because everything I’ve been told or read suggests that in 2001 it was more or less impossible. And yet it’s central to the human side of these tragedies as now burnt into the American psyche, and to this movie.

Oh and, one more question. How in gods name did the computers and office paperwork on the edge of the chasm in the Pentagon survive unscathed, a multi thousand degree firestorm and inferno. Just wondering…..

Not that I believe in conspiracy theories, y’know.

So anyway, here’s to Fanny and WeWe.

I’ve been to Saturn / I sat on the rings

Sitting under a Sanur sunset, with the odd smell of a cremation wafting past me as I write, coming from the large ceremony a road away from here, a few thoughts came to mind, a few things that may or may not need to be said but I will anyway.

Firstly, and most importantly, Brigid and I watched the complete sixth season of The Sopranos this week in three rather intense sittings (four actually but one of those was trying to get the Thai DVDs to work). And loved it I did. I’m a fan and thought that the strange mixture of dark humour, and unease for the reality of what they are actually doing, worked better than it has for a long time. My unease was accentuated by the violent homophobia portrayed by many of the characters and by the way the bigotry played out. Whilst the situation is vastly different, the sentiment implied by Ian Wishart in his attacks on Peter Davis, the completely innocent husband of Helen Clark, is not. Whether or not Mr Davis (who I know vaguely but my wife and her family know well) is gay or not is largely beside the point. It is my belief that he is not, but that is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that Wishart saw fit to use the man’s sexuality as a valid way to attack him, and via him, his wife. And that the media, from this distance at least, seems not to have called into question such a tactic, beyond simple distaste.

Now correct me if I am wrong, but some years back, New Zealand passed a law legalizing homosexual behaviour, and more than that, made it illegal to discriminate against someone on the grounds of their sexuality. To then use this as way to attack a person seems to me not only morally indefensible but technically illegal.

But barely a murmur from the righteous defenders of the nation’s morals and the likes of the NZ Herald and TVNZ, unless I’ve missed it. The RNZ interview I heard skirted around the issue, in the assumption that if Wishart had any proof then he had some right to pursue this story. But regardless of whether he did or did not have any evidence the real issue here is that this is implied queer bashing. Sadly however institutionalised homophobia, as illustrated by the Christchurch Crèche and Phillip Sturm cases is an unquestioned part of the NZ landscape in the 21^st Century.

And the line between what Wishart is doing and what happened to Vito in The Sopranos is a very thin one. I for one am ashamed to carry the same passport as the man.

On a completely different tack, in Thailand I bought a bunch of jazz CDs, I’m on a blue key spin right now and decided that I needed some of my old favourites, which I have on vinyl in Auckland, with me now. So I did the correct thing, rather than download or buy the multitude of pirated copies available, I went into one of Bangkok’s quite incredible specialist stores and bought them. Lovely annotated re-issues they are two. All that Coltrane and Getz…..

Amongst the bunch were two on Blue Note (read EMI), Thelonious Monk’s timeless Genius of Modern Music Vol.1, a collection of old 78s released almost sixty years back; and a Sonny Rollins collection of fifties masters. So, innocently, I put the Monk in the laptop, and waited. Nothing, not even the recognition of a piece of laser read plastic. No disc it said. Damn, I thought, faulty disc. So I tossed the Rollins in. And the same thing. I followed it with a Coltrane on Impulse which read and copied to my iTunes without any issue, then two others that had no problem at all either. And it dawned on me…I’d been suckered by EMI, bless them, and their customer friendly copy protection system. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I’d been screwed; I’d been ripped off by this monolith in their efforts to prevent me, or someone else ripping them off. And this on fifty year old recordings which may or may not still be subject to copyright. And they wonder why it is all turning to shit. Since this happened a year or so ago with the live Kraftwerk album, I’d made it a policy not to buy anything on EMI, but in the Thai heat and with the sheer joy and anticipation at hearing these again, I forgot. Fortunately I found both albums on the net and downloaded the things immediately, as I will now do as a matter of policy with anything EMI releases, rather than paying money for something I don’t receive.

So, yes, Thailand, well Bangkok actually…. we went there last week for five days. I don’t know enough about the country to make a fair comment on the coup, except that the King’s blessing on all this seems to be enough to give it some popular legitimacy in the eyes of many of the nation’s people. It’s hard for many of us outside Thailand (or Japan) to understand the authority and place the monarch holds.

But why is it that everyone I mention Bangkok to comes back with a rousing chorus of Murray Head’s awful tune from Chess, or makes sly ping-pong ball references. I didn’t see Murray Head there or spend much time in Patpong (although I did go there but the highlight was finding a 24 hour supermarket to buy some drinks for the hotel…god I’m dull). It was more a routine of the shops, the markets, the shops, food, the shops and more food. I’m a terrible tourist. We went to the royal place but got within a hundred metres of the gate, fighting off relentless touts and con artists with fake IDs and a thousand convincing stories before we decided to go…shopping….

So, all good apart from making one shitty mistake….trusting the Rough Guide to Bangkok. We live in Bali so we should know better. I know that the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guides to anything to do with food, accommodation, in fact virtually anything beyond which road is which and what area is what, are to be absolutely ignored. That mistake, put us in the worst Dim Sim house in Bangkok, and nothing in the place matched the glowing guide description.

But, yes, more shopping and more markets, and it felt good to be in place where in infrastructure vaguely works, and the rubbish was at controllable levels. Where the traffic lights go as they are meant…and I think if I had to live anywhere else in the future that would perhaps be it.

But not right now…

Anyway my old buddy Norman Jay, MBE, is coming to Bali this weekend, so that's a reason to be excited

Songs for the sunset:

The Clash…Armagideon Time…the live version from the wonderful From Here to Eternity that lazily lopes and skanks along with less tension or anger than the studio take, and makes me miss Joe Strummer all over again

Fetus Productions…What’s Going On…I came very close to releasing an earlier version of this some years back, recorded at Harlequin Studios about 1979 with Simon Alexander and Jed Town’s massed overdubbed 12 string guitars under Jed’s wonderfully plaintiff and fragile voice. It was a work of sheer beauty and I don’t know why it didn’t come out. Maybe one day, but in the mean time, this later version will do just fine..

Fuckpony…Freaky Stories of Earth…band name of the year and a killer few minutes of Lil Louis inspired sensual deep house off their album, easily my most listened to record in the last couple of months. Gorgeous, and, dare I say it, timeless..

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane….In a Sentimental Mood…about as conservative as the ‘trane ever got, his album with Ellington ain’t no blistering Live at The Village Vanguard (the first heavy metal record) but it has it’s moments and is perfect for a languid Balinese afternoon (even if the smoke from the dearly departed is in the air). And the Duke’s solo half way through is quite something in a quiet way…