nice one Mark and Louis

We are very proud of our mates, Mark and Louis, who recently screened their movie Shopping, at the Sundance Festival, and tonight are making their first European screening in Berlin. Mark and Louis are consumate filmakers, with a distinctly Kiwi take on growing up in 70′s and 80′s.  They are so adept at capturing childhood experiences so clearly.

As an aside, I really tried hard to get them to write into the script two bizarre occurrences of my own childhood. The first was how we used to sit cross legged in assemblies singing contemporary songs, like the theme song to M*A*S*H – never mind a room full of discordant falsetto children singing ‘Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it as I please’.  The other, equally bizarre, but perhaps MORE disturbing, was Ms. Steshman (sp?), who would get us to tickle/scratch her legs on the mat while she read stories to the class.  As an exercise in behaviorism  it is fascinating to recall how eager we were to indulge this request – we were only seven or eight years old.  As an exercise in classroom management,  that method has been surpassed, I am certain. But, I digress… (guess I have been looking for a place to get that off my chest)…I doubt Mark and Louis, as captivated as they were, have coloured their feature with that particular story.

These guys, IMHO are Kiwi-combo-equivalent to the likes of Ken Loach. I love that truth telling darkness served up with  humorous gravitas (or is it that we just wanted to use the word gravitas in a sentence?) Their short films (Run, and Six Dollar Fifty Man) are no stranger to well deserved international accolades. Plus, they really know how to rock the double puffer jacket. We are really looking forward to the premiere, down here. Good on you guys, we are also rejoicing in your success.

It's great to be in Good.

The last few months have been a whirlwind, we have launched our ninth booth and placed it in the caring care of Sophia of My Waiheke. Which is good, because that means no pesking transportation and accommodation fees to get a booth across to the island.  We are already there!  We are Waihitians now.  And then, just when we were having a holiday and a bit of a break, we found that we had a little feature in Good Magazine. That’s GREAT! Thanks you Good guys!

Tonight, we are supporting the premiere of BREL, a production ofSilo Theatre, Auckland.  When we were first approached, I admit sheepishly, that I had to feign delighted recognition f BREL and his music.  Hmmm.  The truth was, I did not knowhim at all. (Though we are familiar with the fabulous work of the theatre itself, and the cast of the show; reckless rock god Jon Toogood from Shihad, rock goddess Julia Deans, the velvet voiced Tama Waipara, Jennifer Ward-Lealand, queen of everything.  These folks all  stand out on their as being amazing. But who the hell was Brel?  Was I that much of a cultural philistine. Probably. Actually, yes.  (and is even OK to say ‘philistine’ like that – some of your best friends are probably philistines, yes?)  Anyway, nothing is too far away to google, and we did discover more about BREL.  And we can confirm, he is amazing. Of course, you could sing ‘where is the supermarket’ in French and it would sound amazing (btw, check out what these guys have done to FOTC, great!).  But when you sing:

When we have only love To speak to rifles And but one song To persuade the drums of war or When we have only love To dress The poor and the homeless with velvet coats in the morning.

You know that sh*t is amazing.  Double amazing.  So, amaze your self, and get thee along to see Brel, while you can. Tickets here.

Music by Anna Coddington. What a privilege! Check out the lyrics just as the art work reaches completion.

Hamish Blake, stars as Bret McKenzies Nige. Ginny is Deano.

And to top that off, last night, at Te Papa in Wellington, the Perioperative Nurses Conference had the pleasure of our photo booth, courtesy of Device Technologies. We were curious, so we checked them out, to see what they did.  Whoa! It’s the real Steve Austin deal here, the future has arrived.  Check it out. Maybe this could even help a Norwegian back packing football star after he has had a run in with Nige and Deano.

Petone Winter Carnival 2012 from Michael Wilson on Vimeo.

Some great highlights in the photo booth too. This was one of our favorites on the day.

snapped!

