30 Seconds to Mars - SCAVENGER HUNT

EMI Music NZ had so much fun hanging out with the winners of their 30 Seconds To Mars 'This Is War' scavenger hunt album listening party, that they've decided to do it all again! But bigger and better!!

We know that you are just as excited as we are, that 30 Seconds To Mars are finally coming to New Zealand to play their very first show here, ever. Tuesday, 3rd of August, at Auckland's Logan Campbell Centre; write it down! The date is ALL AGES and tickets go on sale from 9AM, on Thursday the 15th April from Ticketek.

So! As we all count down the days until August, EMI Music NZ have devised an online scavenger hunt to help you get closer to your favourite band... This is the treasure hunt, to end all treasure hunts, for fans of 30 Seconds To Mars. The grand-prize winner will not only win themselves two tickets to the Auckland show, they will also win the chance for themself and their best friend, to meet 30 Seconds To Mars at a special meet and greet event... AND a Masi speciale fixed gear bike (courtesy of Masi & T.White's Bikes) - think the bikes from the 'Kings And Queens' music video - which you can get the band to sign when you meet them! There will also be three runner-up winners who will win tickets to the show and 30 Seconds To Mars meet and greet, for themselves and a friend.

Beginning Thursday April 8th, there will be a new clue released each weekday at 4:30PM. Each 'hunt'-week will run from Thursday to Wednesday and you will need to collect all five clues from each week, to find the secret location of jigsaw puzzle pieces online. There are ten puzzle pieces to hunt out and from them, you will be able to create a ticket. Once you have put together the jigsaw puzzle to form the ticket, you need to e-mail it and your contact phone number to iamasecretsecret@gmail.com pronto! The very first person to e-mail a correctly solved ticket, will win themselves first place and the grand prize!!

The next (second) person who e-mails a correctly solved ticket, will win runner-up prizes. There will be two more runner-up placings up for grabs... From every correctly solved ticket that is received (excluding those that have already won), two lots of three people will be drawn at random to fight it out in two separate 30 Seconds To Mars trivia quizzes, with the winner from each quiz being awarded the two final runners-up placings in the overall treasure hunt!

EMI Music NZ will also be giving away spot prizes of 30 Seconds To Mars NZ tour posters, stickers, CD's and band merch throughout the entire hunt.

HOW TO PLAY:
- Follow EMI Music NZ on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EMIMusicNZ
- Hunt out each new clue, every weekday at 4:30PM.
- Solve all five clues in a hunt-week. Each clue will give you one letter or character.
- Make sure to keep all the letters/characters that you solve within a hunt-week, in order!
- With all the letters/characters in order, insert them straight into the end of this web-address: http://www.theinsoundfromwayout.co.nz/
- If you solved all the weeks clues correctly, you will be taken to a web-page which will contain a picture file of a jigsaw puzzle piece. Save it to your computer!
- The final clue of the final hunt-week will be released at 4:30PM on Wednesday, the 16th of June. As soon as you have found the final jigsaw puzzle piece, you will need to put together the jigsaw using all ten pieces to create a ticket.
- As soon as you have managed to put together the ticket, e-mail it as a .JPG file with your full name and contact phone number to:iamasecretsecret@gmail.com
- If you are not one the first two to e-mail a correctly solved ticket, you will have one final chance at being drawn at random to take part in a 30 Seconds To Mars trivia competition on Thursday June 17th to win one of the final runners-up placings in the treasure hunt.

Musings Of An Infantile Geriatric has your thirty-seventh clue in the treasure hunt, below...
'This Is War' Clue #37. Revenge is sweet - Nemo Me Impune Lacessit. How many leaves can you see, on the Star of the Order of the Thistle?

Become a fan of T.White's Bikes at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=39451529746
Read the terms and conditions that apply at: http://www.theinsoundfromwayout.co.nz/30stm-treasurehunt-termscondition/
For more competition details and FAQ: http://www.theinsoundfromwayout.co.nz/30stm-treasurehunt/

My Best Friend is You - Kate Nash

This is not Lily Allen. This is not Lily Allen. This is NOT Lily Allen. Oh fuck it! It is so Lily Allen. Just listen to them! They have the same Chav accent and the same style of music. What more is their to either one.

In fairness there are a couple of differences:

• For whatever reason Kate Nash seems more artistically respected than our dear Lily. Not sure why or how. 
• Kate doesn't seem to have the same cheeky sense of humour than our dear Lily. Kate just uses more bad words the nuns told me not to even listen to let alone hear.
• My father also provided a key insight into Kate Nash when he said, "she's unnecessarily aggressive and angry." As in-favour of aggressive anger as I usually am, in this case he's not wrong. 

