Speaker by Various Artists

I believe you should try to do at least one new thing each year. This year I'm going to get around to trying some muttonbird.

Our friend Adrian puts it this way: Think about it. You've got these little chicks hidden away in a secret nest in a little hole on the side of a cliff, just sitting there getting fat. Each day their parents come flying back from the southern ocean and fill them up with omega three oil from the fish they've digested. By the time the harvest season comes, those chicks are actually fatter than their parents. They haven't moved, and they're just loaded with Omega 3.

I know that elsewhere in the world they like to market tuna as the Chicken of the Sea, which is just too confusing for some people, but actually, I like the notion: chicken that actually tastes like fish.

If you're a bit brave about your eating, you can have all kinds of surprisingly good experiences.

A few years ago in Hong Kong our friend John got a bit disgruntled with us when we wouldn't try some food at a little stall in a dusty market on one of the islands. We saw cracked bowls and hepatitis, he saw the food. Okay, but I think you guys are missing out on an experience, he said, as he tucked in. He suffered no ill-effects. He also declared it to be one of the best meals he'd ever had. He would say that, of course, but I suspect we actually did miss out on a treat.

In my life I have also passed on eating snake, mountain oysters, eyeballs and probably a few others that an analyst may one day find under a blanket in the repressed memory corner of my brain. If you grow up on a sheep farm, your week starts well with a Sunday roast, but as you work your way through the animal, the standard drops a little bit each day. The low point comes at Saturday lunch time when you ask yourself which treat you're in for today: Liver? Brains? Tongue? Tripe? You tell that to the kids today and they won't believe you.

Sorry, I've made you lose your appetite. Let's get back to the mutton bird.

There's more than one right way and plenty of wrong ways to prepare any kind of meal, and I think the poor old Titi's come to grief in more than a few kitchens. My Mum says that on the day Dad came to pick her up from the maternity home along with yours truly, he was in an expansive frame of mind.

So when he spotted a sign in the fish shop window offering muttonbirds he said: I've heard they're good. Let's try one. Home they came with a nine pound baby boy and a muttonbird that for all I know may have weighed more. Mum got to cook it. She said it smelled appalling, and that things didn't get any better when they sat down to eat it.

Every other muttonbird story I've heard has been a variation on that theme, accompanied by the helpful advice: You don't want to try them, mate.

Well, I do want to try them. Adrian's promised he'll prepare them for us some time, and we're on.

Adrian thinks that if it's presented to people in the right way it could become a true delicacy. Forget about Mike Moore's lamburgers; think what the Russians have done with salted roe of sturgeon. Maybe the people who do the harvesting could talk to the people at 42 Below about getting the buzz going. I do see one guy here is doing his bit to help.

According to nzbirds.com,

The nightly homecoming of countless numbers of these birds on bird islands of southern New Zealand has been described as one of the marvels of the world. An observer seated on shore will notice before 9pm in mid-summer the birds collecting in hundreds on the water off shore. Soon they will rise and begin to circle the island or the area containing their burrows in their thousands. As one watches a thud is heard followed by a soft rustle. The first bird has arrived to be followed by countless numbers.

If you're a herbivore, you'll be picturing the beauty of that moment, but if you're a carnivore, admit it, isn't there a little bit of Homer in you that's saying Mmm. Chicken.

I could be wrong. Still it's just a thought, and I do recall that a marketing approach along those lines worked for the butcher ship in Willis St that put a sign in the window about the time Watership Down was in the movie theaters and the law on selling rabbit meat had changed.

It said: You've read the book. You've seen the movie. Now eat the cast.

Bon appetit.

I was sad to read that Deborah Hill Cone hated Tokyo during her 48 hours spent here. It seems a pity, a waisted stopover really, but you can't please everyone. But being an entrenched gaijin in Tokyo, I was pretty upset at having the whole place slagged off in such a superficial way, so I kind of said to Russell, "Can I get my ten cents worth in too?", and he graciously obliged.

So, I thought I'd begin with a little run-through of Ms. Hill Cone's checklist of Tokyo hates - and it is a decent-sized list for just 48 hours. The legwarmers, yes they are quite ugly. Until recently it was in fact mostly ruuzusokkusu, (loose socks) mainly warn by high school girls since the mid-90s in tandem with repugnantly short mini-skirt school uniforms. Thankfully, this unwelcome fad has pretty much run its course. Apparently, the popularity of what looks to us like underage prostitute-chic lies in showing off an in-your-face youthfulness, symbolized by their namaashi (bare legs). As opposed to all the over-the-hill (i.e. 19+) women wearing stockings. The fad was also, unsurprisingly, associated with actual underage prostitution, the proceeds of which were used to finance the girls' expensive clothes buying habits. This practice was euphemistically referred to as "enjokosai" (assisted dating), and very few of their clients were ever prosecuted. These days, unless you hang around 109 in Shibuya a lot, the loose sock brigade are not that visible.

