Archive for November, 2008
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
I trust I am not the only one to despair that our country is currently represented by a giant inflatable rugby ball, scrawled with “100% pure New Zealand” – that stupid slogan that means absolutely nothing, but might conceivably belong to a parallel universe where Aotearoa is run by Nazis. ...
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Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Vladimir: Well, shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]
(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1949)
I never used to like Yvonne Todd’s photographs. Not for Hamish Keith’s reason – he described it as “bland wedding photography” when she won the Walters Prize – but because I thought it was just ...
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Sunday, November 16th, 2008
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact...
- Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. i.
“No, let me speak; and let me rail so high, / That the false housewife Fortune break her wheel, ...
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Sunday, November 16th, 2008
I am very conscious that I have a reputation as a Negative Nelly because I’m always bitching and moaning about someone. Frankly It’s because I get frustrated with how dumbed-down and bland things have become in New Zealand (a complacent society that tends to send whingers like me to Coventry ...
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
I am enervated. I am now on the lookout for jobs overseas, because I don’t want to live in a country that has the ACT party anywhere near power. National is objectionable enough, without the Hide the bumptious garden gnome whining like a flea-bitten mongrel for a hard shift away ...
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
THE PRIME MINISTER’S SONG
I am the very model of a Labourite Prime Minister.
Among the politicians I am quite the combine harvester.
I keep at arms-length Green and Brown, and mug for every camera
And when I’m late for Rugby I test my driver’s stamina.
I emphasise my policies are pragmatist ...
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
Kulimoeanga ‘Stone’ Maka has an amazing show up in the Mair Gallery, Ngatu Tu Uli / The Past is Now. It’s one of those rare occasions when Pacific Island traditions (in this case the Tongan art of the abstract black tapa) are successfully blended with contemporary aesthetics without falling into ...
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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
How nice to see the Bobby Mac in use again; its timeless Beaux-arts classical elegance and proportions lend such a sense of occasion – although the purple paint on the walls gives one the impression that they are inside a giant bruise.
The Invitational (a horrible word) was a huge letdown ...
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Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Gustave Doré (1832-1883), The Man from New Zealand (1872), from the book London: a pilgrimage, Blanchard Jerrold (ed). London: Grant & Co., 1872.
[The Catholic Church] was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain... And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New ...
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Thursday, November 6th, 2008
George O’Brien (1821-1888), Designs of R.A. Lawson (c. late 1860s), Otago Settlers’ Museum, Dunedin.
It is a common and clichéd stereotype that every Irishman claims descent from one of the many kings of Eire, but George O’Brien most certainly was. He was born at Dromoland Castle County Clare, the fifth son ...
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