Media Watch - by David Cohen

I came over the rise of the hill and the road to Huntly stretched away like a tantalising ribbon unwrapping an unexpected gift before my heat-glazed eyes. Above my sun-scorched pate, but below the azure heavens, telephone wires sang in a manner which pneumatic chested country-and-western gals with names like Loretta and Dolly and June never imagined they could. So this is hinterland tourism, I figured. This is let-down-the-ragtop and shoot the breeze, and no there would not be no tortuous twang of “Stand By Your Man” polluting the sophisticated sound system of this rented auto with my driver. Freedom from Nashville! Freedom from Hillbilly!  Driving really is for peasants.

To be sure the genre has its place, in unsophisticated outback halls mebbe, packed with bow-legged, tobacco-chewin’, spurs-a-janglin’, ruddy cheeked sing-alongers. But surely one must graduate sometime from listening to that endless wailing variation on the theme of somebody done somebody wrong songs?

By Jehovah, if only the mulish music media critics would, as we do, take a little time to see what else is going on out there in the land of staffs and minims, brackets and clefs, tablatures and breves, tempos and caesuras, sharps and (Enough! - Ed). It isn’t too damn well difficult when you subscribe to, read (You really read them all? - Ed) and write for, as many international publications as – cough – yours truly does? Have they not heard of Dylan? Gaga? Leonard? Forgive my modest familiarity but we have interviewed most every muso around, so can supply their full names for those not on such intimate terms as we have been since but a Hutt Valley domiciled minor gangsta, hustling words for coin.

So it is we turn to lament my inability to figure New Zealanders and their tribal hysteria over the ridiculous spectacle when packs of men start hurtling themselves around, chasing or hitting balls across lush, mud-spattered fields of grass? We mean to say, really, at the mere mention of two words “World Cup” the foam-mouthed nation collapses as one into a sea of cringe-inducing idiocy. This is swiftly followed by those poor excuses for sports jocks spurting their grunts and oiks into our poor excuse for a daily media. Cricket? Rugby? Suppresses yawn. We don’t know anything about these so-called sports, but I’ll wager they were invented by the British, who as one tribe, cheered on by those Nazi loving royals, are responsible for everything stupid in this world.  

And look at the screaming masses on the side. Do they know the meme? If they had to really apply their brain to watching courage in action we could take them to boxing but it should be wasteful. Would they know the first thing about boxing? But just don’t call it a sport. It’s about …oh why should we bother you’re all so ignorant. It’s a lost religion; leave that on the table.

A while back we wrote a column “My Time With Andrew” which, as the yoof like to say, went viral. Truth be told it had nothing to do with media commentary, but ‘twas a whine about not being paid by the Labour Party for three months (Why in such a hurry? - Ed). So occupied were we with commissions to pen our thoughts for The Grauniad, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Christian Science Monitor, the Jerusalem Report, the Financial Times, the (Shut up - Ed) it entirely slipped our mind to post an update.

We was paid. 

We always knew a bit of casual political advice on the side for Labour was going to be risky. But when you’re a snotty expert on the Middle East question as we are  (nyah nyah Jon Stephenson) and have dodged bullets and rockets, well you get down and get back up again; you don’t have rocks in your head like everyone else.

So finally, speaking of rocks in heads, we do think it very pre-moderne for some media folks to still be banging on about plagiarism being theft and all.  Seriously, copying and pasting sentences out of someone else’s article, and just rearranging them a bit, is the same as republishing a press release. As the saying goes, nothing in the world is original. (Chuckles to ourself) – see, we just plagiarised that.

Shalom.

Editor - David Cohen has dropped out of everything – school, bassinets, sight from time to time, and once lived in a home for delinquent boys in Lower Hutt (a fact he loves telling anyone who can be bothered listening). Taxpayers’ money will be used to make a movie of his life this year, with Leonard Cohen rumoured to be playing David Cohen. Cohen (David not Leonard) writes columns for anyone who will pay him without his having to have questions raised in Parliament.