Ms Cone Hill referred to the other untold fashion crimes witnessed on one trip from Narita to Shibuya. Give me a break, please? How many such horrible faux pas is one likely to see driving from Mangere to Britomart? Maybe I'm just lucky, but everyday, just on my half-hour commute to work I see amazingly interesting-looking people. Sure, there is a lot of shallow sameness about a lot of the fashion, but that's mainly a reflection of the high level of affluence and the relentless consumerism of all the magazines, whose only mission seems to be making people feel so inadequate they buy a complete new wardrobe every three months. But it's certainly not the horrendous no-go zone Ms. Cone Hill tries to make out. I'm sure one of the most bizarre things about coming to Japan for the first time is how well-groomed everyone is. Even the ripped-jeans crowd are clean. (When you live here you only realise this when you leave.) And yes, some of the teens and twenty-somethings have been brainwashed by the media into a cult of vanity and "beauty".

And complaining about the place being filled with Starbucks - it's hardly a problem unique to Tokyo. I suspect a lot of the hates mentioned by her stem from her problems with "debased European culture". It's like she's saying, "It's our culture, how dare you other people f**k around with it!" Well, if you didn't notice, that's how culture works: it gets synthesised, cross-pollinated and generally everyone steals their favourite stuff off everyone else.

Moving right along, next on the list is the "prefabricated bathrooms", which most people hate. If a visitor is complaining about these, it is a sure give-away that they were staying in some "cheap" business hotel. And while we're on that subject, the person doing all the complaining has got all of two days to see Tokyo and she books a hotel in Tachikawa! (Like going on your first trip to London and staying in Reading for two days.) Only a cursory glance at a Lonely Planet book would reveal that this was a bad plan. There is reasonably priced accommodation in central Tokyo if you are prepared to be flexible and try looking. She hates the cellphones - do I detect a hint of jealousy at all those lovely colours and fluffy dice cultural equivalents? She didn't see any old buildings or trees? Advice: try walking around with your eyes open. Last but not least on the pet hate list is, wait for it, "politeness". Now let me get this straight: people being polite to you in a city you don't know shit about and the language of which you don't speak, is something to hate? Wow. What can I say? Most people in Tokyo aren't arseholes. Bet that'll scare most tourists away, eh? After complaining that there is nothing Japanese about Tokyo (an assertion one could legitimately argue) then she goes on to do a hatchet job of something that truly is part of traditional Japanese culture. As I said, you can't please everyone, eh?

(BTW, a 90 minute commute is not considered short by anyone here. I bet my 40 mins door-to-door is better than a lot of the poor sods who have to use AKL's motorways!)

Anyway, enough of that stuff. What does Tokyo mean to me? I figure Tokyo is the kind of place where if you have the energy to get out there, meet people and do stuff, you will be more than well rewarded. You don't need loads of money, but a bit helps. To put the place in perspective, the Auckland region has about 1.3 million people spread over 5,000 square km. Tokyo and its surrounding three prefectures cover about 13,500 sqaure km, with a population of 34 million. That's a shit-load of people in anyone's book and it's magnified by the high average income levels. Another factor is the high percentage of people in the 18-35 age group. Young people flood into Tokyo for their tertiary education and they stay when they start working. The countryside in Japan is depopulated of that age band. There are huge media and creative industries concentrated in Tokyo - manga, anime, music, film, magazines, literature, TV, art, design, fashion, game software, you name it. And it's getting more cosmopolitan by the year, partly because of the intense international interest lately in Japanese pop culture. I learned along time ago that there is a "scene" in Tokyo devoted to any inane genre of anything you could possibly imagine.

Finally, what do I like/dislike about the place? The likes include the parks: Inokashira, Yoyogi and Nogawa; the food: especially places like Cafe 8 in Omotesando; the coolest ambient/tribal dub label in the world, DakiniRecords and their wicked Dakini Night parties; and just generally hanging out with my friends and loved ones. I don't go clubbing much now in my old age, but if one is looking for a big night out on the weekend, Ageha is a unique experience. These days I get my adrenaline kicks from (occasionally) cycling 20 km to work through an amazing variety of terrain. In the summer, the outdoor party scene has got to be one of the best in the world. Camping up in the mountains and paying homage to the earth sure beats some sweaty club.

