Out There Doing Things

 

Clearly, nobody in this photo owns this truck. It's parked by the Dharma Bum's Club, Wairau 
Valley and it belongs to a man named Trevor.

There may have been very little action on the blog for the past few weeks, but that's only because I've been Out There Doing Things.  So I can report, in no particular order:

• The abandoned former meeting-house of the Dunedin Theosophical Society in is full of weapons.
• Oamaru is still a great place for albatross heads rendered in papier mache - and this time, Reuben, we had leave to wear them on our heads and dance around if we wanted. But we didn't want, because instead we kept the front bar of the Criterion open long after bed-time with David Bowie covers on a tiny guitar.
• The Dharma Bum's club in Wairau Valley is one of the the best gigs in New Zealand right about now.
• Nobody in Dunedin locks their doors - not the people who ring the bells at Knox Church, and not whoever it is who is currently responsible for securtiy at the former headquaters of the Dunedin Theosophical Society - which is full of weapons.
•  Chick's Hotel is still haunted.
• The Bluebridge ferry is what sea travel should be all about.  There are laminated photocopied lists of who gets to be in which life raft taped to the bulkheads, and reminders about which crew member is responsible for what in the event of a sinking. Sample text: 'Position: CAPTIAN Emergency Position: ON BRIDGE Duty: IN CHARGE.' No fucking about, and the decor is Soviet-era Black Sea Cruise Liner.
• Two good songs for riding the pitching deck of a ship at sea in a gale: Stormy High by Black Mountain and Immigrant Song by the Zep.
• It is very hard to find anything useful to do with and A-zero sized poster on a windy afternoon in Wellington with half an hour to spare, but the crack under the door at Evil Genius Records is large enough to carefully slide one through.
• Some seriously cool things are happening in Christchurch at the moment.

The venue printed A0 posters and all we had was some sellotape and a half-assed can-do attitude.

This is not hipstamatic or any of that bullshit. It's 100% sneaking up the bell tower of Knox Church with Millicent Crow  and taking photos through the stained glass.  We make our own fun.

I want to be in the life boat with the Chief Engineer please

More on all of that later.  Meanwhile, look at this cool blog.  Also: Shows this weekend in Waterview, Raglan, and Karekare. Oh my heck yes!

Sweet Poster

The tour starts in Nelson on Thursday and here is the amazingly cool poster by Ms Millicent Crow, who continues to produce beautiful artwork for Bond Street Bridge related things.  So far a lot of people have told me that think that the chap in the picture is either a) themself, but with a beard, or b) somebody they used to know, but with a beard.  In real life though, he's just a guy Emily made up, because that's what artists do: they make things up.