Writing in Elsewhere
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SCENES FROM A REVOLUTION by MARK HARRIS: He not busy being born is busy dying.
28 Jun 2010 | 3 min read
That film is a collaborative art is accepted, but it can also be a war of attrition where inflated egos collide at the interface of culture and commerce. And in Hollywood where the stakes -- money, careers, egos -- are bigger, and can disproportionately rise or fall dramatically with any project, then the stories from behind the scenes can be outrageous. Peter Biskin's Easy Riders,... > Read more
HOWLING AT THE MOON by WALTER YETNIKOFF AND DAVID RITZ
21 Jun 2010 | 1 min read
Yetnikoff, former head of CBS Records who helmed the company's sale to Sony, tells a racy, drug-fuelled story of 70s and 80s excess, fame and fantasy. He opens by describing sex with Jackie Onassis (it's a dream, but he is to meet her later that day to talk about him writing a book of his mad life) and then his day really begins. There are vodkas, snacks of cocaine and marijuana, a... > Read more
Bruce Springsteen: Streets of Philadelphia
MARILYN by ANDRE de DIENES: Little girl heading for the big time
14 Jun 2010 | 4 min read
For those who came of age after her death, Marilyn Monroe belongs to that generation of American males whose idea of cool was smoking a pipe and reading Playboy. That seems pretty tame to those who grew up with designer drugs and Hustler -- so Marilyn is merely a frozen image from a safer era of the sexual revolution. The mystique of Marilyn -- as with the genuinely famous, a... > Read more
THE FAT MEXICAN by ALEX CAINE: Uneasy riders
1 Jun 2010 | 2 min read
When Hunter S Thompson spent a year in the mid Sixties riding with the Hells Angels to emerge with his book Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, he ushered in the era of "New Journalism" (in which the author is part of the story). For his heroism under violent circumstances, Thompson became the writer that many journalists wanted to be -- but... > Read more
THE MONTY PYTHON AUTOBIOGRAPHY by THE PYTHONS(2003)
24 May 2010 | 3 min read
The shadow of the Beatles is cast long over Monty Python's Flying Circus. The late George Harrison always said he felt something of the band's spirit passed to Monty Python, which appeared on television as the Beatles were breaking up, and Paul McCartney would stop recording to watch the show. Harrison later underwrote the Pythons' Life of Brian feature film (using his home as collateral)... > Read more
THOMAS KENEALLY INTERVIEWED (2010): The people's historian
17 May 2010 | 7 min read
To put it bluntly, Sarah Whitelam didn't muck around. The day after John Nicol sailed off for Britain – the man with whom she'd had child and promised to remain true to in the days before his departure – she recovered from her disappointment and married the convict John Walsh. These were very different times – the colony of Sydney in 1790, just two years after the... > Read more
THE AUSTRALIANS: ORIGINS TO EUREKA by THOMAS KENEALLY
12 May 2010 | 2 min read
Among the many peculiarities in this wrinkled history of the Australian people -- from pre-European times through the First Fleet and up to the Eureka Stockade -- is that one of the first strikes in the fledgling colony was by Indian "coolies" who had been imported in the 1830s to be what was in fact, slave labour. These truculent Indians wouldn't tolerate the irregularity of... > Read more
ROTTEN: NO IRISH, NO BLACKS, NO DOGS by JOHN LYDON: Reviewed 1994
10 May 2010 | 11 min read
“With the Sex Pistols we were hated, absolutely despised. There was no audience there at all to any great extent. We sold a few records in a small banana republic called Britain.” – John Lydon John Lydon -- better known as the sneering Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten -- enjoys lying. He says as much in his rambling anecdotal and opinionated autobiography.... > Read more
Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen
THE SIXTIES by ARTHUR MARWICK: The big picture of the isms and schsims
9 May 2010 | 2 min read
One of the more mindlessly amusing one-liners about the Sixties says that if you remember them t.hen you weren’t there. Duh. That sitcom aphorism reduces the decade to flakiness and drugs, and bears no serious scrutiny at all. By rule-of-thumb and common consensus, what are loosely called the Sixties are the five years between She Loves You and Woodstock, a period which witnessed... > Read more
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: Fire
SEDITION AND ALCHEMY: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN CALE BY TIM MITCHELL (2005): Opportunity knocked
26 Apr 2010 | 2 min read
John Cale, now 66, was an unlikely candidate for a career in heretical, innovative rock'n'roll. Born in a village in South Wales, he showed prodigy-like musical talent. At 13 he was the viola player in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, having started on piano and been a church organist. At grammar school he studied Berg, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, played dixieland jazz. Then he heard... > Read more
