JESSICA LE BAS’s first collection of poetry, incognito (AUP) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry at the Montana NZ Book Awards in 2008. Her second collection Walking to Africa (Oct, 2009 AUP) looks at mental illness in adolescence through a mother’s eye. She lives in Nelson.

With the publication of ‘Map of the Invisible World’, and the recent death of Robert McNamara, MATT MCGREGOR revisits Tash Aw’s 2005 novel ‘The Harmony Silk Factory’.

I FINISHED Tash Aw’s 2005 novel The Harmony Silk Factory, set in Malaysia in 1940, to the news of Robert McNamara’s death. As Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence, people will rightly remember – and judge – McNamara as one of the principal architects of the war in Vietnam. But, as Errol Morris’s The Fog of War reminds us, McNamara’s involvement in American war crimes predates Vietnam by two decades, with his position as a statistician during World War Two. In The Fog of War, McNamara describes his work in improving the efficiency of the American bombing-raids over Japan’s wooden cities. The film portrays, along with McNamara’s later regrets, his technocratic certainties and absolutes, his statistics of maximum casualties, his systematic and ultimately terrifying mind.

ALEXANDER BISLEY looks back on Auckland’s superlative literary event.

THE Auckland Writers and Readers Festival is, three-in-a-row, a terrific literary festival. It raises an exciting challenge for Wellington’s festival. Richard Holloway was my unexpected delight for 2009. The former Bishop of Edinburgh and current chair of the Scottish Arts Council (“a sort of Bishop to the Arts”) is the ideal intellectual: profoundly humanistic and soulful, a formidable presence with a swashbuckling Scottish wit. In discussion with Glynn Cardy, the author of Between the Monster and the Saint and Looking in the Distance: the Human Search for Meaning scintillated. He criticised the Anglicans, his former church, for their attitude towards homosexuality. “These endless, tedious arguments about gay sexuality.” He said it was perverse to tell young people that their love, a beautiful thing, was wrong. He recalled how Bobby Kennedy, a too often callous/opportunistic politician, became spiritual. “That summer [before the assassination] soul entered Kennedy.” On bigoted African bishops? “It’s history’s revenge.” Holloway eloquently spoke of imaginative compassion: “Identify with the humanity of the other.”

The Basement
August 13 | Reviewed by Samuel Holloway

175 East is an unusually constituted ensemble, with an emphasis on the bottom end. It’s an idiosyncratic combination of flute, clarinet, cello, double bass, bass clarinet and trombone that has, for over ten years, performed some of the most interesting ‘new music for old instruments’. Their recent Auckland concert (repeated in Wellington) proved no exception. The concert took place at the acoustically-interesting Basement, and the ensemble, joined by horn player Carl Wells, presented six works, including three from New Zealand composers.

Opera House
August 11 | Reviewed by Anne Harré

PARK YOUR Puritanism at the door, The Tiger Lillies are in town. The British cult band and regular on the festival circuit (they’ve just come from the Christchurch Arts Festival) stirred up the cobwebs in Wellington’s Opera House recently with their mix of lusty, crude, rude, and extraordinarily poignant songs. Paintings of the crucifixion will never be the same.

From Wattie’s tomato sauce to Daniel Cartier via Tame Iti and Vichy Invercargill, the laughs keep coming in Dave Armstrong’s new play, Le Sud. He talks to ALEXANDER BISLEY about reimagining the South Island as a French colony.

One half of the Handsome Furs, Dan Boeckner, unbundles the Montreal band’s latest album Face Control on the eve of two shows in New Zealand this August. Interview by BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

BATS Theatre
August 5-15 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst

Measure for Measure is known as a ‘problem play’, as it holds comedy and tragedy in unequal balance, and director Alexandra Lodge certainly seems to be confused. Having seen the Three Spoon Theatre production at BATS, I am no clearer as to what she considers this play to be about.

Annabel Alpers, aka Bachelorette, discusses with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM making the transition from the brilliant and solitary Isolation Loops, to her more collaborative and technophilic second album, My Electric Family.

By Alison Annals, Abby Cunnane, Sam Cunnane;
University of Canterbury, Dept of Art History and Theory
pearsoned.co.nz; canterbury.ac.nz | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

I WAS intrigued by the title, Saying What You See: How to talk and write about art, hoping I would find some hints and shortcuts to help me say what I see. What I discovered though was that how I have been doing it all these years is also the way students are also taught to do it: read stuff, make notes, view shows, make notes, talk to people, make notes. So no quick cheats then.

Gryphon Theatre
August 5-15 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst

I’VE NEVER liked those inspirational teacher stories. Sure, we’ve all had one, but do they have to be so nauseating? Trudy White as the eponymous character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie doesn’t break the mould so much as shatter it and proves that influential educators are not always a good thing.

Auckland Town Hall
July 23-24 | Reviewed by Samuel Holloway

TWO VERY different programmes were on offer in recent concerts from New Zealand’s two finest orchestras. The Thursday night concert by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra saw an odd pairing of Spanish composers de Falla and Rodrigo with Brit Ralph Vaughan Williams. The programme opened with Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo (‘Love the Magician’), a colourful if lightly-textured score consisting of thirteen scenes from a gypsy story. The APO’s performance included notable contributions from many woodwind and brass players, but too often the Orchestra overwhelmed soloist Anna Cors, a New Zealand-based Spanish soprano, who otherwise displayed admirable pronunciation and enthusiasm.

Shayne Carter talks Dimmer’s latest album, the excellent and unpredictable Degrees of Existence, with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

Courtenay Place Light boxes; The Film Archive
June 19-Dec 19; July 19-Aug 1 | Reviewed by Thomasin Sleigh

IT IS HARD not to be attracted to Marie Shannon’s photographs currently installed in the light boxes on Courtenay Place, Wellington. A collection of affectionate notes left by Shannon, her partner and their son to each other, these messages have a touching intimacy incongruous with their large, public presentation.