Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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In other music news, an Official Information Act request has revealed why Immigration NZ banned Odd Future from coming to New Zealand back in February: they thought they'd be able to spin it into a good-news story for the agency.
When you read the emails between agency officials, it sounds like they were primarily most interested in Odd Future causing a media storm which would make INZ look like the good guys. INZ's decision seems like a direct response to pressure from outside lobby groups with little investigation of the actual potential for harm from Odd Future.
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This week I'm super excited because it's Eurovision Song Contest week! This year it's being held in Copenhagen and judging by the rehearsal videos, it's going to be the usual blend of great pop and weird thrills.
This year Sky channel UKTV have the NZ screening rights (a good match, I think). They'll be screening all the shows (two semi-finals and the final) live (7am on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday), with an encore screening at 9.30pm the same day.
But if you haven't got Sky but fancy a pyjama party on your couch, you can watch the official live webstream on Eurovision.TV.
In the mean time, here's Austria's entry: Miss Conchita Wurst, an elegant bearded-lady diva. Her song "Rise like a Phoenix" is like a long lost Bond theme.
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For me, the highlight of this quality post was discovering from the photo that there's a strain of pot called Cat Piss Romulan.
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There was always a lot of hype around Shane Jones as being a future prime minister. It seems like he accepted the hype but it didn't occur to him that he'd actually have to put in any effort to get there. Sure, not many politicians are are statemanlike as Helen Clark, but even John Key realises that he's the prime minister and he has a job to do. Shane Jones always felt like he was operating from an arrogant, detached stance.
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Free to view online this long weekend - Sound It Out, a documentary about a record store of the same name, the only remaining indie record store in the Teesside area in the north of England.
The doco looks at the store's staff and regular customers - mostly male, mostly over 30. There are certainly no teens around like there were in my youth. The doco visits some of the regulars at home, their listening rooms, their alphabetised collections, their denim vests adorned with patches and badges of their favourite bands.
It's a great portrait of what independent record stores have become in the 2010s. Teens are happily streaming music on YouTube, your auntie gets her Sole Mio CD from the Warehouse, and record stores are left for people who love music and buying records so much that they couldn't imagine life without.
Watch the doco here: http://www.sounditoutdoc.com/
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Peter McLennan explained the bizarre lighting to me – it was set up for the EDM acts, who stood behind a DJ booth at the back of the stage pretending to play something. They were numerous and almost all shit.
One of the other acts at Coachella was Outkast, reuniting after a decade. It should have been epic, but everyone seems to have been left feeling rather underwhelmed. There are a few theories flying around, but this one is most intriguing. EDM.com speculates that the Coachella audience wasn't impressed with the lyrical hip hop of Outkast because it wasn't as thrilling as the big-ass party experience of the EDM artists that are so hot right now. An unfamiliar sounding song, a gap between songs - these are all buzzkill moments that EDM shows never have.
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At some point she’ll want a bigger show. Or not – who am I to offer advice?
I would bloody love it if Lorde had a full-on stadium show with an expanded band, dancers and power lighting and super staging.
I've just written a thing looking back at the BRN>BRNT anti-piracy campaign of the early '00s. The most intriguing thing - people took the message of the campaign to be "It's seriously not cool to copy CDs by New Zealand artists, but no one's gonna mind if you burn that Beyonce CD."
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I keep thinking back to the time in the '90s when my friend and I made a day trip to Tauranga. We stopped off at her grandparents place and they insisted we stayed for dinner. Dinner was fish with white sauce, boiled potatoes, peas and carrots, followed by rock hard vanilla ice cream and canned fruit salad for dessert. It was like the food was trying really hard to barely exist.
I don't have any cinematic memories of amazing cooking from my grandparents. When my grandma got older, she started boiling the crap out of vegetables and relying heavily on Maggi packets. My mum still makes a Grandma recipe called "Chinese beef and beans", which I think is "Chinese" because it has soya sauce in it.
Meat and three veg is my heritage, but one that I'm not especially wanting to cling onto.
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This is interesting. The last of my grandparents to die, my maternal grandmother, became a really rubbish cook in her latter years. She started boiling the crap out of vegetables and relying on Maggi packets. But yet Mum has various recipes from earlier that are ok.
Nothing with garlic or chillis, though. That's outrageous!
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In my town, the council recently published draft guidelines on where legal highs could be sold. The law prohibits them being sold in any dairies, service stations, or anywhere liquor can be sold. The council had also decided that it would be the main street only and nowhere within 50m of a community facility (e.g. the town hall, childcare centre, community house). So with all those restrictions, it left only a gift shop and a sewing machine repair business that could legally sell legal highs. And I don't think either have any interest in doing so.