What don't I like? Lots of shit, really, but especially the wankers blowing cigarette smoke in your face on the street and in restaurants.

Even when I decide it's time to shift down a few gears and shift back to a nice out-of the-way spot in NZ, I know I'll still look forward to coming back occasionally for my fix of the unique buzz that is life in Tokyo.

When Muldoon was still Prime Minister, I became a suit in an advertising agency. I would call it an accident, and I'd rate it as one of my more regrettable ones.

I had a part-time job in a pub in Wellington and I was getting towards the end of my law degree. Young women would come into the bottle store. I would talk to them. One of them was named Mandy, and she would come in quite often to pick up supplies for the ad agency where she worked. The agency sounded glamorous, the people she worked with were glamorous and she was glamorous. See if you can guess the reason I asked her one day as she was heading for the door: "So, do you have any part-time jobs there?"

A week later I was a part-time courier for my new best friends at the advertising agency.

At that point, the idea made sense. I'd be making a bit more money; I had a nice little desk in a room full of filing cabinets; the people were fun to be around and because there was no particular code of office conduct for a young student with a motorbike helmet in an advertising agency, I could pretty much act as I liked. We all got on famously and I rode all over Wellington fetching artwork and transparencies from one building to another. The only flaw in the scheme was that I was still going to lectures a few hours each day, and that meant that your super-urgent package might be sitting on David's desk for a bit of a stretch while he was in Kelburn. No worries, though. They soon learned to call up New Zealand Couriers if they had to.

What made the job more interesting was that the offices were a couple of floors below the National Party Head Office. Their ad agency was a couple of floors below that. Being 1981, a lot of Thinking Big was going on. Being 1981, there was also a degree of civil breakdown being fomented by the Prime Minister, and there was often protest activity outside the building. I would probably be the only person filmed for TV news that winter wearing a bike helmet in the middle of a Springbok tour march who was actually on his way to deliver artwork.

They were happy, simple days.

Then I got The Offer. I was sitting at my desk by the filing cabinets one lunchtime, tucking into my slice of quiche and reading my free copy of the Listener when one of the Suits strolled in. He said "How are the studies going?"

"Fine." I said.

"When do you finish your degree?" He asked.

"Next year." I said.

"And then what happens?" He asked.

"Then I queue up with everyone else for a job as a law clerk." I said.

"Looking forward to it? He asked.

"I suppose so." I said.

"Did you ever think about working in advertising?" He asked.

You can join up the dots.

What I didn't know then but I surely know now is this: just because someone offers you a job, don't assume it's in your best interests to take it. Pretty bleedingly obvious, I'll admit, but when you're flattered to be asked, and relieved to know you don't have to go through a whole lot of interviews where they might turn you down, well, it can be a little seductive. Also, Mandy still worked there.

You can probably also join up the dots about how someone who ended up being a speechwriter enjoyed life as a suit - sorry, Account Executive - and not, let's say, a copywriter. Within 18 months I had changed careers and I knew I didn't ever want to work in advertising again.

I can see now, looking back on it, that I also got into the business because I'd been fascinated by what they did. They say it doesn't pay to watch sausages being made. In this case, I think what shocked me wasn't so much the sausages as the people making them.

I met all kinds of nice people in the business: entertaining, lively, witty people; thoughtful and considerate people. But I also encountered some human beings who just made the whole experience untenable. Sure, you'll find disagreeable people in any office. But the advertising business has some real shockers. Take your pick: self-absorbed; venal, galling; insincere; not to mention the usual pride/envy/gluttony/lust/anger/greed/sloth packages.

These were not people you would want your daughter or your marketing budget to meet.

Seeing the sausages being made left me with less respect for the business, but it didn't put me off the ads. I still liked seeing good work, and I still admired the creative talent that lay behind them.

Or at least I used to. These days, I mostly use the mute, and flick past the advertising pages.

Yes, they made ads that sucked 20 years ago too, but not so many, and the pretentiousness factor was way lower. I don't see nearly as many New Zealand ads using the wit or wry humour, or imagination they once had. In fact I see scarcely any. Some of today's ads make me wonder what the people who are making them really know about the world around them. Their image of a typical New Zealander seems to be a fashion designer living in Ponsonby.

I realise this may be a demographic issue: Of course our tragically hip ads don't appeal to you, you sad old git. You're on the other side of 40 now and you no longer count.