I tried, for the sake of my friends/kidnappers at Coup de Main to like this album. And I very nearly did with Kiss That Grrrl, which is in my humble opinion the best on the album. But then I found tracks like I Just Love You More and Mansion Song. No. sorry, just no.

Once again I think if you're a fan then you'll likey. For me though, a couple of listens was more than enough to expose some pretty novice song-writing skills and a lack of much musical ability.


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1 1/2 efforts made

Love In Motion - Anika Moa

I was surprised when I found myself enjoying the new song from Anika Moa. Really enjoying it in fact. It saw it on the music television (yes... those last three words should be read in the voice of an octogenarian) and I thought it was alright. I heard it on the radio (just use your normal voice for the rest of this) and it grew on me slightly. It wasn't until I heard myself singing it that I realised how much I actually liked it. Even more surprising was the realisation that it wasn't my angelic song-bird-esque voice that made me like it, it was, and still is, a bloody good song.

The 'it' I refer to is the first single off Moa's new album Love in Motion. To drop the pronoun... 'it' is Running Through the Fire (Storm). It's up-beat, it's catchy and it's a sing-a-long-able gem.

I've never been a big fan of Anika Moa's stuff, having simply never been wowed by her other songs and also never been a subscriber to that whole "buy NZ music because it's NZ music" school of thought.

I'm sorry to say that my opinion hasn't been greatly changed by this album. It's ok... but not something that will stay in my rotation for too long.

Clearly the outstanding track is the single, but there are a few other decent tracks too such as Blame it on the Rain and Burn This Love.

I think that if you like her other stuff, you'll like this album. If you're not a fan, then don't expect the world. It's a perfectly listen-able album, but not in a league with similar kiwi artists or albums - Bic Runga's Drive for example, though Moa is certainly a bit rock-ier than Runga.

This article has show-cased well my love of, and indeed skill in, inventing new words by simply using one or many hyphens. See if you can find them all!

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3 notable tracks

For some reason the embedding has been disabled by the record company, but here's a look/listen at Running Through the Fire.

Avenue Q

For those who don't know, Avenue Q is a live stage show, musical and cross between The Muppets and the DVDs usually kept behind beads in most central-city video stores. It was nominated for six Tony Awards (that's the theatre award like an Oscar!) and won three of them. It also just opened at The Civic here in Auckland.

I have to be honest with you, I pendulumed throughout the performance finding it at times hilarious, and at other times a little overrated. The funny parts are involuntary-blurt-out-laughing funny, but what frustrated me as a fan of musicals, was that often the show seemed to be trying to take the Mickey out of the genre. If you're after an example, try examining the first act for sentimentality. Any hint of reflection, a piano driven ballad, a sniff of introspection, hopes or dreams, moments filled with a sense o... crushed like a one-legged leper's dreams of being a dancer!!!

In the end though, the highs were enough to leave me entertained, having laughed enough to skip doing my usual 200 sit-ups at home that day. Really... few things in life give me more pleasure than watching puppets swear their little butts off.

The high point of the show for me came, not in the form of any grossly offensive punch line but in the transformation of Christmas Eve, a Japanese woman whose dreams of working in a Chinese Laundromat will, of course, never be realised. This diminutive, Engrish speaking Oriental suddenly unfurls one of the best soul/R&B voices I've ever heard with the number The More You Ruv Someone. Think Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Shirley Bassey. Wow! I mean Wow! I don't think this YouTube clip is as strong as the woman doing it here in Auckland (Christina O'Neill) but have a listen if you like.

Other song highlights for me were the hilarious live puppet sex show You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want, The Internet Is For Porn and Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. Special mention goes to the composers for writing a song called Schadenfreude! 

The staging and concept is unique and original, and I heard many people remarking that after a little while you begin to watch the puppets and not the puppeteers. It wasn't like watching Les Mis for the first time, but this is a fun night out for anyone who likes musicals, theatre or smut. 

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4 knobs up

The Blind Side

So after what seems like weeks since the media screening and months since its US release, I've finally watched The Blind Side.

You know what? It's not vomitastic. I really was expecting the worst. By the worst I, of course, mean every other football movie you've ever seen - kid comes from the wrong side of the tracks and no one really gives him a chance until one day an unexpected encounter with an unlikely stranger sets in motion a series of events that would change the course of his life for ever and all because someone looked beyond what they saw on the outside, took a chance on him and just believed. Good god! What a long sentence and what a pile of slop. How many movies have that plot?!

