Posts by GemmaG
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Yep, Gracewood Sisters: keeping people up past their bedtime since, ah, 1970-something.
Speaking of bedtime, I just woke up to all this (the post & comments, not feminism... uh...).
So, am I the only one who misread Emma's post title first off as "Can't We All Just Get Along By Fucking?"
Now there's an idea. PAS: up for a mass debate about anything, anytime!
(Sorry for taking it to the gutter. Lindy West started it.)
[Points over there...]
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so to ask for an extra $300k in that same year might have been excessive.
True, although it is an 'off' year for the NZ Arts Festival, which usually frees up a few council funds... so where are they going?
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One of the most important things about the Cuba St Carnival is that it's a free event. A free event with a usually impressive line-up of bands, who play for absolute peanuts. In this respect, the event has been under-funded for years.
So, $350,000 for an artwork celebrating sport? It is about art v sport. But it's not art or sport that started the argument, is it, publicly elected officials?
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Craig - don't sweat it.
Robbie - you callin' me a babe? ;-)Alright then, here's one. Ponder this non-theoretical example of ("harmless" ie the bog-standard legal, smutty kind of) porn's place in family life. One of many recent, and disturbingly similar, examples experienced in my sphere.
A father of teenage daughters withdraws all his usual (and safe) forms of physical warmth because said daughters have arrived at an age where they, for him, uncomfortably resemble the women in the porn that he is addicted to.
For obvious reasons (to him, at least) he can't explain to them why he has created distance between himself and his daughters. Their relationships suffer just at a time when the daughters themselves are feeling most vulnerable about their womanhood, their place in the world and their image in the eyes of the boys/men they are now getting involved with.
I believe this to be a form of domestic emotional abuse (the unexplained withdrawing of fatherly love), one that will have lasting effects (not least of all, potentially, upon the daughters' own sexual experiences), and not the sort that gets reported. So, when I read of domestic abuse decreasing when porn is around, I am suspicious of the statistics because they never tell the whole story. Statistics are funny like that.
Is it the porn's fault? Not exclusively, of course not. But is the porn culpable? Absolutely.
And yes, I'm aware there is "good" porn that informed adults can enjoy, yada yada yada... but still. This guy in question? He's not a doofus, generally. But then, I don't need to show his credentials, do I?
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I wasn't going to get into this either because like Emma says, I feel like we've had this conversation over and over again. However.
However. Exactly. The conversation ain't over, just because it's been had on other blogs and in other threads and in other countries.
I'm sure it's exhausting for those who have written long and often on this and other topics in other blogs to resurrect it all again. But it would be just as exhausting for the rest of us to have to trawl back through several years of blogs and threads before deciding on whether it is okay to have this conversation now, when now seems exactly the time to have it.
I also find it problematic that there seems to be an undercurrent of if you aren't a hip hopper/brown teenage music video watcher/horror genre expert/sex worker or someone with direct knowledge thereof, you can't possibly contribute to these discussions with any fair authority, not just here but in several cyber-conversations kicking around. Which is why I haven't commented before now, here.
Also I get the feeling that I would have to establish my credentials before I do, in order to have a clear path to say my piece. And I'm not willing to go into the distasteful role that porn has played in past relationships in a public forum in order to do so, much as I would love to get stuck right into a round of "is it the porn's fault or the guy's fault?", definitions of violence/abuse both reported and non-reported, etc etc.
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I think Lady Gaga's doing a bit more than getting her tits out. She's much more interesting than that.
Ooh, I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's show...
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Graham, thank you. Thank you for writing this for us. This devastating news is an untimely opportunity to celebrate the importance of the Fuemana name in our musical & cultural history, which, as you and others have written, stretches back more than two full decades... and takes me back to late 80s/early 90s, living in Papatoetoe, getting to witness the nutty young energy of those early Fuemana outfits, House Party and White Boy Black and OMC, and thinking 'this is choice!'.
Choice. I can't think of a better word to describe what it felt to watch all that stuff happen. And it's harder still to describe the sadness when Phil died. And now Pauly. So thanks for giving it a go for the rest of us. -
I saw True Lovers - Dion from the D4's new band - the other night at Union Pool, a great little room in Williamsburg (am overseas at the mo visiting Busytown...).
There were probably 60 people in the venue, but the show they put on made me think "they could pull this off in a stadium". Then I remembered - they're on the BDO bill (and at the SFBH the night before).
So ignore the lame video for "Death Threat" (I've seen better burlesque, that's for sure) and check them out if you're going along. The slower, sexier, bluesier numbers are the ones to listen out for. Boxcar Guitars' Ben sings a couple of tunes, but Dion owns the band, in that cock-rocky sorta way.
And...
That being said I'm not going to Wilco this time around for various reasons-the main one being it's hard to see how they can top the Opera House gig last time.
Agreed. Plus, they're not in town at the same time as Yo La Tengo, so they can't do this.
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You deserve a nice cuppa tea and a lie down, I reckon.
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Amazingly, the hardened security-dude wilted ... and let her through without a murmur of protest.
Yeah, I know you're all envious of my skills. So I'll tell you what went down at Parliament, for free. The rest of my "How I get into all the parties" tips will be in the book that D Haywood will inevitably try to get me to write. But, it will be a boring book, if the Parliament Incident is an example:
I wandered in with the rest of the PA-ers. The security guard asked my name. I told him. He said, "Hmm, it's not on the list. How do you spell it?" I told him. He wrote it on the list. Then ticked it off.
Yup, next stop, White House.
That aside, David's speech at Parliament was legendary, but Bob-the-Tattooed-Baby's topless appearance at the Auckland launch took the cake. I'm pretty sure his bare torso/leggings combo was a carefully choreographed nod to his Dad's Margaret Urlich-inspired speech.