Writing in Elsewhere
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
IN THE ABSENCE OF HEROES by ANTHONY McCARTEN
26 Feb 2012 | 2 min read
Recently, while sitting in airport lounge in Sydney waiting for a flight home, I glanced up from my hardcover book and surveyed the other travelers in my immediate vicinity. Everyone of them – perhaps 40 in total, of all ages from preschoolers to the elderly, from diverse backgrounds and cultures – was on some kind of electronic device. This our world, the one where... > Read more
THE WORLD OF TINTIN. The timeless boy
22 Jan 2012 | 7 min read
Age has not wearied him -- and nor can it. The little adventurer with a distinctive flick to his forelock, oddly unfashionable plus-fours and rarely a change of clothes, is frozen in time. As he globetrots from the old Orient to the Land of the Pharaohs - and even the Moon - he looks as he ever did. Yet in 2009 he turned 80. However he is with us still -- and suddenly back in the headlines... > Read more
AEROSMITH, THE ULTIMATE HISTORY OF THE BOSTON BAD BOYS by RICHARD BIENSTOCK
16 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
The real problem with the story of Aerosmith's five decade career is that -- despite the drugs, decadence, women, partying and internal friction -- it is rather boring. It follows such a familiar story arc: young and hungry band models itself on bad boys like the Rolling Stones, takes drugs, works in clubs, gets contract, makes albums and tours and then straightens up a bit and makes more... > Read more
Sweet Emotion
NO REGRETS; A ROCK'N'ROLL MEMOIR by ACE FREHLEY
7 Dec 2011 | 3 min read
One of the more unusual and least played albums in my collection is Spaceways: A Salute to Ace Frehley from the mid Nineties on which people like Sebastian Bach, Gilby Clarke, Tracii Guns, Dimebag Darrell and others lined up to pay tribute to the original guitarist in Kiss. We say "original" because the Kiss story has seen him sidelined a few times, sometimes at his own volition.... > Read more
Take Me To The City
BULLFIGHTING by RODDY DOYLE
5 Dec 2011 | 1 min read
A recent profile of the astonishingly productive British military historian Max Hasting – a few thousand words a day, almost every day it seems – must have come as depressing reading for anyone struggling for years over their first novel, or even just a volume of poetry. If so, then there is more bad news in that Ireland's 53-year old Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle has yet... > Read more
CLAPTON, THE ULTIMATE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY by CHRIS WELCH
28 Nov 2011 | 2 min read | 1
Open this handsome, cleanly presented, large format book at the midpoint of its 256 colourful pages and you learn much about its contents from just two words. The words are "Blind Faith", the name of the band Eric Clapton formed with drummer Ginger Baker, keyboard player Steve Winwood and bassist/violonist Ric Grech in 1969 and was launched by a debut concert in London's Hyde Park... > Read more
Hideaway
SPEAKING FRANKLY: THE FRANK SARGESON MEMORIAL LECTURES 2003-2010 edited by SARAH SHIEFF
27 Nov 2011 | 2 min read
Get past the crushingly obvious title and the cheap looking cover, and inside this collection are eight provocative, interesting, idiosyncratic and insightful essays which speak not just of New Zealand's Frank Sargeson but in some instances of how we see ourselves and our writers. You might also need to skip the introduction which begins with the uninviting, “ '23 March 1903,... > Read more
THE COOKBOOK TOUR, EUROPE by FLIP GRATER
21 Nov 2011 | 2 min read
Subtitled "Adventures in Food and Music", this substantial book is of reminiscences and vegetarian recipes gathered on a two month European tour by New Zealand singer-songwriter Flip Grater, and it follows her previous smilar volume of journeys playing and eating her way around New Zealand . . . playing and eating delicately we might hastily add. This also comes with a five-song... > Read more
THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING, 2011 edited by STEPHEN PINCOCK
8 Nov 2011 | 2 min read
Science is a problem for mainstream media. It isn't sexy, usually can't be reduced to a snappy headline or soundbite, progress is glacially slow in a fast-turnaround world, there are too many big words, and its practitioners are often more at home in the lab than blinking into the light of the public domain. Science takes its time. Darwin didn't exactly bolt into print with his... > Read more
TREASURES OF THE BEE GEES by BRIAN SOUTHALL (Carlton Books)
28 Sep 2011 | 2 min read
If the Beatles were the greatest songwriters since Schubert as William Mann, the chief music critic of The Times, once asserted (in the very early Sixties, they got better) then what is to be said about the Bee Gees? Brian Wilson's comment that they were "Britain's first family of harmony" when inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hardly seems adequate. That was just... > Read more
Alone
ARNOLD ZABLE INTERVIEWED (2011): Speaking for those who cannot
