It has all started for us – met Kelly Goto and Doug Bowman at the airport this morning. No one should have to be out of bed before 8am on a Sunday morning. Still, I shouldn’t complain, at least I hadn’t had a 13+ trip…
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Festival of the Arts
The festival is over and the impressive tent dome has gone. What will take it’s place?
Hopefully this:
You can read more about it here(warning : nasty PDFs ahead)
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After rain
Autumn has come in and like last year the temperature has dropped suddenly. A shower the other day resulted in this; the sun came out straight away and the rain evaporated…
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NZ International Arts Festival
The festival of the arts is on in Wellington. Everything that I’ve seen so far has been of pretty high quality, although Eva has really stood out. The dancing was great, but the music really blew me away. It struck me that the singing was similar to Islamic music I had heard (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for instance) and that the dancing was sort of (that’s a big sort of) like belly dancing. The south of Spain were occupied by the Moors for hundreds of years, and so of course it makes sense that Flamenco has its roots in Islamic/Arabic music. There was very little in the way of props or fancy tricks, the performance simply didn’t need props.
In sharp contrast, the stage play The Holy Sinner was an amazing production, with a great sound system, costumes, props, explosions, rain, structures, you name it…. However, this didn’t cover up the rather slim plot. The shock value of the “sinful” sexual relationship seemed contrived, and the atmosphere of Irish Catholic oppression was tired. Most of all I was surprised to find that it was a New Zealand play, I assumed that it was British or Irish….
The other highlights so far have been the Japanese opera “Tea”, and the awesome Antonio Forcione Quartet.
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Sound and vision
Been listening to Ricky Gervais’ podcast series. Very funny.
Have been having my own New Zealand film week. Watched Geoff Murphy’s “The Quiet Earth” and “Goodbye Pork Pie”. Have also lined up “Smash Palace” and “Utu”, and will probably go to “River Queen” this weekend.
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Linux and other adventures
Desktop Linux is great. I’ve discovered KMail and Kontact which so far seems to be a little nicer to use than Evolution. Still having a few issues with sound which is a bummer as I love the interface on amaroK and can’t wait to start using it properly.
The other day I upgraded the old IBM Netfinity with a 250GB hard drive. Had no major issues changing over the home partition. Picked up a printer on Trademe for a fiver, and got that installed and set up with CUPS in no time. Can now print from anywhere around the house (or garden) thanks to that and the wireless network.
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December
Where did the December go? Lots to report on if I get around to it…. Watched an episode of Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’ last night and loved it. The series was dissed by a couple of Art History teachers I had at university, and while I see where they were coming from, judging by the episode I saw there is a lot to recommend the series.
In addition, I have just discovered an really cool feature of Konqueror, which is a spell check while you type in a textarea. Swwwweeeet.
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For the record
Just wanted to add this retrospectively, but bought first house on this day.
