Chad Taylor

Cut the patch, then cut the hole

I have been taking time off writing to repair and paint the house. I don't like not writing but I get satisfaction from fixing things. And although I am not the best or fastest tradesman, my rates are excellent.

I live in a 60s weatherboard house almost the same age as the one in which I grew up in south Auckland, which was almost the same age as me. I have a lot of memories about how a house like this was put together and what needs to be done to maintain it. This house, like my parents', is woodframe on concrete piles but its hill location and exposure to wind and sun over the decades has hardened the frame like steel. The builders who replaced the roofing were surprised that they didn't have to replace any beams; the technician who installed the fibre connection blunted a drill trying to put a hole through a stud. (You're not a real tradesman until you cut a supporting beam. Being an amateur I got him to drill a hole in a corner of the floorboards instead.)

One of the good things about doing work like this is being taken away from my keyboard. But researching technical matters has reacquainted me with the best of the internet, which is its repository of DIY information, in particular the forums (bulletin boards at their best) and videos. You could characterise the videos as amateurish or funny or sometimes just weird (the one on replacing plasterboard has an art school quality), but I can watch these things for hours.







Spies like us


I wouldn't wish a Bond movie on anybody. Locked in the very early 60s the character and stories have been preserved in aspic. Each element of the branded franchise must be ticked off in the movies like a nursery rhyme we all dimly remember. The Bond movies are panto: look out behind you.

Having said that, my pick for Bond has always been Wesley Snipes by the simple math that of all the younger male movie stars who shared a bill with Sean Connery in the 90s (Costner, Gere, Baldwin, Cage, Lambert etc) Snipes was the only one who held his own. In Rising Sun Snipes could do action, comedy, be vulnerable, be seduced, mess up, shoot straight and look cool as fuck in a suit -- but most of all stop your gaze sliding towards Sean if he so much as coughed. Connery like Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins is a scene-stealer, but Snipes steals it right back. Idris Elba? Also good. But Snipes should shoot first.

This will not happen. Bond does not need to be updated because the form has been absorbed into a broader matrix, like jazz, westerns and literary novels. But were the character to be retrofitted, steampunk style, with the accoutrements that would enable him to do his job in the syntax of Fleming's original -- a cruel, racist loner who is terrible with women -- a quick mind would cut and paste Peter Quinn from season four of Homeland.

As Quinn Rupert Friend has been a prick from the start, knifing that nice Damien Lewis, killing children, having terrible relationships and not blinking when he shoots a gun. By season four he's the star of the show. The limits of a TV budget makes him more realistic than Matt Damon's Bourne, although again the opening of the third movie of that revived series -- the chase in a London train station observed from all quarters which can be escaped only by use of a cellphone -- is Bond redux: everything that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ought to be but can't.

On the beach



Body double

Director Brian De Palma to Rich Juzwiak in 2013:
You know, Body Double is the kind of movie that people always talked to me about. It got massacred by the critics when it came out, but I can't tell you how many people come up to me to this day and talk to me about Body Double. So who knows ... times change.
Peaches, the artist formerly known as Merrill Nisker, to Melissa Leon:
Ugh, I just think it's time for everyone to fucking get naked. What's the point when Miley Cyrus wears two little suspenders or whatever [the outfit Cyrus wore to the VMAs]? "Look, I'm skimpier than you!" Just get fucking naked. Why do we have these problems? Really all we have is our bodies. I'm sorry, designers, I'm sorry you'll be out of a job but why don't we just show ourselves?