Action! Live on set with One Battle After Another

I’m not expecting anything to dislodge One Battle After Another as my favourite film of 2025 with mere days to go before the rough beast of 2026 slouches in, snorting fire and brimstone. 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ripper of a comedy/action/drama met the rare threshold of being a movie I went to see twice in the cinemas, which at modern ticket prices in New Zealand is a commitment. It feels very much a film about the current seething moment in America, where everyone’s angry and disappointed all at the same time. 

But I also thrilled to it because I got to see a brief part of it being filmed back in Sacramento way back in February 2024 during a visit to see family. One Battle is set throughout California’s epic open skies and coastal towns, including places like Humboldt County and the endless desert hills of far southeastern California, but a big chunk of the opening act was filmed all around Sacramento, not far from where I grew up.

It was a lifelong buddy of mine, also a journalist with the Sacramento Bee, who invited me along as he was attempting to get some photos of One Battle’s filming that February morning. It was a sequence being filmed among the squat brutalist architecture of downtown Sac, a grid of anywhere Americana. Streets were blocked off, bouncer-looking type blokes kept us spectators from getting too close, and like any movie making, there was a lot of standing around.

The scene we saw filmed comes after an explosive bank robbery sequence in the finished movie, and for a few hours we watched director Anderson and crew capture a brief part of a chase scene through Sacramento’s streets, including seeing actresses Teyana Taylor and Shayna “Junglepussy” McHayle running along.

For a film geek and a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan, it was a glimpse behind the magical curtain of movies. There’s something about seeing the sausage get made, if only briefly. 

New Zealand gets a lot of film production now and I know people who’ve worked on them, but my experiences with being quiet on a set are pretty limited – I saw some cool explosions for Die Hard With A Vengeance being filmed on Manhattan streets a million years ago during my New York summer, and once upon a time a big 1990s Hollywood romantic comedy called The Gun In Betty Lou’s Handbag was filmed in my small Mississippi college town, exciting everybody until they saw the pretty lame final product, which flopped. 

For One Battle the moments we saw being filmed did recognisably pop up on screen at a pretty intense section of the movie. Sure, for all we know it’s quite possible none of the exact takes I saw filmed that day are the ones featured, but hey – let a fan dream. And it was nice to catch a few moments of a movie being made that is actually really damned good, and hopefully cleans up at the Oscars in a couple months as it sorely deserves to. 

Anyone who’s ever watched a movie being made knows it’s all about tiny jigsaw pieces that are all later painstakingly put together and you rarely get to watch Robert DeNiro give Oscar-nominated monologues. Most often you’ll watch elements of a scene be gone through over and over again in bite-size chunks. 

That day we watched cars on the downtown Sacramento street be moved in and out of position, each time needing to line up exactly with where they were on other takes, and we watched director Anderson and team rolling along on this adorably cool camera rig vehicle each time shooting the actresses running down the sidewalk.

It’s just a few intense moments of the finished near-masterpiece film… but man, I was there that day, lurking in the gray concrete shadows of Sacramento streets, and those couple of minutes of the film will always sparkle with that trivia for me. Action!

The death of the mass market paperback, the people’s books

The mass market paperback is dying. Publishers Weekly makes it official, as distributors have pretty much ended those once-ubiquitous 4-by-7 inch-sized books sold around America and the world.

People who are buying books still are getting the larger ‘trade paperbacks’ or hardcovers but the budget-friendly wee paperback that used to sell by the millions is now, it seems, obsolete. 

They’ve been fading for a while, I guess – I honestly can’t recall the last new mass market paperback book I saw for sale here in New Zealand other than those cute little perennial Penguin classics, and the last few times I’ve been to the US those comforting little supermarket shelves of Stephen Kings and Lee Childs seem to have been shrinking to nothingness. 

Books themselves aren’t going anywhere, or so I keep telling myself and fervently hoping despite all the evidence humanity’s collective brains are dissolving into a stew of slop and influence. But I’ll miss those paperback stands at the supermarket or the drug store, just like I miss those spinning comic book racks I once lived for. 

Growing up, the plucky little mass market paperback was my gateway to the wider world of words, starting with the battered second-hand Peanuts and B.C. comic strip collections I’d pick up at the thrift shops. As a book-obsessed young geek with limited money, buying myself a book for a buck or 50 cents was heaven. 

I still recall my first time or two visiting a paperback exchange with my allowance burning a hole in my pocket – inhaling that rich odour of pleasant decay you get from sniffing a vintage paperback and its gradual breakdown of cellulose and lignin.

I’ve got nothing against trade paperbacks and hardbacks and the like. All books are great! But those mass market paperbacks felt more egalitarian, covering everything from literary bestsellers to glorious trash. Those small covers weren’t a very big canvas, but in its heyday the mass market paperback was America’s everyday art form, before we all started getting distracted by screens 24-7. Nothing beats a great paperback book cover.

