Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: The Ides of Epsom, in reply to Richard Aston,
Will the good people of Epsom wake up and vote with integrity or will they just do as they are told ?
Maybe everyone can just stop being so condescending to the electors of Epsom? Sorry if they keep returning MPs you don't happen to approve of, but to use a technical term: Tough sodding titty. One of the most pleasant, if least remarked upon, features of Election Day is the utter irrelevance of the pundits and self-appointed arbiters of electoral correctness.
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Legal Beagle: Q&A: John Banks' judicial review, in reply to BenWilson,
I don’t think they should back it, either. It is actually a costly form of grandstanding.
And at least, as far as I understand the law, it can be avoided without a dirty little stitch-up to retrospectively change the Electoral Act under urgency, despite the utter lack of genuine public interest or constitutional urgency.
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Purely for informational purposes, here's Mike Williams'... um, interesting musings on that Missing Million we're probably going to hear a lot more about.
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I don’t think the spluttering was really that coherent, but it probably is true that a large-ish group of non-tribal voters sees a multi-party centre-left coalition possibly relying on New Zealand First and Kim Dotcom as less secure than what they currently have with National.
Quite possibly - and I know this doesn't go down well with the arch-"pragmatists" of Labour and National, but I don't think I'm the only person out there who thinks the price of power is too high if Winston Peters is running up the tab.
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Legal Beagle: Q&A: John Banks' judicial review, in reply to Kumara Republic,
“We’re acting as though this is some heinous crime. No it isn’t, it’s just a clerical error”.”
Oh, someone pull out the world's smallest violin and go play that tune to the next beneficiary whose "clerical error" (AKA failing to fully and promptly declare income) get their arses prosecuted for benefit fraud. Ditto for the next small business owner who fucks up their GST returns, and ends up owing the tax authorities a serious chunk of change -- with interest and penalties, of course.
But its always different for politicians and political parties who find complying with far from onerous electoral laws so damn challenging...
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Hard News: Friday Music: Original Beats, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm not a big live gig goer (to put it mildly), but I have mad respect for people who master the theatre of working a room -- it's not just about the music, because I've seen performers who are musically fine but they're still...dead.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Original Beats, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s kind of amazing that this sort of thing got broadcast back then.
Not really amazing at all – it’s exactly the same way Joss Whedon managed to smuggle a not at all mild but archaic obscenity past the MPAA and the studio in The Avengers. If the squares don’t ask, a hep cat never tells. :)
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Legal Beagle: Q&A: John Banks' judicial review, in reply to BenWilson,
Perhaps I'm really naive, but the smart move for every politician would be to STFU and let the actual member of the judiciary in this sad and tawdry tale do his damn job.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Original Beats, in reply to Russell Brown,
And the Rolling Stones and the Beatles trying to emulate the blues and R&B records that came across the Atlantic, then taking it back to America.
Lloyd Bradley’s Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital paints a similar and dazzlingly complicated picture of “black music” in London. Because, of course, there’s no such think as a homogeneous ‘black’ (or any other kind of) music. The margins become the mainstream, as a whole new bunch of upstarts start muttering “what the fuck is this sad old Dad music? Listen to THIS instead!” Fashions and tastes mutate in ways you never quite expect somewhere you’re not looking, and in some obscure (for now) corner some kid is dusting off Dad’s old MP3’s and falling in love…
Isn’t life grand? :)
ETA: Seriously, I warmly recommend Bradley's book -- not least because like the best cultural historians he's very self-aware (and self-critical) that everything you think you know is probably wrong, or at best only part of the story. So get your arse out there and do your homework instead of cutting and pasting what's been said a hundred times before.
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Which is odd, because as QuestLove of The Roots writes in How Hip-Hop failed Black America, a series of six essays for Vulture
That is tasty – and I just loved this from the QuestLove answers Reader Quest-ions post…
Quest-ion: So what?
Answer: Lots of people gave this shrug. I don’t like the shrug. It’s an abdication of responsibility for making sure that art keeps doing the things that art should do. If you shrug, that keeps the wheels turning the way they’re turning. It lets corporations turn you into selfish consumers. It lets them fit you for a new pair of blinkers. And that means that predictability keeps getting prized over experimentation and product keeps getting prized over art.
I was talking the other day to my manager and a writer friend of mine, and Big Ideas started getting thrown around, as sometimes happens, and a metaphor came up for this process: the redshift. None of us is an astronomer, but we read the papers, even the non-funny-papers. Here’s what happens: One of the ways that astronomers prove that the universe is expanding is looking at distant light. If it’s moving toward us, wavelengths get shorter and it shifts toward the blue end of the spectrum. If it’s moving away from us, wavelengths get longer and go toward the red end of the spectrum.
In DJ/sonic terms, it’s similar to what happens with a siren: When it’s headed our way, the pitch is a little higher because sound waves are bunched up. As it moves away, they spread out and that pitch drops. Well, hip-hop culture has redshifted. The pitch has dropped. Innovation may exist, but it’s not the dominant characteristic anymore. It’s moving away.
*sigh* If QuestLove’s music is as good as his prose, I might just have to expand my musical horizons.