But I don't think that's the whole answer.

There's an absence of ideas and a degree of self-absorption in ads today that suggests to me that a lot of the people in the creative departments these days don't know all that much about, oh: life; people; places; western culture; non-western culture, or anything that happened in the world before the first episode of Friends.

That leaves them stuck with making knowing in-jokes about the process of making ads and the media in which they're being broadcast. You can dress it up as post-modern or ironic, but for the most part, it strikes me that these people don't actually have terribly much imagination or some kind of general knowledge to spark their ideas.

I think that's a problem. Ads play an influential part in our popular culture. If they're good, they'll manage to offer something worthwhile: fresh ideas, for example, or an interpretation of some aspect of life that's intelligent and interesting. Yeah, I know, they're just supposed to shift products. But they can't help but play a larger role than that. In this consumer society, any ad implies something about the things we value, or the values we hold.

I'd feel a whole lot more comfortable about the work that's being turned out if I thought it was being done by people who possessed a little more insight and perception.

I got to thinking about all this the other day because I picked up a book in Dymocks called The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al and Laura Ries.

They maintain that public relations does a much better job of selling than advertising. That's what you should use, therefore, to build a brand. They offer some big examples: Starbucks; the Body Shop; Wal-Mart and Red Bull. All of them have been built with virtually no advertising. It's a theme that they appear to beat to death over 300-odd pages. I didn't see enough there to bother taking it home, but I'm persuaded by the idea.

I think it's true to say that people are more skeptical of ads today. I think it's true that advertising is losing impact. And I think that's true in part because a lot of the folks who are making them need to be a little more thoughtful about their messages.

But here's the thing that gives me pause: if Ries Snr and Jr are right, and I think they are, you can expect to see an outcome that I don't much relish. You'll see a bunch of scary human beings not unlike those from whom I fled screaming when I exited the ad business smearing their greasy mitts all over the "free" media.

Too which you might rightly say: In other late-breaking news, Hitler invades Poland. Yes, the news media already suffers the depredations of spin doctors and image handlers. But this will be as nothing compared to the onslaught you can expect if every ad-man and his wolf-hound decides to take this path.

The movie and TV and music business people have already half-strangled the media with this whole celebrity culture business. I fear it could get much worse. And I know a bit about it. I once had a job in PR.

You wouldn't call it the highlight of the holiday, but last week I took my family to the spot in Dargaville, where I once keeled over with a heart attack.

Call me sentimental, but I like to share my past with them.

'Keeled over' isn't an entirely accurate description of what happened back then, actually. If you'd been standing next to me, (and one poor guy was) you'd have watched me more or less crumple into a small pile against the front panel of the hospital reception desk.

It was a pretty surreal way to spend your 27th birthday, even before you count the morphine. In those days I had two - well, more actually; but let's start with these two - idiosyncrasies. Firstly, I spent more than the occasional Saturday at the races; secondly I didn't possess a wallet. So when the nurses helped me out of my suit and onto the bed, they also obligingly emptied my pockets. Which were fat with twenties.

The pile of bills had found their way there thanks to a horse called Modra Rua which, as it turned out, never managed to repeat the trick, and ended up costing us a lot more twenties in training fees over the next two years. But that would be getting off the point.

Anyway, one of the nurses started counting out the twenties. After she'd counted a dozen or so, she stopped and said: "Would you like me to get someone else to witness this for you?" I told her I trusted her with my life. She counted up the rest and went away to get a very big envelope.

Meanwhile I had bigger things to worry about, although I hadn't entirely registered that yet. My best guess was indigestion, so I was still approaching this in a George Costanza frame of mind. Which meant I was thinking about my underwear. You know that old line about never knowing when you might get knocked down by a bus? They're right on the money. That morning, the last pair in the drawer was an orphan from a multi-pack of briefs I'd bought on holiday a month before. Lurid doesn't start to describe the rainbow fabric, but G-string would not be a million miles off the mark if you had to describe the cut. Folks who work with the sick and needy don't tend to be judgmental, and God bless them, they didn't seem to leap to any conclusions about me.

They do make judgments about what's prudent to tell a 27 year old who's had a heart attack, though. What they decided to tell me was that they were running "tests" and they'd be keeping me there for a while. Which they did, for about twelve hours. Then, when they judged that I was stable, they told me they were sending me over to Whangarei Hospital where they could take a closer look.

Call me dense, but it wasn't until they wheeled me into an ambulance and two nurses got in, that I sussed that something might be up.