Books that feel like they were made just for me like Paperbacks in Hell and the absolutely amazing pulp fiction histories like Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Cool Cats or Dangerous Visions And New Worlds celebrate all the weird little horror and sci-fi and crime paperbacks that filled up every spinner rack between Spokane and Miami for decades. Every chunky pocket-sized paperback was a passport to somewhere else. 

My first Stephen King reads were battered paperbacks handed down from my mom. I’ve still got Different Seasons, its cover barely hanging on, and can picture the thrilling little shocks and heartbreak his classic novellas “Apt Pupil,” “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and “The Body” broke open in me. Somehow, reading those King books as a teenager, I knew I’d have to make a living with words, even if I’d never be a Stephen King. 

I was first introduced to the irascible, unforgettable Harlan Ellison through books like Deathbird Stories, and even though that stark gorgeous red spine on the paperback has faded a lot over the years, I’ll never get rid of it, or part with the memories of the beautifully apocalyptic title story, which felt like a cosmic symphony cracking open to Young Nik’s brain.

Or Tom Robbins’ delightful Jitterbug Perfume, which was passed around my high school pals like contraband – we were years too late for Robbins’ peak sexy surreal hippie lit-god era, but Perfume and his other books still felt like the counter-culture to me, with his loopy prose wrapping in everything under the sun in gloriously excessive comic romps. 

I still remember exactly where I got many of the paperbacks – the collection of Flannery O’Connor novels I picked up during a summer in New York City at one of those outdoor book stands, the hefty Stephen King The Tommyknockers I picked up to read during a long road trip around Oregon and California with my dad toward the end of high school. 

So many others – the extremely battered “1984 anniversary edition” of George Orwell’s 1984 I read when I was 13 which turned me into a lifelong fan; the very first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, Hocus Pocus; the massive pre-internet compendium Book Of Lists which filled me with a Wikipedia’s worth of trivia and knowledge; Robert Asprin’s charmingly hokey “Myth Adventures” series, Donna Tartt’s achingly gorgeous The Secret History which felt like the literary novelisation of my wild intellectual college hopes and dreams. The most recent one on the shelves, Quentin Tarantino’s doggedly nostalgic novelisation of his movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, was released in mass market paperback form just like all those hacked-out movie novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Before you could log on to stream or even pop in a VHS tape, the Star Wars novelisations gave us a way to get back into the story. I miss that truly interactive experience.

As the wife reminds me, I’ve got too many books, spread about the house in a variety of shelves that I’m constantly refining so I can fit the new books in without too many piles of loose books everywhere. But I’ve still got many of those mass market paperbacks that were building blocks to the book-brain, carried around the world the last 40 years or so. They won’t go anywhere while I’m around. 

Why Pierce Brosnan never quite worked as James Bond

In theory, he should’ve been the perfect James Bond. He looked great. He was groomed for the role and talked about it far longer than other actors, and yet, 30 years on after his 1995 debut in Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan feels like the 007 who never quite hit his target.

Rewatching all four Brosnan James Bond adventures recently, the main fact I was struck by was how inessential they all seem – even the best regarded of them, Goldeneye. They feel like corporate IP placeholders between Timothy Dalton’s harder-edged Bond in his last hurrah in 1989’s Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig shoulder-charging onto the screen as Dalton’s spiritual successor in 2006’s Casino Royale. 

There was talk of Brosnan playing Bond for years going back to his Bond-adjacent turn on TV series Remington Steele. But when NBC wouldn’t release him from his contact, Dalton became the new Bond after Roger Moore retired, and Brosnan wouldn’t get his chance until 1995’s Goldeneye. He was anointed. It all felt so promising. Yet in the end, he was also disappointing. 

Sean Connery was the sexy and brutal Alpha Bond all others came from, while Roger Moore was the more genial killer, Dalton the cunning professional and Craig excelled at giving us a haunted, bruised Bond. But too often Brosnan was asked to imitate elements of his predecessors. He started to develop a kind of professional, cooly slick James Bond archetype which never quite came into full focus. 

The horny sexism and one-liners of Sean Connery and Roger Moore are products of their time, but when Brosnan tried them on in the 1990s, he always looked vaguely pained to be making awful jokes like “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” His quips generally come off as lame or needlessly cruel. There’s a lot of performative posturing about Bond being an antiquated dinosaur (mostly coming from Judi Dench’s M, who’s the true MVP of the Brosnan era) but little true interrogation into what that would actually mean. 

Goldeneye, like most of the Brosnan Bonds, starts with a banger sequence including a still-classic motorcycle leap onto a moving plane, Sean Bean makes a solid villain and Famke Janssen’s feral thrill-seeker is one of my favourite sexy villains. It’s a very good Bond movie that doesn’t quite make it to great, and in his debut, Brosnan too often just seems like a pretty guy in a nice suit to me. 

