DJs

Apparently, the Revo 4 American DJ offers a moonflower effect with razor sharp LED beams producing dynamic and unique lighting patterns. It looks like a lot of fun, although I personally wouldn't have any use for it, not being  DJ. 

I met an artist the other day who's does DJ work three nights a week. He told me this while working on a large canvas of Tippi Hedren, the woman nearly frightened (and pecked) to death in Hitchock's The Birds. This artist applies the normal brushstroke to fill in the features of the painting, then uses a second, dry brush to give a kind of smudge effect that makes it look somehow as though there's a blur to the picture. Intriguing. 

I don't know that I've met many DJs in my time. It always strikes me as a rather odd job, but plainly it requires a great deal more skill than I've given it credit for. You have to be quite a technician as well as a bit of a showman. So, strike that off the list of possible jobs for me in my retirement. 

However, DJs sometimes go beyond their technical skill and musical ability. Take this extract for instance, in which Alexis Petridis is discussing Stockhausen's last but previously unperformed opera, which can only be said to bizarre in a multitude of ways: 

Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayake has been cast in the role that Stockhausen intended for himself: interviewing the participants – players and pilots alike – after the Helikopter-Streichquartet, and hosting an audience question-and-answer session. "There's no context as to why they would have approached me," Arthanayake says. "I mean, I've seen an opera before, but I'll tell you how shandy an opera that was: it had Dawn French in it. To be honest, I didn't stop to ask them why, just in case they thought, 'Oh, we've got the wrong fella.' I thought, 'Oh God, it's gonna be one of those things where you're DJing dubstep and a big woman comes out and starts singing over the top of it' – but then Graham started talking about string quartets and helicopters. I don't think I've ever been in a meeting for an hour and half and been so dazzled and confused and inspired.

Medical help - or not

A few weeks back we were listening to one of the young missionaries from our church who's home on leave from Papua New Guinea.

If ever you felt you had a reason to criticise the medical help we get in New Zealand, try living in a place like PNG.  Some of the stories this doctor had to tell were scary to say the least, and the medical problems are compounded by cultural ones.   The witch doctors may not be so thick on the ground - at least where this person works - but they're still in existence and can have a profound influence on the life of a person; can bring about the death of that person, in fact. 

But beyond that are the distances involved in a place like PNG, and the lack of doctors or nurses - or equipment.  Here we have the Rescue Helicopter flying overhead several times a day.   There they might have one plane available, and the injured person still has to get to a medical centre (which isn't anything like you or I might imagine). 

It's very much a hand-to-mouth existence, medically-speaking, for these staff, some of whom have been trained in hospitals where everything required is on tap.  In PNG they have to work out ways to deal with medical issues without the equipment or medication that would help.  It calls for considerable initiative, and tactics of the number 8 wire kind, such as reading up on how to deal with snake bites (of which there are many kinds) while travelling in the plane to save someone's life, and then hoping that you understood the approach to take.

I've just been to the doctor's this morning - a mere bus ride away (I would have walked, in fact, if I'd felt a bit less queasy).   Waiting time: ten minutes at the outside (and I got the appointment for 10.30 just by ringing up at 8.30).   It's not always that easy, but it's certainly infinitely more satisfactory than what Papua New Guineans put up with.   Furthermore, I came home with medication which will probably sort the problem out, and it only required a hop, step and a jump along the road to get to the chemist's.   My lab tests will be done in a day - compared even to the UK where you could wait up to two weeks.

There may be a lot of things to grizzle about in NZ, but the medical service, overall, isn't one of them.

Photo courtesy of PACOM

Three in a row

I spent the night flight from Heathrow to Incheon (Seoul) watching movies, because I couldn’t get to sleep.
First up was the latest in the Oceans saga: yet another complicated piece in which George Clooney and Brad Pitt barely do anything except look pretty. There’s no woman in their team this time; instead the baddie has a chief executive who’s a woman (Ellen Barkin). She gets her comeuppance, of course, as does the baddie. It didn’t help that the engine noise from the plane was a constant background to the soundtrack of the movie, which is one where everybody mumbles a lot. I have no idea what most of the dialogue was about, and it probably didn’t matter. The heist was a typical convoluted affair full of improbabilities. And of course the eleven beat the baddie at his game without blinking an eyelid.
Bruce Willis barely blinks in Live Free or Die Hard either - he doesn’t have time. The body count is high, the stunts (particularly with cars and helicopters and an Air Force bomber) are over the top but magnificent, and the story of course follows the usual pattern. However, there’s a lot of humour (not too much of it directed at recently deceased baddies); a nasty character who manages to fall from a helicopter and survive; various computer hackers who talk in computerese and frequently leave Willis wishing he’d gone to computing school somewhere along the line; an extremely vicious young woman baddie (Maggie Q) who almost beats Willis by using karate against him; and a sidekick played by Justin Long. The sidekick is a computer whiz kid who finishes up being babysat by Willis for most of the film and who finally comes into his own in the last stages. Between babysitting he manages to provide a lot of the humour, a lot of (impossible) computer wizardry, and prove to be a likeable companion. As always all the computer whizzes type like there’s no tomorrow, and the insurance bill for what’s left in the wake of Willis’ doings rises into the billions. The Grapes of Wrath, as you’d expect, is as gloomy as it was when it was made in the late thirties. Henry Fonda gives a performance of considerable surliness, and a few tender moments with his ‘Ma,’ (played with great humanity by Jane Darwell.) John Ford directed it, and it’s wonderfully photographed in black and white. What makes the film still appealing are the performances: Fonda and Darwell are great, but the minor characters have a charm and even eccentricity that’s suitable to the story, and warm-hearted as well.
The distress felt by Oklahoma farmers who are pushed off their land after several years of drought is strongly conveyed, and the difficulty of getting work in California is equally well done. I suspect Steinbeck’s story has been altered somewhat for the movie version - the ‘Reds’ are seen as villains, and for once the Government is a benevolent provider (but only towards the end).