John Cale: Imitating Violin
DYLAN HORROCKS INTERVIEWED (2010): The graphic novelist as social commentator
12 Apr 2010 | 6 min read
At the launch of the long overdue local publication of his graphic novel Hicksville in Auckland recently, Dylan Horrocks said he grew up in two places: In New Zealand and in comics, and both were on the edge of the ‘real world‘. “This was stuff I thought after I finished Hicksville,” he says later. “It wasn’t like I went in trying to explain this.... > Read more
HICKSVILLE, a graphic novel by DYLAN HORROCKS
3 Apr 2010 | 1 min read
In interviews Dylan Horrocks, the 43-year old New Zealand writer and artist of the graphic novel Hicksville, is candid enough to note that more people in his home country know about his book than have actually read it. That's because it was serialised in his own magazine Pickle over the years from '92 but when the final episode was due he was offered a book deal for Hicksville through a... > Read more
JUST KIDS by PATTI SMITH: Nourished by love and art
3 Apr 2010 | 4 min read
In 2004 when Patti Smith released yet another predictable album, the critic Ian Penman correctly observed, "It sounds like she hasn't heard a single thing outside her own music for about 25 years". Smith, acclaimed for her marriage of rock’n’roll and poetry in the late 70s, has been in a creative whirlpool the past four decades and her constant referencing of her... > Read more
100 ESSENTIAL NEW ZEALAND ALBUMS by NICK BOLLINGER
22 Mar 2010 | 1 min read | 1
The purpose of books of lists - and the list of lists is growing by the day -- is probably two-fold: you get to look through and tick off what you've got/done/seen or whatever and make a note of other points of interest to see/collect/experience. The second point is to argue with them: in your head you question the selections, howl in disbelief at an inclusion and rail silently at an... > Read more
Black Grace: Black Sand Shore (1994)
GRIFFITH REVIEW: FOOD CHAIN edited by JULIANNE SCHULTZ
15 Mar 2010 | 3 min read
At regular lunches with a group of friends last year our conversation frequently turned to food, and not what was on our plates. We would discuss what might be called the politics of food: how many miles particular foodstuffs clocked up to get into our supermarkets and restaurants; how certain types of fishing were stripping our oceans; and how cheap and bad food is readily available but we... > Read more
BONFIRE OF ROADMAPS by JOE ELY (2008)
15 Feb 2010 | 1 min read
Joe Ely who grew up in Lubbock, West Texas (Buddy Holly's hometown) is something of a legend in Americana/alt.country rock: he was on the road in the early 70s hitching around to play gigs far and wide but also formed the formidable band the Flatlanders with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore (both of whom have gone on to remarkable careers in the own right); and his hard rockin'... > Read more
Joe Ely: Radio Hell
JABBERROCK: THE ULTIMATE BOOK OF ROCK'N'ROLL QUOTATIONS by RAYMOND OBSTFELD AND PATRICIA FITZGERALD
6 Feb 2010 | 3 min read | 1
This lightweight but cheap paperback provides some funny observations (such as Elvis Costello's "Rock'n'roll is the lowest form of life known to man"), but mostly it proves we're lucky these people can sing, because their insights can be as shallow as a birdbath. Rickie Lee Jones offers: "I never knew that life was so serious and hard and cruel. You can't depend on anything... > Read more
Elvis Costello: Radio Radio
JOHN TRUDELL, NATIVE AMERICAN ACTIVIST/POET/SINGER INTERVIEWED (1992): Living in the Elvis age
1 Feb 2010 | 4 min read
While diplomats and ambassadors exchanged platitudes and gifts in August 1992 to acknowledge the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to the New World, others found little to celebrate at all. John Trudell, a Santee Sioux who was spokesman for the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz in 1970 and was for six years from 1973 national chairman of the American Indian... > Read more
THE WEEKENDERS: ADVENTURES IN CALCUTTA edited by ANDREW O'HAGAN
25 Jan 2010 | 1 min read
According to Gunther Grass the sprawling city of Calcutta is like a pile of shit dropped by God. That may or may not be true, but the Maker’s handmaiden, Mother Teresa, confirmed the impression in the minds of many that this was a city of abject misery peopled by the dying and hopelessly infirm. Only a fool would deny Calcutta its extensive poverty, but a city of 14 million souls has... > Read more
TICKET TO RIDE by LARRY KANE: Along for the ride
18 Jan 2010 | 2 min read
In 1980 presidential candidate Jimmy Carter leaned over to journalist Larry Kane and said, "So I heard you toured with the Beatles. What were they like?" Even the 39th President of the United States wanted to know about those young men who changed the social and musical landscape of the 20th century. And Kane should know - he was the only American reporter in the official press... > Read more