An overpowering ‘90s excess hangs over most of the Brosnan era, with huge action set pieces but a general lack of any strong character moments to let the story breathe. In Tomorrow Never Dies, it all starts to feel strained. Jonathan Pryce’s scenery-chewing media mogul is a little too over the top, even seen today in the world of Elon Musk. And Brosnan, if anything, is more wooden than he was in Goldeneye, while Teri Hatcher is a dismal Bond girl. Michelle Yeoh, however, is a delight as a Chinese secret agent. It’s all decent enough mid-tier Bond antics, really. 

The third Brosnan picture, The World Is Not Enough gets a lot of slagging off for Denise Richards’ godawful performance as Lara Croft-cosplaying “nuclear scientist” Christmas Jones, but that aside, it’s actually a pretty good Bond romp – Sophie Marceau is terrific as one of Bond’s few female main adversaries and Brosnan finally begins to loosen up and give a little emotional depth to his Bond in his scenes with her. Embrace the camp value of Christmas Jones for what it is, and this underrated one is nearly as good as Goldeneye, I think.

Die Another Day, however, is a sloppy mess. Helmed by the late NZ director Lee Tamahori, it’s wildly all over the show in tone, a bloated and unsatisfying clunker that ranks with the worst in the series. It starts so promisingly – Bond is captured on a mission in North Korea and held prisoner for more than a year, and when freed his 007 status is revoked and he’s out in the cold. But the promising germ of that idea, and haunted Bond with his bushy hostage beard, gets lost – within minutes Bond’s shaved and back to his usual wisecracking self. I’m not a fan of Halle Berry’s co-starring role as shallow quip machine Jinx, and think Yeoh did the “allied secret agent” thing much better. Toss in a terrible cameo by Madonna (!), an invisible car, a rogue’s gallery of absurd race-swapped villains, combine it with some truly awful CGI sequences to all make the campy Moonraker feel like a Nobel Prize winner by comparison.

The Brosnan years also became when the Bond series caretakers started worrying too much about legacy, and legal battles and infighting that keep derailing the series started to come into play. Nobody ran a focus group on whether Roger Moore really should dress as a clown for the climax of Octopussy, but starting with the unceremonious dumping of Timothy Dalton the corporate hand began to weigh awfully heavy on Bond. It’s a big reason why Daniel Craig’s reign feels so choppy and obsessed with canon and continuing subplots.

Brosnan’s James Bond comes off as a cool, unruffled professional, with the potential to seem as unstoppable as Connery did, and he truly does try with the scripts he’s given – I’m thinking of the brief brutal climax where he confronts Sophie Marceau’s Elektra at the end of World, or the few moments Die Another Day gives him to portray a broken Bond after months of torture. 

In the terrific oral history of the Bond franchise, Nobody Does It Better, Brosnan frequently mentions trying to find Bond in what were often still-in-progress scripts. “As I was playing the role, I always said to them, ‘Just what is the character about? Where’s the character? What’s the interaction between them?’” Brosnan is a good actor, but the movies rarely let him lean into his own distinctive qualities. Brosnan’s handsome face isn’t as expressive as Moore’s or Connery’s, to be honest, and perhaps leaning into his sometimes stoic presentation more could’ve given us a scarier, more mysterious Bond. 

In the end, I’d rank Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough as flawed fairly good Bonds, Tomorrow Never Dies as mediocre, and Die Another Day as a true misfire. Other than one-and-done Bond actor George Lazenby, no other James Bond actor’s run feels quite like such a missed opportunity.

Maybe it is about more than just looking the part, in the end. 

I never really got over my Beatles phase

My Beatles phase has never really ended.

Like all of us, I go through phases. One week I’ll be super-into the films of Billy Wilder, or I’ll be reading all of Percival Everett’s novels I can find or all of the Daniel Warren Johnson comics I can hoover up, and the next week I’ll be all about exploring the discography of Hüsker Dü. 

But one phase that never really ends for me? That Beatles phase. Sure, it waxes and wanes, I might go a few weeks without listening to or thinking about the Beatles, but in the end, as the man said, I get back, get back to where I once belonged and dive back into figuring out the Beatles. 

There’s been a flood of Beatles content lately, so I’ve been heavy in a Beatles phase the last week or two again – rewatching the terrific 1995 Anthology documentary for the first time in ages now that it’s made its way to streaming, and listening to the latest grab bag of odds ’n’ ends, Anthology 4, all while reading a very enjoyable new deep dive into the great Lennon-McCartney partnership, John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs by Ian Leslie. 

The thing about the Beatles is, like anything that starts to pass into the realms of mythology, you never really get to the bottom of it all. I consider myself a 7 out of 10 on the scale of Beatlemania – I’m not one of those guys who can tell you who Stuart Sutcliffe’s grandparents were or what John Lennon had for breakfast the day they recorded “Penny Lane.” 

