bad cactus

Only one work would befit the Anzac Day opening of the rebuilt War Memorial Theatre. That work was The Armed Man, Soft Machine rocker turned classical composer Karl Jenkins’ modern mass to peace.

“I see a mind-blowing, possibly multi-media production of The Armed Man that involves the Gisborne Choral Society, Boys and Girls High choirs, and full orchestra, with maestro Gavin Maclean on baton, and Mark Peters as production manager, at the new, acoustically-improved War Memorial Theatre on Anzac Day next year,” I pitched to Gisborne Choral Society conductor Gavin Maclean in May 2014.

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New Zealand pop star Lorde fainted when Goth scumbag Aaron hacksawed the General’s hand off during Auckland’s Pop-up Globe Theatre presentation of Titus.

Jason Hodzelmans as Aaron only mimed the rough amputation while two or three actors in Fractious Tash’s grunge production scraped rusty tin trays to create the sound of a saw-blade rasping through bone.

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Gisborne beekeeper John Foster loved his honey as much as he loved his bees. John specialised in tawari honey.

He sweetened his tea with it. His wife baked tawari honey into his cookies to go with his honeyed tea. Given half a chance he would have run the stuff through his hair with a honeycomb.

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It was a dark and stormy night and Mark, another Mark, and I were flymen for a production of George Gershwin’s jazz age opera Porgy and Bess at Auckland’s Mercury Theatre.

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THE most hushed up wartime incident to occur on New Zealand soil happened 74 years ago today. At least three Gisborne men were there but they are no longer around to tell their tale. Not that they seemed to ever have talked much about the mass shooting of Japanese prisoners at the Featherston prisoner of war camp.

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A small bottle of red wine is administered as a tonic to patients each evening at Bordeaux’s Hopital Saint-Andre.

Those not in the mood give it to visitors.

I visited my partner each evening; I collected my miniature, and her room-mate’s.

Ca va? I said to the room-mate.

She half raised her hand. Ca va, she said.

Her husband did not treat her well, my partner said.

The French wine-growing region’s sun-lit hospital had big white corridors with white arches. Nuns glided down the white arched corridors.

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The Rhythm and Vines festival was still going off with a pulsating end set in the hours before day break on New Years Day.

I wanted to spend more time at the festival, particularly to see Scribe and P-Money on New Year’s Eve, but other commitments came up.

So I got up early on January 1 and drove out to the site for a last taste. The new year was four hours old, and it was still dark, but the pop-up city’s shops were open and party people danced like there was no tomorrow because tomorrow had already arrived.

The air was warm and moist and the streets were solid mud but front of the Vines stage, a crowd of stripped down bodies heaved in the nuclear light to Australian duo Sweet Mix’s big beats and digital pyschedelia.

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 920 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 15 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The sky was blue enough to burst when Jas and me biked out to the chicken farm that summer. There was no wind as we biked along the back straight and we could hear the roar of breakers in the bay.

All this used to be under ocean once, said Jas.

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THE yellow soup we called the piddling pool at the McRae Baths was where my brothers and I learned to swim. When we got the hang of it, we joined Comet Swimming Club and graduated to hours of lane-grazing in the big pool.

With its corrugated iron, barbed wire perimeter and its barrack changing rooms, there was something of the prisoner of war camp aesthetic to the McRae . Even so, it is number 10 on my hit parade of 10 memorable swimming pools.

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