It says something that none of the references in the Wikipedia article about Wellington's Ladyhawke are from New Zealand media.
She (officially, Ladyhawke is the band and Pip Brown is its leader, but everyone seems to call her that anyway) is signed to a white-hot Australian label and is based in London and will probably be easily the most successful new New Zealand artist on the world stage this year. All without troubling the official cultural machinery. It would be nice if someone brought her back to play the Music Awards later in the year.
In the meantime, it was a stroke of inspiration to have re-record her flagship tune 'Paris is Burning' in French. You can hear 'Paris S’Enflamme' here, and there's a clip for the original version here.
Her video diary from Glastonbury is worth a look too.
Staying with music, there are cool mixes of Ladytron and MGMT and even more MGMT remixes.
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But best of all, there's a big sampler swag of scandi-pop, officially free from Sweden's Labrador Records. You can download several of the tracks here, but the label's own server was swamped when the world rushed to get the full album. So they did the rational thing and put it on The Pirate Bay.
Fatty Jubbo at WFMU has found more strange and interesting imageblogs and photosets, and the blog also has a some links in tribute to the composer Raymond Scott, the designer of the Fascination machine.
Oh, and now that the Democratic primaries are over, One Good Move is back to its highly readable and diverting self. Phew.
PS: Our team won a rather truncated debate about the respective merits of "paid" and consumer-generated content yesterday, thanks to input from Peter Haynes, Steve Barnes, Emma Hart, Lyndon Hood and David Hamilton, whose words and ideas I incorporated in my speech. The big bags of Eden coffee go to Emma and David, who quipped "Paid content is to consumer generated media like Pacifier is to Shihad." David, can you email me so I can arrange delivery?