There’s 213 or so “official Beatles songs” plus all the infinite demos, jams and alternate takes that have been pouring out the last few years in super fancy special editions. Recently I came back to the mildly obscure track “Hey Bulldog,” and really listened to it – the thumping piano intro, McCartney’s sturdy bass line, the giddy sneer Lennon gives the lines “What makes you think you’re something special when you smile?” It felt like a whole new song suddenly bloomed to me even thought I’m sure I heard it dozens of times before. How did this happen? 

My parents weren’t big music listeners – about all I can recall in the way of “rock” music in the small vinyl collection was some Peter, Paul and Mary – so I didn’t really start hearing the Beatles in childhood, but I was the perfect age to discover them when their albums first started coming out on CD during high school and Generation X got Beatlemania. The Past Masters collections in particular cracked my head open navigating the band’s stunning evolution from poppy singalongs to psychedelic freak-outs. I still can’t quite fathom how they went from singing “Love Me Do” in the Cavern to recording “Tomorrow Never Knows” in less than four years. 

There’s a spark of joy that ignites in me whenever I truly listen to the Beatles, and I think the central mystery at the heart of it all is how these people, these scruffy rough kids from Liverpool, exploded to change pop culture in their decade or so of existence. We want to get inside these songs, to find how creativity itself works. The magic of creation remains the greatest magical mystery tour of all, and in an age where we’re increasingly served up algorithmic bait, fluff and trivia, the rough-hewn analog invention of Paul, John, George and Ringo still feels bottomlessly appealing to me. 

This is why I never really end my Beatles education, because even a bit of a cash grab like the fourth Anthology collection, with its surplus of pretty rote instrumental tracks, can grab me by digging up the gloriously unhinged take 17 on “Helter Skelter.” I sucked up the unabashed nostalgia of “Now And Then” and I dug the rhythmic hypnotic excess of Peter Jackson’s sprawling Get Back miniseries.

I’ve listened to Abbey Road or Revolver a hundred times a hundred times over the years and yet I can still find tiny new scraps of newness in those well-worn grooves. Yep, like everything else, the Beatles have become a content-churning factory in 2025, and, that new “final” ninth episode of Beatles Anthology probably wasn’t truly necessary, yet the little fragments we get of 50-something Paul, George and Ringo (30 years ago!) jamming and messing about with John’s sketchy demos on “Free As A Bird” still feel true despite the glossy sheen of Disney’s content farming. 

And so it’s gone, over the years – I keep coming back to the Beatles, and discovering how much I still haven’t really paid attention to before. 

The very last words Ringo sweetly says as the nine-hour journey of Anthology winds down are, “I like hanging out with you guys.” Me too, mates. 

Why sometimes we all feel like Lloyd Dobler’s girlfriend’s dad

Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything is a great movie and one of the best teen romance movies ever made – quirky yet sincere, witty yet honest. John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler and Ione Skye’s Diane Court feel real in a way so many ‘80s teen movies never manage to. I saw it at least three times in the theatre back in 1989 when I was deeply underwater in my own series of doomed high school love affairs and I love to revisit it in the years since.

And yet – I think just about my favourite little moment in the movie, even more than that whole iconic boombox scene, isn’t anything to do with teen romance at all.

Instead, it’s Diane’s father Jim, played by the late great John Mahoney, singing alone in his car off-key along to Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” just before his life is about to fall apart. 

Poor old Diane’s dad has been defrauding the rest home he manages and will soon be arrested, and it’s a tragic little twist in the movie that the father she idolises turns out to be an inept con man. At this point, Jim probably knows there’s bad things coming, and they do, but just for a moment, he’s in a car and Steely Dan comes on the radio and that’s everything. 

Diane’s dad sings happily along with Steely Dan with all his heart, not caring that he sounds awful, but the music has snagged something deep inside of him and it won’t let go. Sometimes a song gets you like that, usually when you’re alone, and you feel it pulling you inside whether you want it to or not. I have a frickin’ awful singing voice, but sometimes you move on sheer primal instinct. 

Music hits on a different level than most things, and it can break you open in new ways when you least expect it. 

A song by the great Neutral Milk Hotel came on Spotify while I was out exercising a year or so back, and Jeff Magnum’s strained and aching voice hit me hard, bringing to mind all the love and loss we go through and the things we just can’t fix. Almost unconsciously I started singing along with “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” and damn it, the lines “How strange is it to be anything at all” got me suddenly choking up in the middle of a suburban walk, sucked in. It felt wonderful and painful all at the same time, in an inchoate way I can’t even fully explain.  

Or the other day that ‘80s chestnut “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears came on and for some reason this time the chorus got me, and I began singing along alone in the car, ecstatic and sad and nostalgic and hopeful in all the ways a good song can unearth in you. And don’t even get me started about Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” also featured so prominently in Say Anything… that song contains entire multiverses for me.

There’s a part of everyone that sometimes is just like Lloyd Dobler’s girlfriend’s dad, singing along by yourself about Rikki, hoping she doesn’t lose that number, knowing she probably will, but maybe she’ll send it off in a letter to herself. 

