Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: Summer in the Winter, in reply to Alan Perrott,
Marlon was my last profile at the Herald. I met a lot of wannabes in my time but he has genuine star quality. Top bloke with it too.
I met him at the Music Awards last year and he struck me as a genuinely very nice young man,
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Hard News: Friday Music: Summer in the Winter, in reply to Hugh Wilson,
Good looking on the Cedric Brooks – presumably the Light of Saba LP you reference is that on Honest John’s, and its a beauty alright!
Yeah, that's the one, The Magical Light of Saba – was racing to finish so I could go out and didn't check the title.
Thanks for the other tips too!
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Access: Disability as a wicked policy problem, in reply to Sacha,
Education system fails to meet disabled students needs, threatens to prosecute family if he’s not sent to boarding school 3ookm away from home.
God, this case rings so many bells for me. We had a terrible GSE caseworker who tried to bully us into sending our son to a residential school. She was obsessively focused on his behaviour and seemed to have no understanding of the possible reasons for it.
I struggle to see what good taking an autistic child – who will be particularly sensitive to unexpected and unwanted change – away from his family and sending him hundreds of kilometres away would do. What exactly will that school do differently that can't be done at an ordinary school? Is there an underlying assumption that the parents are to blame? We certainly copped a bit of that.
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Hard News: Media Take: Te Mātāwai and…, in reply to Sacha,
Brilliant korero, thanks.
Yeah, it was. And I went into it not quite sure how it was going to go.
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A nice little blog post (with pics) from Unity Books on the Wellington launch of Roger's book.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Roger writes…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Actually Gary there is a fine explanation given – you must have just skim read the book with your blinkers on tightly…
To quote: “I was having so much fun I only ventured out of the sanctuary of the backstage area once,” to see a bit of Simple Minds.
I can testify that that was an awesome three-day party – Doug's PA, the cricket and the various intoxicants – although I did get out and see bands play. I mean, hell: Simple Minds, The Pretenders, Eurythmics and Talking Heads.
But I did commit perhaps my worst reviewing sin that weekend. A certain local band (let’s call them Tomorrow’s Parties) always finished their sets with a bunch of pretty average cover versions. I watched them and when it seemed the covers were looming, I escaped back to the backstage camp.
I wrote a review full of faint praise and then observed how tedious their end-of-set covers were. Trouble was, they hadn’t played any of the covers. D’oh. Bad music writer.
PS: I also interviewed Simple Minds' Jim Kerr in his backstage caravan. I can't vouch for how much cocaine he'd had immediately before my arrival, but that was one very fast-talking Scotsman.
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This witness account suggests some weird, inexplicable racial motives were tied up in the atrocity too:
Orlando said he never looked Mr. Mateen in the eye, but recalled his calm voice. At one point, after noticing that some of the hostages in the bathroom were texting, the gunman ordered them to surrender their phones.
He spoke again, according to Orlando, asking the hostages, “Are you guys black?”
“He said, ‘I don’t have an issue with the blacks,’” Orlando said.
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It’s also equally plausible that he was a deeply homophobic straight man who scoped out the scene of his crime for a disturbingly long time, using social media to stalk potential victims and hung around people he hated with an ultimately lethal passion.
It’s a very long time. Lateen’s former police academy colleague says Mateen asked him out 10 years ago. And he was on multiple dating apps for years, it appears.
Meanwhile, given the police correction as to what he actually said on arrest, it seems James Wesley Howell may simply have been the kind of gun-obsessed, threatening right-wing asshole who drives around with assault rifles and bomb ingredients, and happened to be gay or bi. But his ex’s reports about him yelling about wanting to “take everybody out” suggest it might have been a matter of time before he hurt someone. Christ – how many of these men are there in American, merrily buying arsenals?
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The picture of Omar Mateen is certainly getting more complex. A former police academy classmate, four Pulse regulars and a man who interacted with him on a dating app all say they believed him to be gay. Most accounts also have him as a dark, unhappy figure with few friends, who drank heavily on the occasions he went to Pulse.
It’s tempting to think his confused and contradictory grab-bag of radical influences pushed him into an act of extreme self-loathing. Or did the fact of a Latin night featuring trans performers trigger some other hatred? I guess we’ll find out more in time.
One thing this is not looking like is a man actually directed by ISIS, or a part of a conspiracy. This is quite unlike the Paris attacks.
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Sigh. Gary Steel has written an updated (and toned-down) version of his perennial complaint about Flying Nun as a review of Roger's book. See: Flying Nun: In love with the sound of their own voice, more like
I don't really want to take it apart in detail, because I like Gary and the last time I did that it ended up in a silly feud. But for an essay that professes to dispel "myths", it takes quite a few liberties with fact.
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