Summer>Torrent

BY HENRY OLIVER

Okay, so summer is generally pretty great: the sun is shining (duh), friends get together more frequently & generally do more interesting/funner stuff, it is socially acceptable to drink earlier in the day, and people generally seem happier and more fun to be around. So what’s the rub? The rub is that TV sucks in the summertime.

(Yeah, so what if it’s summer? I still want to watch some TV alright? I mean how much time can you really spend at a beach? And who feels like reading a novel after a 4AM Iron Chefesque cocktail competition? Not me. And sure, BBQ’s are fun and all – and delicious! - but everyone has their limits.)

First, the kids are off school so there is all the 7:30 family orientated movies to contend with. Second, most of the shows are reruns, so if you missed what happened in Ugly Betty the first time round you’ll be glued to the set but if you didn’t care last year your remote will remain firmly in hand. And third, there’s the Writers Guild of America Strike.

If you’ve been living under a television for the last few months, it basically boils down to this: all the people who write TV shows are pissed because they want to get paid residuals (continuing payment) for use of their writing on the Internet, they want a bigger percentage per DVD sold, and writers of reality shows (yes, The Hills is scripted) want the same basic contractual rights as the writers of any other TV show. The Man (the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) doesn’t want to pay up and has hired Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign manager to try and reverse the inevitable rising tide.

Anyway, THERE’S NOTHING GOOD ON TV. In an effort to comfort to comfort my short attention span, I’ve turned to the three most ironic (under the circumstances) sources of Television: the Internet, DVDs and Reality Television.


Undoubtedly the best source of television on the Internet is BitTorrent – a file sharing system where you download a torrent or ‘seed’ file from a website that when opened with a specific program puts you in touch with other people who send you tiny parts of the file while you send the tiny parts you already have to others. The key to the whole thing is that the sites that provide the torrents are not breaking any copyright laws because the file itself is not a TV show, movie or album at all. It’s just a birdcall to those that have what you want telling them that they should give it to you should they wish to.

My Current Torrent Obsessions:

The Wire Season Five
The last season! Wholly Shit this show is so good. If you like television and you like drama you will like this. In the realm of HBO, this is the Charles Dickens to Deadwood’s William Shakespeare. This season is a pungent cocktail of mayoral politics, financial misappropriation, drug dealing, and the death of the newspaper. Has the same Decline-of-America/Good-VS-Evil/Crime&Punishment bent as The Sopranos but substitutes the zippy one-liners for gritty realism (when I drove around Baltimore it was pretty scary). I can’t believe it will all be over soon. Please Sir, can I have some more?

A Daily Show/Colbert Report
I never seem to be at home or watching TV when The Daily Show plays on C4 so I download it and watch it back-to-back with The Colbert Report, just like it’s meant to be watched. Having been off air for sometime due to the strike, they are back with The Daily Show being renamed A Daily Show for the remainder of the dispute. Now, the both these shows tried to come to interim agreements with the Guild, like David Lettermen et al, but the Guild put the kibosh on it quick and now both shows are back on air without writers. You can tell. The funniest thing about these shows at the moment is how un-funny they are without the writers. It seems almost like a statement of solidarity: “See how much better our show was when we had writers? Pay the damn writers for iTunes downloads, okay?”

Project Runway Season Four
The best guilty pleasure on the VLC these days is Project Runway - the best reality game show since the early days of Survivor. This show is Fucking Funny. I can’t really talk about this too much because I wouldn’t want to give too much away, but if you’ve seen this show before and liked it, you are in for a continuous treat. The clothes are so-so but the freaks are fierce!

When the torrents are too slow (I’ll save the NZ Internet snail race rant for another time) I reluctantly visit my old friend Video Ezy Ponsonby for some sweet box set action. This will definitely go down as the summer of Deadwood. When I actually had a HBO subscription Deadwood never appealed for some reason but Amber and I watched the entire run of the show in two weeks over the New Year period. AMAZING! Al Swearengen is the best character in recent television. He’s hard to keep up with but his iambic hailstorm will knock you to the cold, hard floor.