There’s a beautiful loneliness to Jim Court’s car singalong, but there’s also the music, keeping him company and for just a few seconds, making everything all right again. 

The Spectre is the most heavy metal of superheroes

How do you write good comics about a being that’s essentially invincible, a force of nature incarnate?

The Spectre is one of those heroes who’s been hanging around DC Comics almost since the beginning. He was introduced in 1940 as hard-as-nails cop Jim Corrigan, who is murdered by criminals but brought back to life given a chance to serve as the “wrath of God,” the Spectre. 

His schtick was punishing criminals in gruesomely inventive ways, such as just full on skeletonising one particularly unlucky bad guy in his very second story:

He was made a bit friendlier over time (including a very goofy era when he was basically the sidekick to the dorky “Percival Popp, Super Cop”) and even joined the Justice Society of America, but the Spectre never quite fit in as one of the superhero crowd. He represents something far bigger, more cosmic. When he was brought back in the 1960s, his short-lived solo book had him wrestling bad guys by smacking them in the head with whole planets, because the Spectre always goes hard. But it was hard to make the character relatable when they’re that far beyond humanity, and the run didn’t last long. 

I first encountered the Spectre in his brief appearances in Alan Moore’s essential Swamp Thing, where the character was portrayed as an unknowable, awe-inspiring presence, one that reduced your average metahumans to stunned silence. 

There was also a great short run by Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo in the 1970s in Adventure Comics which made the Spectre into a full horror movie villain, punishing the guilty with some insanely creative kills – turning a man into wood and putting him through a woodchipper, or chopping him up with giant cartoon scissors, for instance. There wasn’t a lot more to the stories than “how will the Spectre kill this guy?” but they were a lot of gruesome fun. 

The problem with the Spectre is how do you really write such a character? “Embodiment of the wrath of God” doesn’t give you a lot of room for nuance. He’s had comics runs that played up the mystic angles and supporting cast and turned him into a kind of Dr. Strange character, but then he just blends into the wallpaper. Some stories had Jim Corrigan definitely part of the Spectre, others had the Spectre as a separate being hosted by Corrigan. 

Enter John Ostrander, who married the gnarly punishments with real character work on the Spectre and Jim Corrigan and their peculiar, never-ending bond. His superb 62-issue writing run in the 1990s was peak Spectre, with a comic that was both bombastic and over the top and yet fiercely humane. It embraced the duality of long-dead angry cop Corrigan and the barely contained rage of the Spectre entity for some absolutely banger stories. It richly expands the history of the Spectre entity and its origins in one of the best underrated comics runs – the first half recently was reprinted in an excellent new omnibus. 

This Spectre run cobbled together all the bits of the character over the years and spun it into a dense, melancholy epic, interrogating again and again what it actually means to be the “wrath of God” and what good vengeance can actually serve. In one story, we see the Spectre brutishly pushing forward to avenge a woman’s murder – in the process driving other innocent people he accuses to suicide. 

At one point the Spectre slaughters the population of an entire country torn by civil war – see it as an allegory for the Balkans, or Rwandan genocide – declaring angrily that “no one is innocent!” It’s a key moment that breaks the character free from the giddy righteous cathartic gore of the Fleisher and golden age comics and makes you realise that when you start punishing, it’s pretty hard to stop. 

In the end, Ostrander’s Spectre run is about the fluid toxic nature of hate, and how far it can spread and how much it can control even the most cosmic among us. 

There’s an operatic excess to Ostrander’s writing, aided by Tom Mandrake’s anguished and dynamic artwork. You can’t go small with the Wrath of God as your lead character. It’s also the rare comics series that actually builds to a firm ending, with Jim Corrigan finally allowed to go on to his reward in the masterpiece last issue. (Of course, being comics, this great ending has been fiddled with a fair bit since that 1998 “last issue,” but it’s still a great story.) 

The Spectre hasn’t always been the best fit for good comics and DC is always failing upwards by trying to reinvent the wheel with him (we won’t even talk about that time that, bizarrely, they turned Green Lantern Hal Jordan into a new Spectre for a while), but over the last 85 years, he’s starred in some remarkable stories.

Ostrander’s run is a reminder that you can take a heaven-sent angel of death whose life feels like the chorus to a hundred Black Sabbath songs and still turn it into compelling storytelling. Now, that’s totally metal. 

There’s more than one edge of the world

I’ve always been fascinated by the edge of the world. 

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but one of them is that I’ve never travelled as much as I would like. In my free-wheeling 20s I was dead broke, and then marriage, parenthood, et cetera. Now, I’m teetering on the edge of old. But when I do travel, I’m always interested in those spaces that feel like the edge of the world.

New Zealand is all edge, really, a handful of wee islands bobbing away out there on the far reaches of the South Pacific, surrounded by wide wide seas on every side. I’m always vaguely aware that hunched on the horizon below us like a yeti is Antarctica, which is a mere 2500 or so kilometres (1500 or so miles) to the south. 

