21 April 2006
More coffee...more light, this time downtown at an old favourite, Rakinos...and with old friends...Suzanne, groupie of The Same who all lived with me for a wild and wonderful year, and Rob, my whacky, camp accountant and art-as-business consultant. This bar is where my photography career began back in 1991, when I came here to interview and photograph New Zealand artists, poets and musicians for the university newspaper...where Sam Hunt encouraged me with "tell the story, tell it true, charm it crazy!"...and where I learned to appreciate really good coffee, made by an old Greek guy who set this place up and named it after one of the small islands near Auckland. I also ran into an old acquaintance here today...Harold of the band Hallelujah Picassos, who invited me to a reggae concert the next evening.