Wall St Mall

I finally went into the new 'Wall St' mall yesterday here in Dunedin. Quirky, it ain't.

It's fronted by several clothes shops - all those trendy sort of places that only certain people go in, I presume. I presume this on the basis of the fact that there never seems to be many people in them. Inside there's lot of space, and very little else: the cafe was doing quite good business, as it should in a lunch hour. There's a large chemist's shop right at the back, a tinky-tonk gift shop (tinky-tonk being one of my former bosses word for trivial junk), something else which I've forgotten (oh, yes, yet another Vodafone shop - making three within spitting distance of each other), and that was pretty much it.

Lots of versions of the Wall St slogan, which goes something like: Now you don't have to leave the place you love to shop. If it sounds obscure, well, it pretty much is. Are we to imply that the place we love is the Wall St mall? I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many Dunedinites to love this mall. There's very little to love. It's light and airy, and there's some sort of 'feature' in the centre by the cafe, and the pharmacy looks very glitzy, but....?

I went up the two flights of stairs to see if there was anything else going on. The first flight basically takes you to the office area, where Fisher and Paykel staff are fully visible at their work. The second flight takes you to....nothing. Exits to the outside world, and currently restricted to Tradesmen.

Eventually the mall will run into the Golden Centre which runs into the Meridian. One Large Mall. My suspicion is that the Wall St bit will be the poor relation of the three on the basis of its current lack of customers.

The picture of Wall St's frontage comes from a blog hosted by Jia Yih, a Malaysian student living in Dunedin. Check out his blog; he's got some great pictures.

Murder in the Dark

Finished another Kerry Greenwood mystery last night: Murder in the Dark. It stars Greenwood’s high-class amateur sleuth, Phryne Fisher.
I’m sure I started this novel a couple of years ago, but not a thing about it was familiar, so perhaps I never got past the first couple of pages.
Anyway, it has the usual host of Greenwood characters, well-delineated, so that you don’t get confused (though it helps to have read another one in the series recently), and it has the usual ambience, and mise-en-scene, and wide range of strange people (stranger than usual in this one). It’s set in a country mansion that exists in reality half-an-hour from Melbourne, but Greenwood has taken some liberties with the place.
The story is about a major party (The Last Best Party) which is spread over several days one Christmas, and involves endless amounts of food, heaps of guests, musicians, and other sundries. It also includes some pretty strange goings-on, which Phryne, being the lady she is, indulges in pretty fully. A brother and a sister, constantly referred to as ‘gods’ because of their singular beauty, have put the party on, and they’re attended on by a bunch of male and female acolytes, some of whom get in on the action. There’s a very odd little boy by the name of Tarquin, a missing little girl called Marigold, and a jazz singer called Nerine – who’s so short-sighted she has to be prevented from slipping off the edge of the stage. And then there’s Nicholas, who’s obviously more than he seems, but what is that ‘more’?
Greenwood has a knack of drawing her characters clearly, and only very occasionally did I mistake one name for another. She delights in detailing how food is made and eaten, what clothes look best (especially on Phryne, who is compared the film star Louise Brooks at one point), what the surroundings contain and so on. The book is a trifle overlong, but it’s not because Greenwood is ever a dull writer; perhaps there’s just too much information. And it’s certainly a more compact mystery than the other Phryne Fisher I read not long ago.

Murder on a Midsummer Night

This book is a Phryne Fisher mystery, written by Kerry Greenwood

I began to read an earlier Phryne Fisher mystery a few years ago, but between dealing with the main character’s name and an atmosphere that reeked of the knowing the right thing to eat and the right thing to drink, I didn’t get very far.

However, Phryne Fisher is more charming than her name (though no easier to spell than Dalgliesh), her taste in everything that smacks of money is up with the best, and her creator has a nice line in wit and humour. This last undercuts the otherwise hothouse atmosphere of a world in which nearly everyone has plenty of money, and those that don’t speak funny. So I gave her a second try.

In this, Fisher’s 17th outing, she solves two mysteries at once, one to do with a ‘lost’ child, and the other the murder of a young antique dealer. Neither mystery is quite up to the mark of an Agatha Christie, but the details are interesting enough, and the journey towards solving them has plenty of curiosities and side-turns along the way.

If you like mysteries that don’t tax the brain too much, this will do nicely.

Short Circuit

I haven’t seen Short Circuit since my children were young – it was one of those movies (along with its sequel) that we watched over and over. The story and characters are pretty simple, but what makes the film is the wonderful character of Johnny 5 with his increasingly warm ‘humanity,’ his delightful eyebrows, and his constant cry of Need More Input!
I thought Steve Guttenberg was good at the time, but he seems a bit flat in the movie now, a bit slow-paced. And I thought Ally Sheedy must have vanished from the movie scene, but in fact she's kept on making movie after movie ever since (and made a number before this as well). She plays an over-the-top-irritating, too silly for her own good, and pretty much one-note character whom we don’t ever really believe in. Fisher Stevens’ pseudo Indian character (the father of all the other Asian IT people in movies?) has some funny malapropic lines and some surprisingly crude ones, considering this is supposed to be a kids’ movie. He was the only actor to make it into the sequel, where I think his lines might have been toned down a little, but it’s a long time since I saw the sequel (which also featured Michael McKean, that mad actor who’s appeared in some of the spoof documentaries made by Christopher Guest).
All the actors seem to be on that second-level area where they get plenty of work but they’re not really household names. I thought Steve Guttenberg had vanished from movies, as well, but in fact, he’s been just as busy as Sheedy. Obviously there are thousands of movies out there that we just never hear of – until you check out IMDB!
Any carping about the movie aside, it’s Johnny 5 who’s the real star. Apparently there were more than a dozen actual Johnny 5s, swapped and shuffled as required. Certainly some of them must have barely survived the ‘stunts’ they went through.