We took a recent road trip around the very bottom of the South Island recently, a place I hadn’t been to in far too many years, all mountains and long empty roads and sheep, everywhere sheep. We stopped for a visit at Slope Point, a stark little bit of cliffside that happens to be the southernmost point in mainland New Zealand. You cross a sheep paddock and brave never-ending winds to stand there on the edge of all things, a lighthouse and scrubby plant growth for company. If you’re lucky like we were, you get to experience it by yourself, only the jaunty yellow directional sign pointing out you’re closer to the South Pole than the Equator.

You can’t see Antarctica, of course – it’s still very far away – but you can feel it, lurking like a Norse ice giant. That’s what I mean by edge of the world. 

I’ve been to several places I would consider edges, even if they aren’t next to the ocean. Places that feel ancient and pre-civilisation, bigger than our squabbly little day-to-day human concerns and doomfears. Uluru, perched in the Red Centre of Australia, is definitely one of them, magical and awe-inspiring even with other tourists wandering about in the hot desert emptiness. 

Another is Alaska, the place I was actually born half a century ago at an icebound Air Force Base. I’ve only been there once since I was a toddler, but it was enough to feel the edges that exist everywhere there in the last frontier, watching a glacier slowly rumbling into the sea, dropping chunks of ice the size of houses in the frozen ocean.

Or the Badlands in South Dakota, another spot that feels untroubled by the world of humans, rippling and strange.

Or New Zealand’s northernmost point, Cape Reinga, which is where it is said spirits of the Māori dead begin their journey to the afterlife by leaping off the edge of the shore. I like that image – on the edge, a new beginning.

The thing about an edge of the world is that it should make you feel proper small, a speck of dust floating around in a world far bigger than we can ever really comprehend.

Mucked up as life often seems these days, there’s still an awful lot of world edges out there. I hope to get to more of them and teeter happily on the abyss a few more times in this brief little life we get. 

Sometimes all you want is a medley of the hits, right? 

While foraging at the groovy local record emporium last weekend, I stumbled across a CD single I’d never seen by Prince, Purple Medley. I snatched it up instantly, because I’m a sucker for the cheesy medleys, and a medley of Prince’s golden era is not to be missed. 

OK, I’ll admit – medleys sit at the bottom of the ladder of musical melding, while a little higher up there’s remixes and at the top, skilled sampling. Medleys are the Cousin Oliver or Poochie of pop music, bastard children that nobody really respects. Yet there is a party-down energy to a good medley, which at its best feels like a song of “all good bits” and no boring bits. Medleys are proudly basic – a chorus bashing into another refrain slipping into a good drum solo, with little layering or dissection. 

On Purple Medley there’s goofy fun in hearing “Little Red Corvette” push into the sultry chorus for “Cream,” or the raunchy opening power guitar chords of “Batdance” swerve into the bouncy intro to “When Doves Cry.” It never replaces the Olympian Prince originals, of course, but sometimes all you want is a medley.  

You can’t think “medley” without going past the kitschy world of Stars On 45, the Dutch tinkerers who used knock-off soundalikes to bash out a stew of Beatles ’n’ disco ’n’ Star Wars and much more in the early 1980s. In that distant pre-internet age, such repurposing of well-loved hits felt a bit startling, like a glimpse of the future. It wasn’t much fancier than splicing, but a good medley always carried an element of surprise. 

I always dug Weird Al’s delirious silly “polka medleys” on his albums slapping together a half-dozen or so hits into a crazed Looney Tunes-style joy ride, and I’ll admit, guiltily, to playing Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers’ eminently dopey cassette single for “Swing The Mood” an awful lot back in the day. Jive Bunny turned canned nostalgia into a brief viral sensation by giving old chestnuts like “Rock Around The Clock”, “Tutti Frutti” and Glenn Miller a hip-hop spin. It’s music as party wallpaper, no depth required. 

I won’t argue these are great art, and in fact a lot of the times they’re just awful. But other times, the  appeal of the medley is hearing the bits you know spliced and diced into something new.

It’s not really the same as sampling, which actually is an art form – the bits are shattered into many smaller shards in a sample, chopped up so far that they become building blocks for something new. A lot of great music has been created from the once-maligned art of sampling, from the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique to J Dilla to DJ Shadow to The Avalanches and many more. The samplers take it further, but the medley-making mix masters like Jive Bunny are all about sticking to the surface, cutting and pasting a collage of all the things you already know. 

To my embarrassment, I dabbled in splicing together medleys myself for a spell my freshman year of college – in between the drunken escapades and studying I sometimes found myself playing around with my old-school double tape deck and CD player, painstakingly pressing “record” and “stop” again and again to put together a just-for-me melange of clips from my tape and CD collection of Depeche Mode, cartoon sound effects, Men At Work, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Prince, Aerosmith, Robert Plant’s “Tall Cool One,” Iron Maiden, quotable bits of movies and TV shows all mashed up with excerpts from dire “comedy” cassettes my teen friends and I made. 