So off we rolled, out of Dargaville hospital, down the hill, and out of town to make the trip back to Whangarei and into the Coronary Care unit, where I would spend the next two weeks getting over an honest-to-goodness heart attack. Could my day get any worse? Well, in a bizarre fashion, yes. Elsewhere in Dargaville that evening the National Party were having their candidate selection meeting for the next election. They chose a really top sort for the job by the name of Meurant. You may remember him.

The road between Dargaville is quite a winding one. And a pretty long one, especially if you should try to make the drive while your chest feels as though it's being squeezed by a giant fist. That's what I'd set out to do, and if it hadn't been for the road signs saying "Hospital" that I decided to follow, that's where I would have headed. I asked my doctor later what would have happened if I'd taken that choice. He said "You'd have just got sicker and sicker." I love the way doctors choose their words.

Otherwise Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play? I've been ambivalent about Dargaville ever since. I visited Northland quite often in the first few years afterwards, but I didn't bother going back there. But then this Christmas our friend Adrian said, as he did last year: "You should come over to the place I'm looking after in Dargaville. You'll love it."

And so after we'd had a few days in Leigh and Sandy Bay, that's what we did.

So how was Dargaville after all those years? Well, Adrian was right. We did love it. His friends have a home just out of town, surrounded by old trees and a sprawling lawn. There were chooks for Mary-Margaret to feed, a little dog for her to play with, a trampoline, a swing, and just enough of the feeling of farm life for her to get the idea of it.

But the best part was a drive to Maunganui Bluff. We drove down at about six in the evening with the sun glowing, and waded around the rocks to haul off some mussels and bring them back home for dinner. You look around on an afternoon like that and you're reminded why this is a nice place to live. The water was warm, the beach was vast and almost empty, and there were more mussels than you could count.

We even dug up a toheroa to show Mary-Margaret how they burrow their way back below the sand. She thought it was hugely entertaining.

If you drive into Dargaville when there's a strong wind blowing and it's gray and overcast and the river is its usual colour (the locals explain that it runs upside down) you can think it's a bit dismal.

When you can add to the list 'had heart attack there' you might feel inclined to leave it out of your tourist tips.

But I wouldn't. That afternoon at Maunganui Bluff changed my mind. So did our trips to the Kauri trees, and the Kai Iwi lakes and the little settlements on the road to the Waipoua forest, and a great breakfast cafe in Dargaville.

And oddly enough, so did the sentimental trip to the hospital. The reception desk has gone, and I could only stand with Karren and Mary-Margaret in the foyer and try to describe what had happened, but it was enough. Some provincial towns look backed against the wall these days, especially when you poke around what's left of their hospital facilities. But Dargaville's hospital actually seems to have more going on there now than it did in 1987. I could be mistaken, of course, because I didn't actually ask anyone about it, but the car park was full and there seemed to be other primary care facilities there. If that's what they've managed to achieve, good on them.

We had a great time. And my heart didn't miss a beat.

David Slack's father was a farmer. His father was a farmer, and his father was a farmer and as far as the records show, it's farmers all the way back. It was only a matter of time before one of them became a speechwriter. He runs speeches.com from his home in Devonport.

Leaving aside the squabbles of a few (million) fans, it's basically obvious that Peter Jackson has achieved that rare and wonderful thing: a successful film adaptation of a literary work. It's a bit like David Bowie - everyone either loves it or is like whatever about it, neither of which perspectives offer a very robust platform for discussion.

Firstly, let's clear up the matter of genre. This is a war movie, from beginning to end. Secondly, a single line of dialogue for consideration: 'You are men of the West.' It doesn't really matter where this line occurs in the scenario - it's really just one brilliant moment among millions. As it happens, it is Aragorn's battle cry to the hastily amassed armies ready to do the business on the gates of Mordor.

Just what is it to be men of the west? Those four words alone provide enough argument to drive an entire humanities faculty - about which more later. For now, let's just say that it's a tribute to PJ's cinematic fidelity that Tolkein's own moral values are not only preserved, but writ large and literally emblazoned across the screen in giant symbols of fire.

He wrote LOTR between the world wars 1 & 2 of the 20th century. To be a man of the west - in Tolkein - is to be a member of the chosen race, the race that defeats all else - no matter that all else is stronger, better armed, greater in number and simply thrives on endless war. Men of the west stand fast on nothing but their moral righteousness - their character - and evil just evaporates, like oil spills burning in the deserts of Iraq.

