Look out! He's got a knife!

The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre

It's currently possible to see the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre back to back with The Passion of Christ. I think I'm gonna do exactly that tomorrow.

I wasn't going to see Passion, but then I realised: it's a movie which depicts nothing but a man being tortured and killed over a two hour-plus running time. That puts it in the same extreme horror movie class as Last House On the Left or Maniac, both of which I went well out of my way to see, while this one's showing in theatres everywhere.

Also, a woman apparently died of a heart attack while watching it. If a horror movie scared someone to death I'd be trying my luck watching it within seconds. (Partly because the very people who are praising The Passion to high heavens would be up in arms and demanding it banned if it were a horror movie, so I'd want to see it while it was still there. But also because - hey man, it scared someone to death, let's see if it scares me to death too!)

You either understand this impulse or you don't.

A great bloodline

This is Albert Pearce Whitehead, my maternal great-grandfather, who I was named after. This is the only photo I have ever seen of him.

Big black fellas

I can't resist this one, so before I go to work:

I notice people are STILL writing letters to the editor saying "John Tamihere is as bad as Gerry Brownlee because calling someone a 'big fella' is as bad as calling them a 'black fella' - hipocrisy is the greatest luxury, raise the double standard!"

So why noy try going up to a large Maori man and call him first "big fella" and then "black fella" and see how he reacts.

If you still think there's no difference between the two after thinking about this idea for more than 2 seconds, you've got a problem.

Meanwhile, this Missy Elliott CD is actually really good. "Old school in a new way," as Bootsy Collins & Lady Miss Kier would say.

Weirdnesses of perspective

Morgue's nice little piece on the disconnect got me into a thought tangent. He said:

"Something you know about or care about has turned up in the newspaper or on TV, and you've watched/read the coverage and been taken aback by it. Maybe it angered you; more likely it just made you realise how far their portrayal was from your experience."

It made me think about the Bowie concert. I came away from it thinking, "That was really great how we all got together in crap weather and had a great time. I loved how Bowie rose to the occassion and seemed to have fun with it. Sure I had to stand in the rain for several hours, but it was a great time!"

Some other people I've heard from came away from it with thoughts that seem odd and - frankly - stupid. Like, "He didn't play enough of his old songs!" Or "Brooke Fraser was shite" as a recent comment on this very blog had it. Or "The seats were tied together," or "People stood up so I couldn't see while I was sitting down" - because as everyone knows rock & roll is all about sitting on your arse.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of me mates about a mutual friend of ours. He said, "Why is it that this person always focuses on the negative to the exclusion of the positive?" and related a story about a great social gathering that he and this mutual friend had been at, where Mutual Friend spent the whole evening bitching and moaning about how a particular person she'd really wanted to see had been too busy to come.

Forget about the insult to the people who were there in the inference that this one person's presence was the difference between a good night and a bad one. Mutual Friend was robbing herself of a good time by focusing on what was wrong, rather than simply enjoying what was right.

And it goes on around me all the time. I'm guilty of it sometimes. I think i'm finally understanding the true meaning of "If you haven't anything positive to say, don't say anything at all." It doesn't just mean "Be polite or shut up," it also means "If you change your focus, you'll have a better time."

That's not to say that we should all put blinkers on and ignore the bad stuff. I'd never say "What I don't know can't hurt me," because that tends to lead to "I never even saw what hit me."

(My faithful manservant just asked me, "Will you be needing all the cliches this evening, Mr Pearce?")

As Morgue says in his timely piece, it's all about missing the point. If all you've got to say about Bowie is "Brooke Fraser was shite," you're missing the point of going to see David Bowie. If all you've got to say about a party is "but the one person I wanted to talk to wasn't there," you're missing the point of going to a party. Likewise, if you're the only survivor of a four-car pile-up and you lose both your legs and all you've got to say is "Wow that was exciting..."

So it's not really all bad that WebMarshall has banned access to this blog and its affiliates from my work for "offensive content," and that I can no longer read it or post to it from there, and will therefore be posting much more infrequently from here on in. Hell, I had to give up reading all the Stonesoups weeks ago, the Livejournals months before that; can't read Norightturn or NZPundit or any of my other favourites (though badpolitics still seems okay). Because now I have more time to... er well to work. There's a bright side in there somewhere...

Bowie ruled

David Bowie put on a great show, despite the rain. Lots of psychedelic images churned behing him. His bass player, a bald black chick, did perfect Freddie Mercury vocals on Under Pressure - the song that broke the ice with the crowd and got everyone singing along.

Bowie wore a black mac for much of the gig, and was seen toweling his hair dry at one point. He seemed pleased at the pervasive odor of cannabis in the air.

He covered one of my favourite Velvet Underground songs (White Light/White Heat) and my absolute favourite Pixies song (Cactus) - he'd done both before, but I didn't expect to hear them live. Wicked.

The new songs sounded great. The oldies were choice. The encore finished with Ziggy Stardust. Anyone who didn't have fun is clearly a mad fucker.

Poll

There's a good poll on the front page of horrordvds.com that you should check out - and vote on! Forget "should Maori keep ripping us off? yes/no" biased poll rubbish, THIS is the real deal.

For what it's worth, this "new trend" dates back to Return of the Living Dead.

Scunge

Just saw Brian Sergent's playwriting debut, The Love of Humankind. I kinda guessed it would be foul, smelly, verbally explicit and hiliarious, and it was.

