Posts by Russell Brown
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All right, 'pristine' is completely the wrong word. Intact. Concretey. Orange. Drear and blocky and completely impractical. Okay, I'm not a big fan of Brutalism. The easy-hose-down decor was at least understandable, but the rabbit-warren of little hallways and windowless (or far too windowed) rooms? Those orange couches with the sloping backs? I was there in the 90s. Why was everything so relentlessly 70s?
The brutalist AUSA complex at Auckland University was also designed by Warren and Mahoney, "in a style contemporary to the times," as the AUSA website puts it.
The story was that the union got it cheap because it was a design that had been rejected by the University of Fiji. I don't know if that's true, but I can see how a design which put the toilets in the basement of a three-level building might get refused.
Putting on a long record to go to the toilet was customary for bFM DJs on the top floor.
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Tobi Muir and Silva MC at IRL of Jafa Mafia on Saturday afternoon. Real Auckland dancehall. They started with a Cornell Campbell duplate (aka a one-off version he recorded specially for them) and finished with a dubplate of Dawn Penn's 'No No No'. Amazing.
The video won't keep the time code when it embeds, so you'll need to scroll forward to 1:35:00.
I went along to their party at the Edinburgh Castle (much) later on. It was lovely to hear reggae through their 12K valve-amp-powered system.
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As northwest kids, we had pretty much open access to UCSA without even being students. I remember seeing Arthur Baysting as Neville Purvis ("Right. We're not here to fuck spiders") and The Plague during one Orientation.
But mostly it was about finding ways to sneak into the ballroom space for gigs, usually after attempting to guzzle Liebestraum in the car park. I saw The Swingers and the Skeptics there, and also a Toy Love show in which Chris Knox appeared to nibble on a broken light bulb. I asked him about it years later and he couldn't remember doing it.
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Tamaki released a video message after being asked how he felt about the "Chris Brown saga" and about his "previous abuse - violence, so-called".
He said people needed to have patience to accept others even though they had made "mistakes even if it comes to physical violence".
And:
If Brown was granted a visa to come to New Zealand, Tamaki wanted him to attend the church's Map Up programme which helped those with alcohol, drugs and violence issues.
The church said it would write a letter of support to accompany Brown's application to Immigration New Zealand.
In the same story, Mika:
Mika issued a video support message, pointing to his Mika Haka Foundation and saying it worked with predominantly "young brown people" who had been convicted of crimes.
"Let's face it, if he wasn't black he probably would have been let in because there's been a lot of white people - celebrities - who have been let into New Zealand in the last few years with crimes a lot worse than this. Chris Brown, we want you to come to New Zealand.
"I am supporting the tour of Chris Brown because I know what he's doing now - or what he is trying to - repair and change his life if a great thing for young brown men. If we want to stop crime ... want to stop domestic abuse, we need role models like Chris because young brown guys listen to Chris Brown."
Where are all these white celebrities who've been let in recently after crimes "a lot worse" than Chris Brown's? Names, please?
This is just witless people being persuaded by Jevan Goulter.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to chris,
Which isn’t so much a meaningful law as a coat tailing device. In 1991 Flavor Flav pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Karen Ross and served 30 days in jail, lost custody of his children. In August 1992 Public Enemy played in New Zealand. In 1993, Flav was charged with attempted murder and imprisoned for 90 days for shooting at his neighbor.
Flav is a goddamned mess all right. They're lucky they can still tour with him, but it's probably because he's been able to plead everything down to misdemeanours. Note that he wasn't convicted of attempted murder, which is why he only served 90 days.
Ironically, Chuck D is teetotal and doesn't even drink coffee.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to philipmatthews,
Thanks Danielle. That is what I wanted to say yesterday when I got into an ill-advised Twitter discussion on this. Twitter is probably too rushed and chaotic a medium for it.
Yeah, it is. And you come up against absolutes very quickly.
There was a line in Andrea Vance's column about both Chris Brown and the Lorde revenge video, which is that "pop culture defines acceptable social norms". That seems utterly wrong to me. There is a place for violence in entertainment; pop culture is not a set of instructions for everyday behaviour. Sometimes that violence might be fantasy or catharsis.
I'm also not sure about making this dividing line between one form of popular culture and another. The Lorde video is a story, with characters.
Otoh, I do wonder if hearing Chris Brown instructing women to be "head down, ass up" in seemingly every track starts to normalise that as an attitude.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to BenWilson,
I'd argue that this, among many other levels of nasty, is exactly why GoT is so popular. Medieval fantasy that "keeps it real". Everyone in it is a gangsta to some degree or other. If they weren't at the start, they are by the end.
I honestly can't watch it. Too much sadistic, sexual violence. (I also don't like Tarantino films.)
Otoh, the two members of my household who follow it enthusiastically are much nicer people than me.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The next Soundcloud?, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Nice jacket!
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to Steve Barnes,
fucked up and broken in so many ways.
As Danielle so rightly says,
we’ve all got to make our own way through that maze.Craig... you little hip hop lyricist you... ;-)
That is actually quite good! They call him Rappin' Ranapia.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The next Soundcloud?, in reply to nzlemming,
Are we to take from that graph that Doug Hood doesn't play well with others?
Ha ha.
Doug of course played a hugely important role in the Flying Nun story – recording Boodle and other classics, touring bands, managing The Chills for a while – but most people don't even know he was briefly the singer in The Clean.
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