Sorry mate, I'm actually rather out of shape at the moment

Source: John Christopher, British Posters of  the First World War, Stroud (Gloucs.), 2013.

Sven Olsen's Brutal Canadian Love Saga

Pictured below, the lighting rig show at last night's Fringe Festival performance by Sven Olsen's Brutal Canadian Love Saga, a Wellington-based 19-piece orchestral pop collaborative singing bedsit epics of life and love in New Zealand, the land of the laid-back catastrophe and the mythical rockstar economy. Plus the odd ditty about Kron, the most famous tagger to ever adorn the walls and buildings of the fine conurbation of Hastings. The concert put me in mind of a local embodiment of the pop spirit of Tim DeLaughter's Texan hippie orchestra The Polyphonic Spree, which I enjoyed seeing in the big tent at the Big Day Out in Auckland in 2004 (or perhaps '05). 

The Svens play two more Fringe gigs in the beautiful St Peter's on Willis Street, tonight and tomorrow night. Entrance is by koha.

Rosy-fingered dawn

A spectacular dawn sky over Wellington this morning, viewed from Thorndon.

Cracked Actor

A must-watch for all Bowie-freaks: Alan Yentob's famous 1975 BBC doco capturing post-Ziggy Bowie in America during the '74 Diamond Dogs tour - chem-raddled and alarmingly emaciated, yet lucid and surprisingly open in interviews and in fine voice on stage. Author Peter Doggett notes that the documentary's glimpses of Bowie's American stage performance are actually fantastically rare:

David Bowie undertook two lengthy excursions across the United States and Canada in 1974: the first, designed to promote Diamond Dogs, was recorded for the album David Live, but only a few fragments of concert footage have survived; the second, for which he abandoned the scenery and iconography of Diamond Dogs and set out to prove himself a soul singer, was glimpsed briefly in the 1975 BBC TV documentary Cracked Actor, but otherwise exists only in memory and on illicit tapes made by audience members.
- Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s, London, 2011, p.217.

Cracked Actor was also seen by Nicolas Roeg and led to Bowie being cast as the lead in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and who better to play a creepy multimillionaire alien in human form?

Frankenstein in the Alps

I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountaintop, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds--they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace [...]

It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed, "Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life."

- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, 1818, Chapter 10.

Evans Bay triptych

158 Evans Bay Parade

Evans Bay Marina

Shed 152