Posts by Russell Brown
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Hat,
I think my discomfit lies in the balance between what Anke describes above as what is her ‘right to do as a journalist and my compassion for those who had suffered at Centrepoint’. I don’t know what the right balancing point for those things is and I feel really uneasy about it.
Yeah, that's fair enough. Sorry if I came across too snippy there. I realise this is difficult in ways I can't even imagine.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to ,
Sorry about my spelling back there. I tend to get lost on the long sentences.
I’d rather you spelled every single word wrong than you not be here Steven :-)
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Hat,
The details Richter has given about her here – magazine stories she participated in etc – mean that anyone could do a little research and identify her.
It would also come up in any clippings search on the subject of the Centrepoint crimes, which is precisely what anyone doing any research would find.
I wholly understand the right and desire not to talk again about something like this, but, like I say, it's something that will be in any clippings search. You can properly avoid re-publishing the name on request, but you can't pretend the magazine didn't run a major feature.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
So while you say you “grieve” for the book that could of been, and I have some sympathy for all the work you put in, I find the bulk of my sympathy lies with the actress, whoever she is, because she’s the one who’s been living with all this all these years, and will continue to live with it well after you’ve moved on to your next book.
That’s extremely unfair to Anke. It isn’t wrong of her to view public court files – that’s what research is. Was she planning to out anyone? No. There will often be a tension between between the party that that wants to tell the story and the party that exercises a right not to speak – this story more than most. It happens in journalism. It’s wholly unnecessary to find a villain here.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Hebe,
Anke, and Emma: my response was not in any way intended to sweep aside the Centrepoint story and your reaction to it. I admire both of you for your fortitude at persevering with such a traumatic subject.
I don't think it read that way. I've covered the work of the Dart Centre in the past and it immediately struck me as relevant to the passage you quoted from Emma.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Emma Hart,
This came up in the interviews, and I have to say, I am curious.
Forming an embrochure with the lips and blowing a raspberry on the clitoris. It seemed funny and enjoyable then, creeps me out a bit now, for obvious reasons.
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I had some contact with the fringes of the Centrepoint scene when I lived at The Big House in Parnell in 1983.
It’s hard to credit now how accepted and acceptable Centrepoint was within a wider hippyish community. It had a proximity in perhaps the way the Mr Asia scene did a few years before.
The house itself was not at all a Centrepoint place when I was there – more earnest lefties and lesbian feminists and people like me who’d just wound up there – but had naturally attracted people interested in communal living. Those people had largely moved on before I got there, including a really nice group who’d bought a house together in Ponsonby for themselves and their kids. Not everyone who believed in communal living believed in Centrepoint.
I had a sexual relationship (and subsequent friendship) with another resident, a perpetual seeker who spoke enthusiastically about having taken a Centrepoint sexuality course – lots of people in a big room fucking and cheering each other on. It didn’t sound like my thing at all, but she told me about an oral sex technique called the “Centrepoint raspberrry” which seemed to be well-known.
I’ve often wondered about what she saw at the commune, whether she might have been so enthused with open sexual freedom that she didn’t see things.
The dynamics of The Big House could change quite rapidly and I gather that the year after I left, links with Centrepoint increased, to the point that Bert Potter was invited there to speak one night. A riot nearly broke out when he suggested that women who were raped bore responsibility.
Shortly afterwards, the culture of the house lurched again and it filled up with punks, junkies and artists.
Since then, I’ve a couple of times been in situations where it was mentioned that someone else in the room had grown up at Centrepoint. No one said anything until the conversation moved on.
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The Fall play the Powerstation tomorrow night. And Kiran Dass has interviewed early Fall member Martin Bramah for The Spinoff.
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Thanks to DJ Dubhead for the heads-up on this. The reggae reunion documentary RockSteady: The Roots of Reggae is now officially on YouTube:
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Hard News: A cog in the Mediaworks machine, in reply to Alfie,
Brian Edwards suggests that kiwis still see TVNZ as the only "legitimate" channel, whatever that means. Some people might think it has more to do with TV3 management treating their viewers as imbeciles. Or maybe people just prefer entertainment?
Time will tell.
The irony is that TV3 had a pretty good understanding of the 3 News audience for a long time, and acted strategically on that understanding. Fuck knows what they're up to now.
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