FORWARD: CoCA UPDATE

April 8, 2011 – 5:37 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

Forwarding the latest CoCA update: COCA Update: April 2011 The Centre of Contemporary Art gallery will remain closed for the next eighteen months to two years. The building has suffered minor damage in the quake but much of the Cultural Precinct is now very badly damaged. We face years of rebuilding as a city before we can again operate in a normal environment. Since the early 1880’s The Canterbury Society of Arts has played an important role in Canterbury and New Zealand visual arts. However in more recent years the gallery has struggled to cover its costs. Increasingly outgoings have not been matched by income. Seventeen years ago the Society was faced with the same problem. Faced with closure or sale of assets, members chose to sell all but a few of the art works in the permanent collection. The members overwhelmingly supported keeping the other asset, the building at 66 Gloucester St. The ...

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Gothic Revival Architecture

March 27, 2011 – 8:50 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

I am getting sick and tired of idiots excusing the destruction of our architectural heritage as clearing away nothing more important than “pseudo-gothic” tat. That’s like saying Michelangelo was just a knock-off of Roman sculpture. The Victorian Gothic Revival style is entirely self-contained and original despite its historical references. It is important because it says a lot about the Victorians. The internal layout and engineering is pure Victorian rationalism and technological pride. The ornament is a fantasy of British identity, values and idealism. It is also surprisingly rare, given that as a style it had the misfortune to run up against the wars of the twentieth century, and the reforming utopian modernists who did for the rest. If it wasn’t for people like the English poet John Betjeman rediscovering the joys and beauties of the style in the 1950s, it could have been a whole lot worse. But this underlines why ...

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I am now on Facebook

March 20, 2011 – 11:10 am by Andrew Paul Wood

facebook.com/Populuxe

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I also be very much liking this

March 19, 2011 – 10:10 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

This is probably what it's like being inside Charlie Sheen looking out, but it is also very good digital age surrealism... http://www.cyriak.co.uk/

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Crayon Sculptures

March 19, 2011 – 10:05 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

I LOVE these!!! http://www.diemchau.com/crayons1.html

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One Good Thing About The Earthquake…

March 19, 2011 – 10:01 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

One good thing about the earthquake is that with all of the Chlorine they are putting into the water now, I won't have to clean my toilet for weeks! Yay!

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Rebuilding

March 18, 2011 – 11:40 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

There was a really interesting feature in the Mainlander section of The Press today, but every time someone says “why not a Chinatown?” (this time voiced by Tim Carter of the Central City Business Association), I feel obliged to explain “why not”. Chinatowns are hangovers from when the Chinese were excluded from Western communities. That’s what makes them what they are, and the suggestion is (probably unconsciously) highly racist. What are you going to do, order all the Chinese people in Christchurch into what effectively a Disney-esque ghetto? Sometimes I despair. What do I think we should do for New Christchurch? First, Christchurch needs to get control back from the Government and Civil Defence before any more architectural taonga is needlessly destroyed. Perhaps the areas we can’t rebuild on should be made native reserves and replanted with raupo and kahikatea as an extension of what were overly twee Englishified waterways which ...

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Anthem For Christchurch

March 17, 2011 – 7:17 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

Since the Memorial today, I have been thinking. What I think would make an excellent monument for this dreadful time, is not something to be carved of stone (though that too shall come) but music. I entreat one of Christchurch's classical composers to come up with an Anthem for Christchurch. I am sick to death of Vangelis' "Conquest of Paradise" - it sounds cheesy, the lyrics are pseudo-Latin gibberish, and it just reminds me of  a movie about how Gerard Depardieu in Christopher Columbus drag slaughtered a bunch of Central American natives, invaded their country and stole their gold. Not really appropriate, methinks. It's association with the Crusaders makes it too frivolous for serious occasions.  Something like Garreth "Lilith LeCroix" Farr's "Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra" for Wellington.

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Literary Wisdom for Christchurch

March 17, 2011 – 7:05 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

There must be either a predestined Necessity and inviolable plan, or a gracious Providence, or chaos without design or director. If then there be an inevitable Necessity, why kick against the pricks? If a Providence that is ready to be gracious, render thyself worthy of a divine succour. But if a chaos without guide, congratulate thyself that amid such a surging sea thou hast in thyself a guiding reason. - Marcus Aurelius Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. - James Joyce Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. - George Bernard Shaw Invictus, William ...

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Update

March 17, 2011 – 4:13 am by Andrew Paul Wood

The silt from the liquefaction that once made everything seem so lunar has dried and resembles nothing so much as the grey-white sands of Caroline Bay in my home town of Timaru. I am therefore beset by the strange semiotic surrealism of wandering through a city shaken to pieces interspersed with nostalgic flashbacks to childhood golden summers. If that wasn’t strange enough enough, there is someone in a werewolf suit terrorising the suburbs, and today in Hagley Park – forced to walk even further out of my because the Avon walk was blocked off for the Memorial the next day – I saw some young men driving balls on the putting green. It does my head in. Speaking of drivers, Cantabrians are notoriously crappy drivers, but post-quake tensions have ramped up the bad behaviour. I have nearly been run down on pedestrian crossings so many times now, that my middle finger ...

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