It is tempting to imagine Britain's hunger for this kind of narrative as it shed bitter memories of hellish, victorious trench warfare, and simultaneously galvanised itself for more. Further, there is the tempting comparison between Sauron's single minded genetic breeding programme of Orcs (which begins in Two Towers, or perhaps earlier) and the marshalling - and costuming - of nationalist armies by the European fascists.

On the other hand, there's probably wisdom in going to war with the conviction that you're exercising some kind of moral imperative. People everywhere yearn for the abolition of annoying difference. Difference is simply exhausting. It kills us, especially during wartime. When Satre said that hell is other people, he wasn't kidding around.

There's a military philosophy - first articulated by one Carl von Clausewitz 200 years ago - that war is the extension of politics. Politics, that is, as the business of power, more than the business of ideology. The reality is that no idea is worthy of murder. Power itself - in the form of resources, food, or land - can justify killing. Food itself is the business of life and death.

In fact, nearly everyone in LOTR is obsessed with food. Great battle scenes are juxtaposed with funny - and some disturbing - eating scenes, in most of which there just ain't enough to go round. On reflection, this is perhaps one of the main differences between the soldiers of Mordor and the 'men of the West': the soldiers of Mordor have a nasty tendency to eat their victims on the battle ground, whereas the good guys are good apparently because they prefer to eat at home, before and after fighting, but not during.

Other than that, the only difference between good and evil is that the bad guys are covered in mud and the good guys are ... men of the West. Narrative progress is predicated upon life and death, every time. Kill or be killed. That's it, just as surely as either you support the war on terror, or you are a terrorist.

People in LOTR who oppose war just mope around, cowering in draughty throne rooms, turning grey, dribbling, swearing and just generally pissing the hell out of Gandalf and his men of the West. In Middle Earth (a fantasy, idealised, mother-England Europe that tolerates only moderate difference in the name of good manners) opposition to war and killing is tantamount to the opposition to life and peace. Sound familiar?

Other great war films such as Apocalypse Now or Lawrence of Arabia tend to treat war as a sort of institutional inevitability. In these films, war is there because professional politicians and soldiers have put it there ... it's crazy ... but what can you do? Well, you can be a Lawrence, a Willard or even a Kurtz, but LOTR extends military logic to question the morality of killing anything, human, animal, or completely alien.

Aficionados will have already identified the problem with this analysis, which is that Tolkein takes great pains to construct the warlike imperative of the narrative around the ring itself. Perhaps this is a sort of Archduke Ferdinand analogy - indeed we live in a time intimately familiar with wars waged on red-herrings, obscuring dark and more sinister agendas.

And on yet the other other hand, the whole thing is a brilliant romp in the cinema with the perhaps most reliable teller of tales New Zealand has yet produced. There's a lot here from his earlier - and earliest - works. Lots of the Orcs look like the zombies from Bad Taste. There's a similarity in the slapstick and pratfalls that characterise lots of the fight choreography, which Jackson fans will know is always a good chance for a laugh. And I'm sure I glimpsed the same location where they filmed Bill Ralston getting chewed to death by a rabid monkey in the first five minutes of Braindead. Well, maybe ...

And at the risk of looking like a tag line on Amazon, people who like LOTR will also be interested in Richard Wagner. Dragons, dwarves, cosmic warfare, realms of fire and toil all abound in his extraordinary operas, and their influence on subsequent Western culture is as incalculable as it is controversial. They also feature a gold ring forged in magic fire which induces all who behold it to forsake love for power ... sound familiar? This guy makes Tolkein read like Enid Blyton.

So anyway, speaking of humanities faculties, it seems strangely fitting that Roger Horrocks should retire from his role as Professor of Film, TV and Media Studies at University of Auckland at the same time the final episode of LOTR goes worldwide. Roger's contribution to screen culture in the country is hard to summarise, it's so vast. The feeling I've had when working around him is that he seems to like nothing more than making culture, and to see others doing the same thing. He's incapable of small-talk, and has an almost dogmatic obsession with turning big talk into big actions.

As one of the driving forces inside NZ on Air, Roger's done as much as anyone - and more than most - to find a way through the political wilderness of the 80s and 90s to bring about a three-fold increase in local TV production. Within Academia he is among the first pioneers to have recognise the pedagogical value of researching screen arts, and has pushed hard for its inclusion as a post graduate subject. Now, media studies has reached the high-school curriculum and tertiary film schools abound. Beyond all that, there's his scholastic interest in poetry, his expertise in experimental art films, the Len Lye biography, an opera libretto ... did I mention he's hard to summarise? Good on you, Roger. What's next?