What lets the show down and holds it back from Best Show Ever raves is some unfortunate scenery chewing from Timothy Olyphant (as Seth Bullock) and the utterly unconvincing romance between Bullock and widow Alma Garret. But, despite these major flaws from major characters, Deadwood utterly succeeds in ever other facet. The show was not officially cancelled but the actor’s contracts were not renewed, though two movie length episodes were planned in lieu of a fourth season. In October last year Ian McShane (who played Swearengen) told a journalist that the show’s sets were to be dismantled and that the episodes will not be made. HBO however is in denial.

We can only hope.



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Doing the Arcades of Fire

BY TAHI MOORE

Yeah so I'm back from the lands of reasonably large shopping malls, so I thought I'd check out some arcades while the perspective is still there.

CHEAP IS GOOD>
The only op shops I found in cheap clothing land had unworn RRL jeans from 1992 for a thousand dollars. I don't know what that means either. After all the struggle last month for an okay pair of jeans, I found myself focusing on increasingly small details to the point where everything became fairly ugly here and there if not all over. It's time not to look too closely. I turned on the radio and didn't bother changing the station. I drove to the op shop where the clothes are 2 dollars a kilo. Either someone had come through earlier or there wasn't much there. I still filled up a sack. I saw some cheap Mondays in Singapore that were almost white, so I got all the really light blue jeans I could. After a bit of basic re tailoring I had some good jeans for eighty cents. Sure you gotta take your chances in these places, but my god, come on. Try to get something you want, that you see people wearing every day, in all the shops in several countries, only to not find it. There it is, sitting on some online shop somewhere that won't ship anything outside of wherever they are. The biggest online shoe store in the world. Come on. All you have to do is stick it in an envelope and write an address. How hard can that be? I guess you can go through a third party international online shopping delivery service for eighty dollars.

THE ARCADES>
Okay so went to St Lukes arcade. What did they have? Um. I'm not sure. Oh yeah. No. Lots of chunky sporty shoes, with the flat broad soles. Well I thought, maybe the time has come for Onitsuka Tigers. I'll go buy a pair.

First we gotta check out Onehunga Dressmart arcade. Here's a few things. In Barkers there were plain t-shirts in a tasteful grey on sale for 30 dollars, which I couldn't handle just yet. In the Converse shop there were some dark blue canvas boat shoes in women's sizes that I thought were good. Um. Some Black Adidas Puffy high tops that came in small and huge. I didn't try any on, so I don't know how they go when worn. The thing about this online shopping stuff is it's tricky trying the stuff on, and when you find something you're sure you'd like, it ends up being a taunt from the strange bureaucracy of capitalissyium . It's true. I don't think they care about money. they just want to not give you anything. it's always available somewhere else. Maybe it's about exclusivity. Lots more chunky shoes. I went to Sole in Vicky Park Market to get some of those shoes that I suddenly decided were good now. I've been to all these places, and there's probably better shops somewhere, I don't know. I'm not that smart.

So In this Sole place, there suddenly weren't any Onitsuka shoes any more. There were always heaps before. I looked around a last time and found one pair, so I got them. These are the ugliest shoes I've seen in a long time. They're mostly purple. They're samples that the shoe co must have sent in case the shop wanted to order some and they didn't because they were TOO UGLY. Maybe sports shoes should look like sports shoes and be ugly and all that, and casual shoes should be minimal and inexpensive, and street shoes should come in brown and black leather, not have logos seared into them, have thin soles, not be pre-distressed, have round toes of varing degress of pointiness depending on how swanky you feel, and should avoid any kind of chunkiness unless they're actually work boots. Or maybe I'm thinking it's good to either dress very well or very badly. Perhaps boredom is the only adversary.



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