Don't get me wrong, I'm totally down with changing the flag, and a referendum is surely the way to do it. But I've got a few reservations about nzflag.com.

The site has been set up by some ad exec "a flag is a brand" twat. While it purports to be simply pushing for a referendum, it looks to me as though it has a pretty clear agenda in favour of the All Blacks flag, which is pasted all over the site and promotional t-shirts.

Hundertwasser's flag, which has long been proposed and championed as an alternative to the current Union Jack embarassment, is presented unsympathetically as a pixellated, garishly (mis-) coloured gif.

Anyway, my new favourite its Dick Frizzell's design:



It's about as cool as Hundertwasser's, with the advantage of having been designed by a prominent NZ artist. I think that's important. To choose a new flag designed by an Austrian, no matter how styley, would undermine the whole national pride/identity thing that is driving people's desire for change in the first place.

Thanks to everyone who showed up to Bodega on Sunday for the first gig of The Hi-Aces (Wellington). We had a real cool time and it sounded okay I reckon, for a first gig by some rank amateurs. We'll be hitting the practice room, working out a few more songs and coming back better, badder and drunker in the not too distant future.

For the record, our set consisted of:

- You Don't Miss Your Water (William Bell)
- So Much Wine (The Handsome Family)
- Rowboat (Beck)
- Hickory Wind (The Byrds)
- Messin' with the Kid (The Saints)
- That's the Way that the World Goes Round (John Prine)

Muchas gracias also to Ben (Das Ben) and Mark and Kali (The Bridge of Sighs) and Bevan (Aspen/Signer) for doing sound.

In a wierd and fortunate quirk of fate, The Hi-Aces (Christchurch) had their first gig with the new line up on Friday at the Wunderbar. Sounds like they too kicked ass, so nice work all round peoples...

I was lucky enough to stumble across this obituary from the Guardian, celebrating the life of a great New Zealander. (Well, he was someone who was born here but rose to greatness elsewhere - like Phar Lap, Earnest Rutherford, Dean Wareham etc - what do you call them?).

Anyway, John Burchfield was born in WangVegas but went on to become the lexicographer guy who put swear words in the (Supplement to the) Oxford English Dictionary, or, as it is put in the obituary, who "unveiled those four-letter coinings whose etymology his Victorian predecessors had diligently prepared but had been unable to present to a public which, to judge by the explanatory citations, were more than familiar with them."

Ditto "grotty", "gearbox", "Sod's Law", and, presumably, most of the new vocabulary that emerged in the post-war period.

Didn't see anything on this guy in the New Zealand media. Pity.

Rick James is dead. You gotta hand it to the man who lived so hard he'd had a stroke AND a hip replacement AND done a stretch in prison (for domestic abuse, or drugs, or tax, or maybe all of the above) by the time he died of heart failure at the tender age of 56. As a younger, healthier man, he went AWOL from military service and escaped to Canada because the army was cramping his musical career. Now that's sacrifice in the service of funk.

He was an eighties style icon, with the kind of ringlets any 18th century courtier would have died for. He was an originator of the "wet look". Without regal Rick, there could be no Prince. He was also the "mastermind" behind short-lived girl group the Mary Jane Girls. His drug referencing was not always so subtle, however. Apparently upon receiving some angular glassy music award or other, he cracked a joke to the audience about snorting a line of coke off it. Now that's class!!

The cruelest irony of his career was that he received his only Grammy not for 1981's genre-defining all-time party jam, Superfreak, but for "co-writing" MC Hammer's 1990 rip-off, U Can't Touch This. That's like giving Stevie Wonder an award for something Will Smith threw up. That's why award ceremonies are for retards.

Tuesday August 3
Indigo

The chance to see the MC5 is not something you pass up lightly. This is the band of political radicals, Detroit hoods and badboy wasters that influenced The Stooges and The Ramones, among countless others. Cut to 2004, and the deaths of singer Rob Tyner and guitarist Fred 'Sonic' Smith have reduced MC5 to MC3. Losing your lead singer is bit of a drag, but this is the MC5 for f**k's sake, not INXS. The lineup here consisted of the original rhythm section and one original guitarist (Wayne Kramer). The replacement guitarist was Deniz Tek, a Detroit native and founding member of Radio Birdman. So far, so good. Vocal duties were picked up by Mark Arm of Mudhoney and the (anorexic, drugf**ked) Evan Dando. Arm did most of the singing, while Dando stepped up for the big numbers - 'Shakin' Street', 'Kick out the Jams'. His voice still sounded great, but he looked genuinely unstable and had a tendency to wander off stage before the song finished - I'm not 100% sure why he was there. (Speaking of 'not sure why they were there', openers Rock'n'Roll Machine subjected us to one-dimensional sub-Datsuns pap.)

MC5 kicked ass. Despite appearances (most of the band must be well over 50) they were tight, loud and heavy as a motherf**ker. Often referenced as a seminal 'proto-punk' band, they're kind of a missing link between 60s hard rock and 'punk' in the classic vein. They ran the gamut from fast'n'loud rock, amphetamine-fuelled bubblegum pop, cosmic noise jams and turgid whiteboy blues. They played all the classics from their first two albums, opening the gig with 'Ramblin' Rose' and proving their political hearts were still in the right place by ending their set with a pointed 'American Ruse'. Museum exhibits, maybe - but it was fine, fine gig.

[Review for The package]