I spent an awful lot of hours in that weird time pressing “stop” and “record” to slap together a half-dozen or so silly medleys, but to me at the time, it felt kind of comforting to see the pieces of my past in new ways. I could see the appeal of getting inside sounds. 

Medleys are hacked together for sheer consumerism but sometimes they can feel like a bit of accidental art. Prince didn’t have a thing to do with putting together “Purple Medley” far as I can tell, but it’s still all about echoes of his art. And of course, a medley doesn’t erase the original songs.

One could even argue that it’s a heir of William S. Burroughs’ “cut up” techniques of random art generation, with Jive Bunny part of a long line of iconoclastic innovators. 

…Or maybe not. Perhaps I’m just basic in my occasional need for a medley. But y’know, that “Purple Medley” is pretty darned cool.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, my ultimate comfort watch 

I’m not a big one for massive binge re-watches of television shows. There’s always so much other stuff to watch, for one thing. So when I see people say that they’re watching all of Friends for the 42nd time, I don’t really get the appeal.

And yet… when I just want to zone out in front of a familiar face, I often find myself stepping aboard the good old starship USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. I like a lot of Star Trek, even the current stuff  (let’s not talk too much about Discovery, though), but for me, Star Trek: The Next Generation is the home I keep returning to again and again, more than 30 years after its final episode. There’s a lot of Star Treks now, but TNG will always be my Trek.

There is something very soothing about boldly going where you’ve already gone before. On a recent holiday night at a hotel, we somehow burned through four classic TNG episodes in a row without even meaning to. That’s the TNG spell for you.

The show ended in 1994 and yet Jean-Luc Picard and crew just keep sailing on those voyages long after the actors entered retirement age. All 178 episodes form a comforting narrative that remain eminently watchable – mostly self-contained, with those occasional dazzlingly energetic two-parters to shake things up. (Yeah, OK, the first two seasons are pretty middling, but by mid-season 3, TNG hit its stride and even the dud episodes – I’m thinking of pretty much any one that focuses too much on Deanna Troi – have their moments.)

Perhaps I’m viewing it all through the retro-futuristic zen of a late 1980s imagining of a better tomorrow that didn’t quite work out the way we imagined. TNG posits a world that still has a lot of conflict but rarely feels weighed down by the dystopian tech-troll world of existential loathing we appear to have gotten for our future instead of Vulcans and holodecks. Watching the best TNG episodes over and over again, you know they’ll sort it all out in the end, that Picard will get un-Borged, that Riker will still define space-sexy masculine goofiness, that Worf will be grumpy and Data will be endlessly curious. 

One of TNG’s strengths is its willingness to indulge in quieter moments – Data playing with his cat, Picard drinking tea, Beverly Crusher putting together her awful plays. You get a sense of real life in these glimpses at life aboard the Enterprise, in a way that a lot of other sci-fi shows and even other Star Treks never quite settle down enough to showcase. Who wouldn’t want to hang around playing cards with Riker and the gang at the end of a long day battling Romulans? 

Terrible things happen all the time on Star Trek, of course – you can get turned into a Borg, trapped in a space-time anomaly, accidentally turned into a child in a transporter accident or Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis might come to life on the holodeck and take over the ship. Every problem can be solved by a generous helping of techno-babble and Patrick Stewart’s soothing narration. 

There’s a vaguely cozy vibe to even the very bleakest of TNG scenarios, when you watch them again and again. The NCC-1701-D is ‘90s kitsch of what the future might look like, bold primary colours and a starship full of liminal spaces. It’s never seemed quite as dated to me as the original 1960s series does, and its blandly functional professional aura isn’t as idiosyncratic as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Voyager, which tried to shake up the five-year mission assignments a little more and threw in a lot more interpersonal conflict. 

The Next Generation cast moved on to movies after the series ended and I generally like them all too. And while the recent Picard series was a fairly mixed bag, an old TNG fanboy like me still dug seeing the old Enterprise gang coming together one last time in the final season.

Yet none of the continuations ever really hit that blissfully comforting zone that the 178 original episodes of TNG do. Every episode is reset Groundhog Day style, as we hear the latest captain’s or crewman’s log and the crew of the Enterprise get set to go about their business, again and again. 

Watched from our jittery world of 2025, there’s a relaxed pace to TNG that feels like a nice cup of tea at the end of a long day. Even when characters lose their temper and shout a bit, it still all feels, well, calm. You just don’t lose your shit on Jean-Luc Picard’s ship, no matter how wacky things get. And when the real world feels crazier than any science-fiction scenario, a little interstellar comfort food is sometimes all that you need.

