So the final Sopranos is tonight. No please, don’t tell me….will I be able to avoid it? What with the USA being the only place on the planet that actually matters, will the American media be able to extract itself from the most important news story of the decade (Paris Hilton…it took a full twenty five minutes of the Fox “only news that matters” bulletin that was playing in the Gym yesterday…with the promise of further indepth analysis to come) and consciously avoid telling the other 95% of the planet who have yet to see it, what happens in the final of the greatest TV series ever. Since Minder that is….

I love The Sopranos, I love the fact that the lesser made guys are such comical thugs. Take Silvio….he is such a calm measured consigliore who just happens to be a mouth clenched cold as fuck thug driving Adrianna to her death muttering “cunt” as he pulls the trigger. Or Paulie, a comical moron, who seems perfect for an episode of Green Acres until he smothers the old lady whilst robbing her house. Or Bobby….a bumbling incompetent grossly overweight schmuk of a father and husband to the grossly overweight breast tattooed strip maller Janice with stupid grossly overweight children…who happens to take pleasure and sees no wrong in killing people for business. The genius of David Chase made these scumbags loveable, at least for a moment, and lets one forget their real business…….and that’s the wonderful thing about The Sopranos. Tony is as much Arthur Daley as he’s Michael Corleone.

And of course he’s the main act, Tony Soprano. It sounds wrong but Tony is my hero. I love Tony Soprano. So much so that he almost makes up for fifty years of almost unrelenting appallingly bad American television. There is a charming cheese factor about some American TV shows, and every now and then you find a Simpsons or a decent NY based crime show but, when you consider the vast volumes produced, mostly they don’t do it very well. When Alf was the highpoint of American TV in the eighties…….

I like Tony because he’s a hard man and I miss hard men. The British have always done it so well and James Gandolfini fits happily into the great, and missed tradition of Bob Hoskins and, when he’s not in one of his countless shockingly bad straight to videos, the great Michael Caine. There was something about Get Carter that nobody in Hollywood was able to quite grasp, let alone remake. But it seems a lost art, even the British, witness Layer Cake, seem unable to avoid turning the role into anything more than a vague caricature anymore. Perhaps after Minder that was inevitable. As I miss classic hardmen, I miss the British film industry too…..I liked Helen Mirren in both Elizabeth and The Queen, but when that is all the BAFTAs have to crow about, something is amiss.

Perhaps that’s part of the attraction of The Sopranos. Set in Jersey it may be but it’s so damned British….it’s humour is layered, twisted, wry and subtle, something very un-American and it’s lineage is so very, for want of a better word, BBC. The genealogy of The Sopranos does very much not include Miami Vice, NYC Blue or LA Law.

So do I pull a sheet over my head and wait for the DVDs to arrive…I’ve pre-ordered them..because the Indonesian censor will only leave about 20% in. The pirated DVDs of Season 6 Part One were around within weeks of it airing which may allow me to come up for air before the proper things turn up, or do I just assume that no amount of post analysis or spoilers on an America-centric global media will take away the thrill of watching the last episodes of the greatest TV ever made.

Or of course I could simply start The Sopranos backlash…it wasn’t all that……

And over at my website I’ve put up a singles catalogue for Trevor Reekie’s (and Sheryl Morris & Tim Moon’s) Pagan and Antenna labels up until 2000. Trevor has written the track notes and they’re both witty and informative. What does immediately leap out is how much incredible music radio in NZ simply ignored over the years….why isn’t Greg Johnson a superstar…it has nothing to do with what he recorded.

Trevor, to my mind, has the best set of A&R ears ever in New Zealand…his signings and discoveries, more than anyone else’s, have defined NZ Music over the past few decades…and indeed, have provided quite a bit that others take credit for.

The recent history of NZ’s popular music has been rather re-written in recent years by those who are able to. Hopefully discographies like this (and more I have to come…going back to the golden pop era of Zodiac, HMV and Impact in the sixties) will help to put the record straight.

