The agapanthus in the foreground borders a path but the rest is unspoiled. Draining wetland is expensive for property developers and hopefully there is protection against them for the native forest.

Story

by Geoffrey Churchman

Apart from Generation Z’ers. probably everyone knows who Bob Dylan is even if they don’t appreciate the impact he had on popular music from the early 1960s to the present. Circa 1964, I remember a small group of women singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’ on a Karori (Wellington) bus, so awareness of him and his songs had spread quickly.

This movie takes as its starting point Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 as an impecunious 19 year old mainly to visit a hero, significant folk singer Woody Guthrie who had been hospitalised with Huntington’s disease. In fact the hospital was in New Jersey, but NYC had a budding music scene in clubs, coffee houses in the Greenwich Village district and it was the ideal place to get known as a singer / songwriter. There at the same time were folksinger and banjo player Pete Seeger, and protest singer Joan Baez both of whom he became firm friends with, and in the latter case, it seems, more than that.

Although his songs showed a strong consciousness to how the world works and how it should work, Bob Dylan nevertheless was aloof, self-centred and not the easiest person to get along with, some of that caused by alcohol. His relationships with women and music industry people get depicted as such.

The local fame spread after the release of records — his first LP was mainly covers of other songs, but subsquently his own compositions. One well-known artist who sent him a fan letter was Johnny Cash and they likewise meet up.

But the main aspect is the music scene that was developing in America, with occasional references to Britain with the beat-pop scene headed by the Beatles and the Kinks. Lyrically, folk music then was to a big degree a contrarian response to the establishment and the turmoil accompanying social change, as well as to America’s foreign conflicts (things haven’t changed much!).

The movie leads up to and finishes with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival held annually in Rhode Island. At the 3 previous festivals he had played an acoustic guitar (plus a harmonica) but clearly influenced by other developments in popular music he developed group arrangements, among others, with the song “Like a Rolling Stone”, featuring Chicago blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper on the organ. A line in the song provides the movie’s title and it became a pop classic, particularly after Jimi Hendric covered it at the 1967 Monterey festival.

Another song which became iconic in 1965 was “Highway 61”. When Dylan played Western Springs (Auckland) in March 1978, I remember him dedicating it to NZ’s then Highway 61 biker club. It was notably covered by Texas blues legend Johnny Winter.

Dylan’s transition to electric guitar at Newport in 1965 wasn’t liked by folk purists and that is given plenty of coverage, although the movie seems to overstate it quite a lot. At Western Springs his set was totally electric, so it seems to have been an enduring switch.

Apart from over-dramatizing some things there is very little I can fault with A Complete Unknown — it presents all the songs that are important from those years, has a good cast, conveys the Zeitgeist well, has an excellent soundtrack, has a lot of classic cars as props (for those into them like me!), looks authentic and succeeds well as a (partial) biopic.

A Complete Unknown (141 minutes) is screening at the Shoreline in Waikanae.

https://twitter.com/realJoelFischer/status/1882790377167745425

by Eva Churchman

This is an issue in America at present because of the Biden administration ordering the destruction of 100 million chickens. I’ve looked up to see what the price is, and it seems to vary between $4.67 and $4.99 a dozen, it’s unclear if that is for barn or free-range eggs. Converting that to NZD at present that is between $8.20 and $8.80. Yesterday in New World Paraparaumu barn eggs were $7.99 a dozen and free range $8.99. If you have a gold card on Tuesdays you get five percent off. That means the price here is about the same

What is the excuse for the high price in NZ?

by Roger Childs

Her fourth solo performance piece

Jan Bolwell has previously performed three shows about her forebears, but this time it’s on controversial German film director Leni Riefenstahl. She looks back from her seventies and tells Riefenstahl’s story from the 1920s when she was a dancer, through her time as Hitler’s filmmaker in the 1930s, confrontations with Goebbels, and ending with excerpts from her films about nature.

It is a monologue, which won’t appeal to everyone, in which Jan acts out the part of a woman who was decades ahead of her time as a movie-maker. However, much of the performance is devoted to justifying her complicity with the Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler and responding to claims that that she must have known about the concentration camps and other Nazi atrocities. She speaks strongly in her own defence, not always convincingly, and points out that there were 50 court cases taken against her throughout her life and she won them all. That said, her naivety in supping with the devil she knew is clear to see.

She was a much-heralded dancer in the twenties known as the ‘German Isadora Duncan’ and she recalls these early years when she was exploited by men and started dabbling in film making before she took advantage of what Hitler was prepared to provide for her to promote the Nazi regime and the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Supporting the recollections
Composer Jan Bolton comments in the program that Leni’s long and multi-faceted life provided an invitation to create music using widely varied musical genre and this works well in creating the appropriate moods. There is also a changing backdrop of photos which sometimes could have been clearer and sharper.

I did expect that there would be some short film clips from Triumph of the Will and Olympia, but, in a post-performance chat with the audience, the production team stated that they didn’t want to show swastikas and other Nazi material. Their arguments were not convincing.

I also felt that there could have more on her film-making skills which demonstrated that she was well ahead of her time, especially in documenting sport on screen.

Overall it was an informative, absorbing and generally convincing portrayal of probably the most famous German woman in the twentieth century.

“Supping with the Devil” will feature at Wellington’s Bats Theatre: 8-12 April. Bookings at Eventfinda

This was on last weekend’s Waikanae Lions Garden Trail.

With a cast of notable supporting characters, including the evil Blinken and Soros!