God love a duck: My favourite cartoon ducks of all time

Who doesn’t like ducks? It’s the time of year here in New Zealand when the ducks roam the footpaths, with little baby ducks trailing after them. It reminds me of how versatile the plucky duck is in the world of comics and cartoons. There’s been many a duck star in fiction, but only some of them can be the top ducks. Here’s my 10 favourite fictional ducks! 

1. Daffy Duck – There’s nobody more despicable than Daffy Duck, who woo-hoo’ed and bounced his way through the very best of Looney Tunes cartoons – the perfect counterpoint to sly Bugs Bunny or naive Porky Pig, an unrepentant greedy ball of ego and id who will never quite win, but who will amuse the heck out of us while getting there. The platonic ideal of a cartoon duck, and while there’s been a lot of ducks who quack me up, there’s only one Daffy. 

2. Uncle Scrooge – Carl Barks turned Uncle Scrooge into one of the most fascinating characters in comics – a tightwad capitalist with a slight warm streak, a daring adventurer at odds with his own selfishness. Sure, he’s a duck, but Uncle Scrooge is also refreshingly human, and starred in some of the best comics of all time. 

3. Howard The Duck – Steve Gerber’s twisty, wordy and satirical comics were a surprise hit in the late ’70s – Howard even ran for President! – but the duck’s name was long marred by the weirdly sloppy 1986 Howard The Duck movie, which missed most of the comic’s subtlety. The movie has its moments (hellooooo, Lea Thompson) but go back to those original comics and you’ll find a dense, philosophical soup of goofy comic book parodies, existential meandering and always, a simmering sense of anger at an unfair world. They are a product of their time but honestly the yearning at the core of Gerber’s writing still resonates strongly today. 

4. Donald Duck – I know, Donald Duck at number four?! But here’s the thing – I just don’t think Donald Duck’s cartoons were anywhere near as good as Daffy’s, and that frickin’ cartoon voice is just annoying. Now, in the comics, Donald Duck is a lot more fun, a short-tempered adventurer whose ego always gets in the way. But… Uncle Scrooge remains an even better character, and as great as Carl Barks’ immortal comics are, they’re ultimately more of an ensemble act that Donald is part of. I do love Donald, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t change that there’s a few greater ducks in this here flock. (To avoid a flood of Disney ducks, I’m only listing two here, so sorry, Darkwing Duck, Daisy, Launchpad McQuack, Huey and Dewey and everyone else. Not Louie, though, he sucks.) 

5. Destroyer Duck – Born of outrage, Destroyer Duck was created by Steve Gerber and the legendary Jack Kirby in protest over comics creators’ rights and stomped his way through a half-dozen or so issues published by Eclipse Comics in the early ‘80s. It’s an exceedingly bitter comic book with lots of swipes against the industry and Gerber’s satire and Kirby’s dynamic artwork are an interesting combination. However there’s one big flaw – Jack Kirby, godlike as he was, simply could NOT draw a duck bill to save his life. His Destroyer Duck often looks a little too awkward. 

6. Super Duck – This fella was a weird kind of rip-off of Donald and Daffy published by Archie comics for a surprisingly long time. His appearance changed an awful lot over his career but I first came across him in some old Archie reprint digests. He had this strange off-brand Donald Duck look with an insanely big head and “cockeyed” expression that made him look perpetually deranged. Oh, and he often wore lederhosen. But his adventures were pretty funny, for a B-level runner-up kind of waterfowl.

7. Dirty Duck – This nasty fellow was a creation of the great underground comics artist Bobby London of Air Pirates and Popeye fame. Dirty Duck cartoons are scrawly, foul-mouthed countercultural fun in a style that’s heavily influenced by George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoons and very much a product of the groovy, acerbic ’70s. Unfortunately they’re hard to find these days other than some scraps online, although London has been promising a collection of the classic strips for some time. I’m down for it, whenever it happens.

8. Duckman – And what about those adult ducks? Jason Alexander voiced Duckman as a kind of rude and crude mallard version of George Costanza filled with outrage and self-loathing in this long-running adult cartoon, which boasted an edgy alt-duck design I’ve always liked. The cartoon was hit or miss for me, but I do like Duckman as a character. 

9. Dippy Duck – Yet another dimwitted cartoon duck, but this one boasts the unique pedigree of being created by none other than Stan Lee and the extraordinarily versatile artist Joe Maneely just before Marvel Comics became a thing and Maneely died tragically young. I rather like how this scruffy, silly duck DOESN’T represent the 1000th ripoff of Donald’s design and the unique look old Dippy has. Only one issue was ever published, though. 

10. Buck Duck – Oh, we’re in the dregs now. Yeah, this guy kind of sucks, OK? Buck Duck can stand for the flood of generic cartoon ducks that swamped kids’ comics back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, all rote rip-offs hoping to be the next Donald – your Dizzy Duck, Dopey Duck, Lucky Duck, the off-puttingly creepy Baby Huey and all the other wild amuck ducks out there. Not every duck can be a dynamo. But that’s cool – there’s more than enough great ducks for everybody.