3 Sep 2011 | 3 min read
When the Australian writer Arnold Zable read Primo Levi's reference to “the eloquent episode” in prose he recognised immediately what was meant. His own short pieces, fiction and non-fiction, frequently have a memorable incident as an emotional or structural pivot. In each story of his non-fiction collection Violin Lessons – which reaches from experiences in Vietnam... > Read more
AMY WINEHOUSE: THE BIOGRAPHY 1983-2011 by CHAS NEWKEY-BURDEN
22 Aug 2011 | 2 min read
As with many of my acquaintance, when I heard of Amy Winehouse's death it was with mixed emotions: a gloomy sense of the inevitability of it, sadness and then anger. That weird anger we reserve for those who have committed suicide or gone out in the manner of so many talented people, before their time and by their own actions. Winehouse was too talented to go from us so soon. Billie... > Read more
Love is a Losing Game (demo)
45 SOUTH IN CONCERT by NEIL McKELVIE (Southland Musicians Club)
21 Aug 2011 | 3 min read | 1
There are a number of big and ambitious books about New Zealand popular music (like Chris Bourke's Blue Smoke and John Dix's Stranded in Paradise) and then there are others which are smaller and more focused in their subject matter, like Roger Watkins' When Rock Got Rolling: The Wellington Scene 1958-70. But this book about music in Southland up to 2005 is a bit of both: it is focused into... > Read more
All New Zealand Heroes
DARK NIGHT: WALKING WITH McCAHON by MARTIN EDMOND
17 Aug 2011 | 2 min read
When Colin McCahon went to Sydney in 1984 to attend an exhibition of his work the attritions of alcoholism and that intensely personal religiosity he explored had taken their toll. He had given up any meaningful painting two years previous and was just three year short of death at age 67. In a bizarre but telling incident, he went into a toilet block in the Botanic Gardens and seemingly... > Read more
EVERY POSTER TELLS A STORY! 30 YEARS OF THE FRONTIER TOURING COMPANY edited by ELOISE GLANVILLE and SARAH MORGAN
15 Aug 2011 | 2 min read
Many people who have grown up in the rock era have band posters knocking about the house. Some of these are artistic (my framed one of Big Brother and the Holding Company with Moby Grape in San Francisco in '68) and some aren't that special but evoke a particular memory (mine of John Cale at the Gluepot in September '83). Posters can speak of an era -- compare brightly coloured late Sixties... > Read more
THE BEATLES Vs THE ROLLING STONES by JIM DeROGATIS and GREG KOT
8 Aug 2011 | 2 min read
At a first glance this lavishly illustrated and beautifully presented book -- with dozens of relevant, interesting and never before seen photos of the bands, and of period-piece memorabilia, movie posters and the like -- looks fairly lightweight. But fun. A quick read and you've got it: the two authors posit a rivalry between these two bands and in a series of themed conversations --... > Read more
Anytime at All
1950s RADIO IN COLOUR; THE LOST PHOTOGRAPHS OF DEEJAY TOMMY EDWARDS by CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY
5 Aug 2011 | 3 min read
Cleveland, Ohio has a formidable reputation as a rock'n'roll city -- today it is the home of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and Museum -- but you'd have to guess there was more to it than just that old adage about "something in the water". Back in the Fifties there, as everywhere, the emerging musical culture was fed by radio, notably Alan Freed who kick-started rock'n'roll.... > Read more
Summertime Blues
TWO WALK IN EDINBURGH, photographs by Mari Mahr, poems by Gregory O'Brien. DEVONPORT: A DIARY by Bill Direen
22 Jul 2011 | 3 min read
As these two slim, hand-printed, limited edition volumes confirm, the necessaries of the poetic writer are observation and considered contemplation, and the words are vehicles which realise them. And for the photographer, close observation and an eye that edits intuitively come before the shutter opens and closes. Writer, poet and curator O'Brien has had a two decade-long association... > Read more
GREETINGS FROM ROUTE 66, edited by MICHAEL DREGNI
18 Jul 2011 | 2 min read
When, in 1946, Bobby Troup wrote what became his classic song Route 66, he could hardly have anticipated how popular it would become. After all, he'd really only written a few words and the hook (“get your kicks on Route 66”, which may have been his wife's suggestion) and after that he just filled the song up with the place names like Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff in Arizona... > Read more
Route 66
LOST IN SHANGRI-LA by MITCHELL ZUCKOFF
17 Jun 2011 | 2 min read
As with many of his generation, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been taken by the idea of “Shangri-La”, that tolerant refuge from a troubled world James Hilton had written about in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon and which Frank Capra had adapted four years later for his enormously popular film of the same name, released as the world was tumbling towards another great... > Read more