It’s called Searching for Sugar Man and is about the songwriter (Sixto) Rodriguez. When I was 14 years old, my father bought home a cassette that had been left on the train (he worked on the Wellington to Auckland passenger train). It became something of a high rotate cassette in our household, and on my Walkman (Dolby Noise Reduction anyone? Yeah!) It’s songs were odes to a gritty North American inner city existence. Not at all like the suburban Newlands one that I existed in . It preceded my slightly over valued interest in Bob Dylan, perhaps because he could sing, and the lyrics were both clear, poetic AND cutting, it prepared the way. It was, I think, the beginning of a realisation that this world is much harder for some than it was for me. I like to think the music contributed towards a dawning sense of empathy, compassion and, dare I say it, justice. It balanced the nihilistic belly gazing anger of Pink Floyd and The Doors, as we rediscovered our parents album collections. Rodriguez didn’t make any significant social contributions though. Dropping a Rodriguez reference, (or graffitied on my pencil case as I did, alongside Bones Brigade, anarchy symbols and Pink Floyd references) just drew blank unknowing stares. So, not strokes for digging Rodriguez. The Sugar Man man was much of a private pleasure, though being a searching and earnest born again-ish Christian, many of the references were wasted on me too. I probably thought that ‘Sugar Man’ was about sugar. It was not until fairly recently that I met anyone who shared my affections for Sixto. There was a brief entry into my orbit when Sugarman was included in the soundtrack of Candy.

Rodriguez existed in a bubble. Out of curiosity I remember googling him once, to find that we was still alive in Detroit, and had been involved on local body politics, but was no longer making music apparently. It also stated that his albums bombed in the U.S, but that he was popular in South Africa, and to a lesser extent, New Zealand and Australia. It did not go on to say if he liked rugby. But what makes the movie amazing?

Remarkably, now this may be a spoiler so beware, the music of Rodriguez flopped in the US, despite major record label support. Rodriguez abandoned his dreams for fame, or surrendered to his working class fate? In the meantime, in South Africa his music had taken seed with the white liberal middle class. It’s songs of revolution, and questioning, fueling a suspicion also, that the world is not as it should be. As one of his fans stated, no respectable middle class record cabinet was complete without a copy of Van Morrison, Simon and Garfunkel and Rodriguez. The film bears witness very well to the sense of the scale of appreciation of Rodriguez within South African society in the 70′s. We are introduced to the reality that nobody knows anything about the artist, and the widely held belief from various apocryphal stories of a rock and roll stage death. The documentary uses the reveal technique, tracking along with a small band of South African fans, on the trail for the truth, or at least some awareness, about the person of Rodriguez. His he alive or isn’t he? Well, he is, and unknown to him, he has sold over half a million copies of his albums in South Africa. So that’s amazing 1.0 And I guess there is also the fact that he never saw any of the money, is the amazing 2.0 part (Check for the interview with the record company A&R man, priceless!) And then, there is the meeting of the South African fans and the man himself. All positively subtypes of amazing-ness within this wonderful film. In the culmination of these events, the searching, the losing, the finding, and the rediscovering is Rodriguez himself, HE to me, was the truly outstanding – AMAZING – aspect. It was him and his story that kept me in tears for a good 30 minutes, breaking up whenever he spoke, while he never really saying too much at all. You see, some fans had found their hero, and that’s pretty cool. And the hero, well, he had been royally screwed, and his life dreams caught the last train out of town. But I found that there was something inexplicably fateful that it happened to a man like Rodriguez. He lived a very very modest existence (His daughters called in modest, but it was poverty – a joyful poverty perhaps, but poverty) mending broken houses, and being a family man. One wonders, before he was ‘rediscovered’ what he would have made of his broken dreams. Did he hold them resentfully, with any hurt or bitterness? By all accounts, he seemed not to. All the while, a world away, they were encouraging people, millions of then, in a struggle much like the pictures he was painting with his words and music. He began to tour again, and took to performance like it was his destiny, yet always seemed so unaffected, and with poise and humility.

Searching for Sugar Man has nothing what so ever to do with the photo booth business, (like I really have no business doing a ‘film review’) that’s obvious. But for me, as a fan from way back, and the owner of this business, it was a really a reminder to have faith. To be good to all people. And that success is seldom deserved, and neither is failure. The good things we sew in this world may one day come back to us, and show us to be richer than we could have imagined. And that is amazing.

www.sugarman.org  www.nzff.co.nz 

http://clauderains.bandcamp.com/album/claude-rains