By Chris Bell

By Chris Bell

Fairfax's Stuff site has the extraordinary decision by New Line Cinema to dump director Peter Jackson from two new Lord of the Rings movies, The Hobbit and another Rings prequel, due to their ongoing legal dispute. Read Jackson's emailed response here.

Ralph Steadman provides audio about his collaboration with the late Hunter S. Thompson on Kim Hill's National Radio show, and tries bravely to define "gonzo": a perversion or contradiction, he says €” like smoking in an oxygen tent, as the Master of Gonzo infamously once did.

Local literary website Leaf Salon might not be the intuitive location for news about climate change, but Kathy Hunter combines Al Gore's recent Auckland visit with an impressive song lyric written by her nine year old daughter, and there's also some interesting comment by Leaf Salon reader "maggie".

Boing Boing and a number of blogs have linked to this, so make sure you listen to Zadie Smith, in a conversation with the host of KCRW's Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt, about the dying art of reading.

There is also a fascinating link from Boing Boing to a Slate article about an American "sample troll" who is abusing US music publishers and hip hop artists by claiming his company owns the rights to many of the songs hiphop artists sample €” some of which he has apparently stolen by forging the signature of the likes of George Clinton on bogus copyright assignments.

And finally from Boing Boing, animator Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), famous for his work on the Toccata and Fugue segment of the Walt Disney film Fantasia, is finally having his avant-garde films released on DVD, says the world's biggest English language blog. The DVDs are available here.

Meanwhile, via Arts and Letters Daily, this blog post tells us the link between Sam Peckinpah, cyberpunk, Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive, Sin City and the business gamble taken by a small publisher in 1949.

Amazon Wire is Amazon.com's podcast about books, music, movies and those who create them. The latest features Michael Crichton talking about his new book Next and Sting discussing his new release Songs from the Labyrinth and songs written for €” wait for it €” the lute by the "melancholy madrigalist" John Dowland. You can either stream or download it.

Russell Brown at Hard News on Public Address follows up on MP for the East Coast Bays Murray McCully's complaints about a supposed bias by "lefty-muso" Dave Dobbyn's when, at the event to unveil the Armistice Day memorial in London, he had the apparent gall to sing Welcome Home, the lyrics to which contain the truism "the empire is fading by the day". McCully says caustically of the government-endorsed song choice on Scoop, "How very, very classy". Dobbyn responds graciously to Public Address: "The Queen officially approved my lyrics ahead of the honourable memorial engagement." And Russell Brown adds pointedly, "And might I say that ma'am showed notable good taste in doing so."

Finally for this digest, the New Zealand Herald has this glowing review of first-time choreographer Maaka Pepene and the Atamira Dance Collective's Memoirs of Active Service at the Maidment Studio. Happy surfing.