Posts by Russell Brown
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A rejoinder to my Wroclaw t-shirt experience, from reader Jimmy Hayes:
Had a real moment reading your anecdote about The Clean and Wroclaw.
In late 2011 I travelled through Wroclaw also. My host took me to a bar and introduced me to a burly doorman who spoke zero English, but apparently had a radio show (or podcast) that only discussed/played ‘Dunedin Sound’ groups. It was evidently quite a popular show. Wish I could tell you the name, but the scrap of paper is back home in Nelson, inside a box marked ‘awesome travel memories’.
With our two experiences combined, there may be a Polish hotspot worthy of future investigation! So strange how these pockets of fan-dom exist.
Amazing.
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Arggh. Another shock-horror Unitary Plan story in the Herald from Bernard Orsman:
Half of suburban Auckland could be built up with three-storey apartments and residents will have no say when developers move into their street.
After nine weeks of telling Aucklanders the maximum height of “small-scale apartment buildings” in neighbourhoods was two storeys, the Auckland Council has admitted the height limit is three storeys.
Three-storey apartments are possible in the “mixed housing” zone in the city’s new planning rulebook. The zone covers 49 per cent of urban Auckland and most suburban streets have some degree of mixed housing.
Half of suburban Auckland? Or half of urban Auckland? It doesn’t seem to matter. The main thing is that evil developers are going to come to your street.
Further down, it transpires that that are substantial caveats. Developers would have to meet what seem to be the current rules on proximity to boundaries, shade, etc, to go from 8m to 10m, and it’s not possible at all unless the property is at least 1200m. It’s not at all clear to me how much this actually differs from the present planning rules. [Edit: I’m informed that this represents only a very modest loosening of current rules, mostly in the reduction of the minimum section size.]
Ben Ross says the “shock” detail has actually been available for weeks. He’s done yet another fisking.
Orsman namechecks Auckland 2040, which endorses Quax, Brewer, et al, and even directs its audience to Whale Oil. The website’s domain appears to be registered to this Takapuna rich-lister.
I think we’re seeing the anti-Brown strategy for the municipal elections taking shape here. It’s disappointing that the the city’s newspaper isn’t so much reporting the story as giving one political group a megaphone.
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Hard News: SpinCity, in reply to Stewart,
Besides, you’d get shot for taking your golf cart onto 1 of the greens.
Excellent point.
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Here's the Finlayson Twitter account if people want to catch up. To be honest, it doesn't help his case at all, and it demonstrates an obsession with funding decisions as an end that ought to be anathema to a conservative politician. Poor.
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Hard News: A Golden Age for the Arts?, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Actually it kinda is a pretty good time for the arts in NZ. There’s a bunch of Clark era good stuff floating round still, and while Finlayson has been meh at best, lots of things have been just quietly continuing.
This is an important point. What the Clark boost did was build capacity. I know about this in the music industry context and NZ On Air funding and the deal with radio on voluntary local targets, as flawed as each was in some respects, provided a degree of certainty that made it viable to learn to be a manager or a specialist lawyer, or to take a punt on new ways of working at the major labels.
The so-called "artists' dole" (actually an exhaustively-accounted skills development grant) has genuinely helped too.
And I'm personally proud to be involved at a governance level with NZ On Screen and Audioculture (which launches on May 31). But if you keep strangling the funding, you're not going to see any of this kind of innovation. Five years of frozen NZOA funding is a long, long time.
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Hamish Keith wrote an interesting take on the operation of the arts in New Zealand back in March. Worth reading.
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Hard News: A Golden Age for the Arts?, in reply to Shaun Lott,
you are pretty much describing the case for the basic sciences also.
I feel your pain.
It is a bit like they're distrustful of professional skills.
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Hard News: Friday Music: In the neighbourhood, in reply to bob daktari,
Jesse Sheehan’s Jesus I Was Evil is brilliant
It is!
Although I initially read that as Rhian Sheehan. That would have been really weird.
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Hard News: Friday Music: In the neighbourhood, in reply to George Darroch,
That's something to note. A venue set up for loud guitars and sloppy drumming isn't going to do well when you want crisp notes across the spectrum and clear sound at lower volumes.
That's it in one. The Watercolours showcase at the KA last year was just a debacle.
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Apparently Len Brown gave an odd and distracted speech at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival do last night. I'm guessing this would be why.
The housing initiatives in the Budget appear to dump all over the government's draft agreement on housing with Auckland Council. It sometimes seems that these people wouldn't know good faith if it bit them on the arse.