digitaldust

… is confused geographically. Fitzroy Street is in Saint Kilda, Brunswick Street is in Fitzroy, and nothing as far as I could see was in Brunswick when I hopped off the tram, starved and decaffienated, looking for a nice cafe. I didn’t find it but there is either a St Kilda street in Brunswick or maybe just more links in a long chain of cartographic confusion.

Electric is a contemporary noir novel set in an exciting Auckland, brought to the boil by a heady mix of lust, drugs and power cuts. Chad Taylor has a good way with words. You can see his crime background in the details and his fascination with noir style dialogue. While at times working his characters at times become too obscure for their own and the stories good. This may have been intended to convey the drug addled nature of the main character, but it becomes misleading and confusing,especially when you have to reread paragraphs to work out where they fit in the story.

Having said that it’s still a quick easy read that keeps the pace speeding along like it’s blasting off to Murawai with a tinnie in its hand.

Rhombus are an excellent New Zealand dub act. I like it a lot which is suprising since I generally hate dub with a soulful loathing.

Arena-folk-metal-punk. Corgan also recruited one of the guitarists from Tortoise.

A disc of “best of”s and a disc of remixes.

I’ve been saving this book for six months now. I was given it as a present and wanted to wait till I had the time to just read it from cover to cover, with no interruptions, no delays, nothing getting in the way of my consuming it. I was right to do so, it was worth the wait, it is worth lavishing attention on.

The Scar is based in the same world - Bas-Lag - as his previous book Perdido Street Station, loosely following on from the events in that book, but not vital to read and nothing to do with the plot. It serves at most as an establishing macguffin.

Bas-Lag is an incredible fantasy world, well thought out, brilliantly imagined. It’s full of plenty of fantasy tropes, but there’s no pointy eared elves or leather clad barbarians in sight. He builds the world well by referring to a plethora of off stage places and things, relating them just enough to the story, leaving the reader guessing and wanting more, but not writing too much about them. No boring info dumps about irrelevancies, just vignettes of stories you want to find out more about.

His prose is very readable, moving easily from Lovecraftian to contemporary modes of description or speech. The thing that makes his work exciting for me is the names. Names of people and places fit, you can recognise New Crobuzon names from southern pirates, undead kingdoms have the right sound to them and invented races and creatures sound magical. It adds that feeling of veracity, in the manner of Tolkien, everything named just right and rolling off the tongue like they’ve been spoken for years.

I’m smuggling back some Illicit Clothing. Hidden deep in my bags so no one but me will know… I will have problems walking through customs, trying to cover my drool, trying to hide my bestial smile, waiting, wanting to get my hands back on my new purchases. Waiting to be able to languidly lie around inside them.

The shop in Elliot Street is very dangerous, I almost exploded with excitement when I looked around. I’m already hooked, I think I might have to go back for more tomorrow… just one more hit before I leave.

One of their artists is having a show in St Kevin’s Arcade and then in LA.

For good reason this is supposedly one of the top 10 dives spots in the world. Beats diving in Thailand or Croatia, my only other dive experiences. I wish I had an underwater camera, there were so many amazing friendly little fishies to play with.

Ah… Piha, the west coast on the North Island. Just close enough to Auckland to be part of the big smoke, isolated enough to be a rural hippy hamlet. Plus more architects per square metre than anywhere else in the world. Every second house on the way down Piha road seems to harbour an architects studio.

I’ve been playing with the panoramic facility on my new digital camera and it works beautifully. The Ixus is set up to take overlapping pictures and software comes with it that stitches it all together. Here’s the view from Pukematekeo the summit of the Waitakere ranges. (It’s a popup and fairly large ~1Mb)