The Opinionated Diner

I spent three or four hours tak­ing pho­tos of the protests last Sun­day. There have been all sorts of absurd claims of mil­lions of pro­test­ers but logic and the eye­ball would indi­cate a crowd in the low to mid hun­dreds of thou­sands. The claims bring to mind Hitler’s famed ‘big lie’ theory.

I walked between stages and took about 250 shots. These are some of them:

On the Sky­walk about Rama 1

Pho­tos and self­ies seemed to be a core activ­ity, often more than protesting.

Out­side the Louis Vuit­ton store — this was quite a dif­fer­ent crowd to the 2010 protest. The high end stores were doing incred­i­ble business.

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I feel like I’m slowly com­ing out of a dark hole. Of my own mak­ing of course.

I blog mostly because I enjoy it  - and because it pro­vides a place where I can harm­lessly vent and enthuse to my heart’s (and head’s) con­tent. I like it and it’s an escape to a place that is mine, even if that mine is rather pub­lic. But it’s a pub­lic me that I can con­trol and limit as I see fit.

I’ll never write as well as my friend David Herkt has for many, many years, mostly recently on this heart­warm­ing — if con­flict­ing — essay ¹, and make no claim to do so, but nei­ther am I ashamed of what I write now. I wish I could say that about then, but I’m not tempted to quick-edit to hide that messy past either.

Three or so years back I started obses­sively push­ing for the thing that has grown into Audio­Cul­ture. Why? Well mostly because I was increas­ingly aware that there was a hole, and it was a gap­ing and grow­ing hole, in the way we (New Zealand — no mat­ter where I live I am every­day a New Zealan­der) as a nation have cap­tured our musi­cal past.

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A guest post from Mur­ray Cam­mick. Mo’ says:

This is the ver­sion of the James Brown story (that was pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary 2007 Rip­ItUp mag­a­zine) before I axed 300 or so words and a bit of the colour from the story.

Bryan Staff inter­views JB, Auck­land 1978

The God­fa­ther Of Funk 

We will need a new card for Christ­mas 2007, one that recog­nises the birth of Jesus Christ and the death of James Brown on Decem­ber 25.

When you read Brown’s biog­ra­phy you won­der how he sur­vived his child­hood in a house of ill-repute and his impris­on­ment as a teenager. With no edu­ca­tion, how did this wild and crazy guy become the biggest soul star in the USA and then rev­o­lu­tionise that style to invent funk?

I get pissed off  when music writ­ers choose the 1962 Live  At The Apollo as Brown’s best live album. They are ignor­ing the piv­otal achieve­ment of his life, the fact that in 1965 he invented a new sound with the sin­gle ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’. This sin­gle was No.1 on the Bill­board R&B charts for eight weeks. He should be called the God­fa­ther of Funk not the God­fa­ther of Soul.

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