It's based on two real-life Wellington characters that Sergent knew, Mark Smith and Brian Bell. Smith (underplayed brilliantly by Ken Blackburn) keeps his moniker, but Bell is renamed Rodney Pump - and with Sergent playing the role himself he lives up to that glorious name. Presumably the name change was to distance Brian the actor from Brian the character, but this is exactly the sort of role Sergent excels at, and this is the best I've seen him since Ross Jolly's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming.

The play centres around Smith's 70th birthday, and is set in his dodgy old council flat which must surely be in Newtown. Pump and a couple of other mates bring vodka and a few other surprises to cheer the miserable old codger up, but Smith seems more interested in watching his money get pissed away on the horses on tv.

The rest of the cast - Anne Budd as the only female the two degenerates have any time for, Paul McLaughlin as a cheerfully bipolar druggie (yes "cheerfully bipolar" is accurate - I guess Sergent knows what he's doing as he's bipolar himself) and a brief but striking (at least to the straight guys in the audience) turn by Narelle Ahrens - are great, but Sergent wrote the plum role for himself and plays it to the hilt.

That's not to overlook Blackburn, who manages to create a memorable character by sitting in a chair peering at a race guide through a magnifying glass and hardly ever speaking.

The comedy gives way to more bitter stuff in the second half, which is good 'cause otherwise the nonstop pus & bile would get a bit tiresome. It only stops being funny to get tense. I loved every minute.

Highly recommended, provided you can deal with nonstop scatological dialogue delivered by pointedly misogynistic characters whose ambitions in life seems to be to get as drunk, stoned and down-and-out as possible. And how can you hate a play that opened with Desolation Row by Bob Dylan? (Who's more famous than Nico or Sonic Youth, by the by.)

Apparently Brian Bell made frequent appearances in the letters pages of New Zealand newspapers. I'd love to read them if anyone's got any (hint hint).

Lenny Bruce pardoned!!

I just read on the Democracy Now site that in December 2003, Lenny Bruce was pardoned. Yes that's right, his obscenity conviction has been overturned.

Thirty-seven years after his death.

If you don't know who Lenny Bruce was - for god's sake look him up. Listen to his album The Sick Humour of Lenny Bruce. Read his autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People. (Coincidentally, I'm re-reading it right now.)

He's largely remembered as a potty-mouthed comedian, but he was oh so much more. Bob Dylan wrote a song eulogising him. Bill Hicks wanted to be him. Dustin Hoffman played him in a movie directed by Bob Fosse (but Hoffman made him too nice, and the movie tried to make him a saint - it's still pretty interesting, and an unusual movie, and it's fun seeing Hoffman do Bruce's routines even if he's not in the same comedic league as Bruce).

People like Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins and even Billy Connolly owe a lot of their spoken word chops to Lenny Bruce.

And now he's pardoned. Take that needle out of your arm and get up off the toilet floor, Lenny, you're free to go.

Another view

Wow, that last entry had my best selection of comments to date!

Here's a link. This dude from the Wairarapa Times says some pretty interesting things about the issue. I liked this bit:

"Still, you can’t condone throwing things at people just because they indulge in cynical stupidity in order to win support from uninformed voters."

Don Brash, racist trash?

I was just wondering why there's graffiti all around town saying "Don Brash, Racist Trash." I mean I know WHY it's there: it's because he said things like:

"We intend to remove divisive race-based features from legislation. The principles of the Treaty – never clearly defined yet ever expanding – are the thin end of a wedge leading to a racially divided state and we want no part of that."

And also "I acknowledge that there are problems of Maori socioeconomic disparity in some places, mostly rural . . . but these are not Treaty issues, they are social welfare issues."

I'm just not sure where the racism is in there... Can someone point it out to me, please?

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Is very good indeed.

The K1500 Project went off again at Indigo last night. The little Pearce laughed to see such fun.

Dave's Not Here!

Stupid monkeys

I know I said I'd never do this, but to hell with it.

I see our Immigration Service is now in favour of giving sexually abused children back to predators.

Spike Milligan tried to formally resign from the human race. I'd like to join him. People are just selfish monkeys.

Some Movies

Just saw Bright Young Things, which was Stephen Fry's directorial debut; he also adapted the screenplay from Evelyn Waugh's book Vile Bodies.

I thought that the script lacked focus. Worse, so did the cinematography; there were lots of flashy whirling shots where the focus puller seemed to be asleep. The whole movie was over-directed, as you'd expect from an actor & writer making his debut. Some of the acting was pretty good but a lot of it was overdone, especially Simon Callow and the usually-great Jim Broadbent.

Sir John Mills was hilarious in a silent cameo, and the ever-brilliant Peter O'Toole was delightful in his one scene. All in all, a trifle slightly over-cooked.

Much more worthwhile was X-Men 2, which I finally caught on DVD. I really wish I'd seen it at the movies now. I'll say it in bold italics: X-Men 2 is the best action movie I've seen in at least a decade.

Quite frankly this was a better movie than most "serious" movies. It tells a cracking good yarn; it's generally well acted and visually splendid; it tackles serious issues - ranging from racism and homophobia to America's foreign policy post-September 11 - without seeming preachy. If there was one criticism I could level at it it's that it expects you to have seen the first movie, but you should see the first movie too so that's no biggie.

It also features an awesome scene where a guy with claws kills heaps of people. Which is always a plus, especially when the guy in question is doing it to defend children. Hooray for Hollywood!