Fabulous darling….well it was, almost. Blossom is all the thing here right now, situated in the middle of the villas d’choice (this week), Sentosa, just off the ever deteriorating Jalan Laksamana / Jalan Pettinget thoroughfare (one has to ask when they’ll see fit to repair the worst major road in central Bali…they crave tourists but won’t fix the bloody road which is like traversing quarry).

It’s the restaurant and all the beautiful young, and not so young anymore, things in their flowing white resort-wear, and Paul Ropp, thinking they’re so tropical and sophisticated are loving it, and flocking.

The holidaying elite from Jakarta, checking out their new beachfront villas, seem to have flooded in too (I imagine that’s the real target market…they have the money) and it’s like being in (fab) Indonesia but not really being in Indonesia. That’s because the management, senior staff and front of house all seem to be staffed by non-Indonesian imports, leaving the lesser waiting jobs and other positions for locals….which makes me more than a little uncomfortable (especially as the service is not the venue’s strongest point, of which more in a minute). But lest I sound too snarly, let me say it does look incredible (even if the pool is a little too Playboy Mansion tack), the audio is a very passable mix of modern house and classic disco, the food is stunning, albeit it a little over-priced for what it is (we are in RI, not Double Bay), but I guess that’s because the target markets either don’t know or don’t care. We couldn’t fault the favours or the presentation of the Thai styled cuisine. And, like the new Bali Café (or is it Café Bali?), it offers a very pleasant and slightly less twee place for a late night drink than the likes of Ku De Ta, which I love for breakfast but have trouble with any period after noon, when the we-are-so-fabulous masses waltz in for their sunset drink or rather overpriced, and often less than average food.

God, I sound cynical, but I guess you get like that when you’ve been traipsing around bars, clubs and restaurants for as many years as I have…but it’s not all bad…let me get over the jaded snipes before I move into a more positive mode. So, yes, the service….is shockingly bad…and for that there is no excuse in Bali, being as it is allegedly tourist driven, and that there are countless places where the service is of a standard you can only dream of in most western cities. I guess that may be the problem…whoever thought of bringing in Australian and European staff to fill the senior service and on the floor management jobs needs to have their heads read. The Indonesians, and indeed most Asians (excluding Singapore which specialises in appallingly rude service), do it so much better….visit any restaurant in Jakarta, Bangkok or KL and tell me that’s not so.

It occurs though that Sentosa seems to be perfectly suited to the sort of people that came here, may spend years here, learn nothing of the language and spend no time either outside the Seminyak / Kerebokan / Canggu triangle, or with any Indonesians who are not serving staff. Which is a rather ugly reality.

But service….after we were seated, and ordered, there really wasn’t any to speak of unless we pointedly stood and waved furiously to call over a staff member, of which there were dozens milling around. Someone asked if they could take a chair from our table..we said no, we had another soon to arrive, and after all, it’s not KFC, at these prices. And to top it off, after having been there for just over an hour and a half, in which one of our party had ordered a bottle of Piper Heidseick, and before we’d been offered any coffee or desert, we were asked to vacate our very pricey table for the next sitting. We were polite in our refusal until they were out of earshot. And when the large bill finally arrived it had been overprinted several times and was unreadable. A request to reprint was met with reluctance. And then nobody seemed to want to collect payment.

So, yes, the service was flawed on every level but I still liked the concept…the bar was rather cool, it was a very enjoyable place to sit and talk; and the potential, assuming they bring in some local management to sort the issues, was promising. I need to feel a little excessively decadent at times and there are not many places on the island, despite the choices, that offer that.

To be honest we’ve found ourselves quite regularly at the quirkily cool new Café Bali (terrible name…great drinks) in Jl Laksamana, sitting on the veranda out the front sipping the very reasonably priced Caprioskas which are almost as good as the tried and true passion-fruit ones down Dhana Pura at Antique. It’s the best new bar on the isle…and the service, all Balinese, is rather good. I guess Blossom, despite misgivings, offers another option, and it will get better you would hope…..the place must have cost a fortune and they need to it to service that investment.

Jaded, me?