Yeah yeah yeah. Call me a cynic, but to my way of thinking, the single worst thing a film can be is unoriginal.

Now don't get me wrong, Blind Side doesn't quite steer clear of all of the pitfalls of copy-cat film making, but it's certainly better than I'd expected and certainly better than most.

Cathy Bates was, as she always is, a welcome addition to the cast which was, overall very good. I'm still not sure I'm 100% comfortable that I live in a world where Sandra Bullock is an Oscar winner. Yes she's very lovely, and seems like a lot of fun; the kind of woman you could grab a beer with a have a laugh. But I think it's for these reasons that she won - the voters like her and this was as good an excuse as any to give her a gong. It's not that her performance was bad, it's very strong in fact, but Oscar worthy...? Well not in my opinion. The politics of awards season - you could speculate for the rest of your life and still never come close to understanding the way people think or act.

I think the nicest thing about this film is that it probably started its life as just one of those kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Somewhere along the way a producer or a critic got hold of it and decided to help take it to the next level. It's bigger than the sum of its parts and that really does count for a lot.

While the trailer still makes me want to throw up at the thought of seeing it again, the film itself is well worth a watch.


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3 1/2 well call me Susans.

Not worthy of an Oscar

Horseplay

Horseplay is an Auckland Theatre Company offering during the Writers and Readers Festival. It chronicles a fictional meeting between two of New Zealand's best known writers; James K Baxter and Ronald Hugh Morrison. It is, in short, the literary academic's wet dream.

Anyone who knows anything about, or has read anything from, either writer will be well equipped to pick up the allusions, the in-jokes and the overall cleverness & wit of the play. Unfortunately I still consider myself a foreigner despite having lived here for the last 13 years, and know nothing about and have read nothing from either of these local literary giants. Thus, I will be forced to give me you my take on the play; that of a self-confessed layman.

In the play, a critically-brow-beaten Morrison recognises Baxter as the latter walks along the road on the outskirts of Morrison's home town of Hawera. He decides to seize his moment; picks Baxter up as if he doesn't recognize him and sets about "out writing" the man by spinning him a twisty-turny story about his home town and the supposedly savage inhabitants. As the play develops we learn more about both men and their diametrically opposed lives and styles of writing.

I'll be honest, by the time the intermission came I felt that I had overreached by attending and that everything in the play would be a little over my head. I laughed at the funnier lines (I'm not a complete moron!) but I wasn't getting some of the inside jokes I would normally expect to be privy to.

By the time the play finished however, I'd found myself several times on the verge of profoundness. Something in the lines that the two characters spoke would reach out and touch me. Leave my thoughts lingering. Nothing profound or ground breaking on my part of course, but enough to touch me for a moment.

I could be completely wrong of course, (it has happened once before) but as I left I remarked to my friend/chauffeur-for-the-evening that I thought the joy of the play was that it lent both characters something that they'd never had; Baxter's more poetic and romantic, almost abstract and decorative turn of phrase was lent and earthy, grounded feeling, while Morrison's straight-talking, crude and coarse turn of phrase achieved a sense of flight and afforded something almost nearing a beauty.

The ultimate melding of the two styles can be found near the conclusion of the play when Baxter forces Morrison to rattle off a poem for him to take down. 'Ode to Hawera' is both blunt and stirring.

Tim Balme and John Leigh both turn in excellent performances which are sure to entertain. Special mention should also go to the lighting and set designers whose work is as well crafted as it is subtle and therefore liable to go unmentioned.


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For myself I'd give Horseplay three winnie's. For the brighter and better-read among you, four. In either case I'd suggest you check it out for yourselves - it will be playing at the Maidment Theatre until May 29th. By all means, let me know what you think.

For another take on the same performance, why not check out this post from Vaughn Davis.

When In Rome

My great-aunt used to say "If you don't have anything to say, don't say anything at all." Long time readers will know that the phrase is not one that I've really taken to heart.

That having been said I did struggle when it come to jotting down my thoughts on When In Rome. The temptation was there to lay into it, in a big way, but the truth is that it's such a bad film, I find myself unwilling to expend the time and effort it would take to come up with a moderately informative and amusing list of reasons why it sucked. 

It was a nice idea, the kind most of these sorts of films are based on, but it just didn't spark. None of the cast were really very funny or convincing in their roles. It wasn't romantic or funny - a major failing for a romantic comedy. 

Save yourselves. Instead, why not watch this far more interesting video I have taken the time to embed for you.

Look at that! Somehow I found the strength to type despite having nothing nice to say. Aunts aye?

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Zero. Just zero.