Waitangi Holiday Monday

Waiting for Tom at Memphis, and it is ultra busy, although the city is quiet. The Belle now has such a  reputation On-line, with the young coffee groover backpackers, that they all come here as soon as they arrive in this cool capital.

Making the queue to get the best Flight Coffee, made by the best baristas.

Today is busy for me too. Last night at Danss Heta reqested a visit to his place at four pm to discuss funding for the Danss competition and also possibly for Body Positive. He is getting active now and wants some input, but frankly it is not my bag anymore, although the idea is to separate Wellington from Auckland which I know is what Tom wants to discuss also. We'll see.

In the meantime I have driven Bella to town as it is a holiday, and parked outside Memphis as you can do, free, for two hours, and then will take off to see the the Academy touted film called 'Room', a tear-jerker, but apparently an amazing performance by the two main actors.

Waiting outside with babe for a coffee

Paris never stopping...

Also this woman three times the 100 kilometre champion!!!

Chinese New Year very in popular in Tory Street...and it's the Year of the Monkey, for Gloria's seventy-fifth birthday.

It is Gloria's 75th on Valentines Day but as she will be in Aussie to see her daughters, we at Memphis are giving her a Year of the Monkey card for her birthday, from me and all the Memphis Mob. See AJ (Alex) in photo.

Saturday February 6

This day is to celebrate the rare Treaty of Waitangi, for better or for worse, when the Maori married the invading Pakeha. The rest is history, and they are still squabbling with PM John Key refusing to attend    the Marae in Waitangi near the Bay of Islands in the north. There is always a joust going on and Key doesn't like what happens to him as he is not very popular at all.

This Kiwi girl has cashed in on Make-up and Vlogging to make a lotta money

At Black Coffee at Newtown, great cake as well!

The crowd playing pinball while listening to the singer at Black Coffee...

Art on the walls at Black Coffee - good stuff, I like it.

Pell being the bastard he is, pretending to be too sick to travel, Not True!!

Black Coffee clientele...

Kieran, once Ciara, shows what it is to be a modern guy, and a trans one at that. More power to him, I hope he visits us at Tiwhanawhana one day when he comes to Wellington. He would be made very welcome.

The Pasifika boyz having fun diving at the wharf after dusk...

...

..and finding a cool place to change their wet togs.

This is Kiwi mega-talent Arthur Meeks, writer, director, actor, who has won a following on off-Broadway, with his witty and incisive, but especially topical, political satire about Hillary and her pre-election show. This time it was in front of a very appreciative Kiwi audience at Circa Theatre, who laughed uproariously at his every joke. He was excellent and funny in a Kiwi endearing way. An enjoyable hour of one-man theatre.This writer, another closeted man of his generation, just fiteen years before mine, has this great bigraphy penned by Paul Millar, and in itself is a great history of the tough life in the South Island and how Bill escaped it and finally met someone, a man, with whom he lived the latter part if his life. He was a beloved academic but only wrote and published very little, amongst which was 'Fretful Sleepers' an essay which has gone down in history and which is much revered in this bigraphy I bought at, of all places, Bulls bus terminal, on my last bus trip to Whanganui.

Well it was an interesting movie 'Room' with an Oscar nominee in the lead and a very demanding role.

But it was relentless, and to make up for this, Hollywood made it schmaltzy, so it was a tough movie to see on many accounts. The little boys who was born in the 'room', and led all of his five years within its claustrophobic walls, was perfectly rendered by the young actor, but it just didn't cut it for me. The movie, with the plot obviously borrowed from an equally harrowing true story of an imprisoned woman in Germany, was this time from an Irish novelist,  and I ask myself again, why see these ugly and sad movies? I will try to remind myself next time I am tempted by an Oscar nomination.