BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM trawls the local music calendar to bring us the month’s best gigs. This July: Songs w/ Surf City, Samuel Flynn Scott & the B.O.P, Daysend w/ Subtract, Polka Dot Dot Dot, I Heart Hiroshima w/ Thought Creature and Little Pictures, Band of Horses, Mark Kozelek.
HELEN MCKINLAY is one of the original performance poets at the Mussel Inn. She also writes children stories and her third book will be published in November 2008. Her website is helenmckinlay.co.nz.
By Chris OrsmanAUP, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by L M Wallace
THE TITLE sequence of the book The Lakes of Mars begins with a quote from Stephen Pyne’s The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. “The microbiosphere of Antarctica has more in common with Mars than with Earth”, and it is on this premise that Chris Orsman invites the reader into the unfamiliar landscape the collection meditates on.
BATS TheatreJune 20-July 5 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
THE 2008 Young and Hungry Festival trio of new plays all have darkness in the form of death at their hearts. But that is not to say they are depressing affairs – on opening night laughter was the predominant audience response. As usual, the young performers involved in each professionally mentored show put a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm into the works, despite their varying quality. It’s a worthwhile endeavour and BATS and the Young and Hungry Board and mentors should be commended for keeping the spirit alive during times of increasingly straightened arts funding.
BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to Moana Maniapoto – formerly of the Moahunters, now together with the Tribe – about the challenges of representing ‘Maori music’.
Circa TheatreJune 14-July 19 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
“DEATH to literalism!” proclaims one of the characters in Love Song – and so John Kolvenbach’s play proceeds to buck the literal and tangible in favour of abstract feelings and sensations. Beane (Gavin Rutherford) is an unusual, depressed city dweller with a job he has no attachment to and a lack of possessions. When the pay opens the room is closing in on him (done in this version cleverly with a shrinking square of light and sound rather than a literal closing in of the walls as indicated in the script). Beane’s spirit seems to be embodied in a lamp with a bare light bulb that is flickering fainter. His sole tie to the realm of ‘real’ human emotions seems to be his outwardly successful sister, Joan and her amateur psychologist husband, Harry. But his interactions with them reveal him to be (humorously) pretty far removed from ‘normal’ human responses. The outlook for Beane is looking pretty bleak until Molly, a charming house burglar, bursts into his apartment and discovers he has nothing to steal, except a cup from which he eats all his meals. Beane’s interaction with Molly brightens his world and heightens his senses but makes him appear even more abnormal to Joan and Harry.
Downstage TheatreMay 30-June 28 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
My Brilliant Divorce is a one woman play that tells the story of Angela Kennedy Lipsky, recently ditched by her husband in favour of a younger, more exotic model. It ostensibly tells of her struggle through the first few years of ‘singledom’ after spending the majority of her adulthood identified as wife and mother. I think it is supposed to be empowering. Personally I thought it was the opposite. The play is littered with bad and sometimes offensive clichés and stereotypes. It is only near the end, when Angela finally captures another man that she is happy again. (Sorry if I’ve ruined the ending there, but you can see it coming a mile off so I haven’t done a huge disservice.). I found myself feeling far more sympathetic towards Angela’s ex-husband and nest-flown daughter – I’d have left her too.
RENEE LIANG devours the live flesh at the 2008 New Zealand Body Art Awards.“I DON’T know why we paint on bodies,” Australian body artist Lynne Jamieson told the crowd. “Why would we choose to paint on a canvas that breathes, asks too many questions and can’t be put away in a cupboard when inspiration fails?”
I can think of plenty of reasons. For a start, those canvases can move, dance, strut or crawl – along a giant catwalk, to a rousing sound and light show. Second – and let’s not forget the titillation factor here – those canvases are fascinating in themselves, being people’s (nearly) naked bodies.
Steve Abel’s Flax Happy, with the help of some impressive contributing musicians, mines a “haunting spareness” with lyrics “fiercely elemental and moody”. He talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about making his sophomore album.
By Emily PerkinsBloomsbury, NZ$35 | Reviewed by Amy Brown
TOM, a screenwriter and solo father in his early-forties, cannot stop thinking about his dead wife. With an honest, imperfect passion, he writes a novel about Ann, organising his memories and speculations of their time together. With the gradual revelation of how and why Ann died, Tom appears to make peace with his situation and Emily Perkins ensures that her fourth book is both suspenseful and emotionally complex.
MIKAELA NYMAN is a Wellington prose writer and mother of baby twins, who more recently has discovered the challenges of short stories and poetry. Previously she has had a biography, research on democratisation and civil society, as well as newspaper articles published.
JOHANNA AITCHISON’s volume of poems, A Long Girl Ago, has just been shortlisted for the Montana Awards. Fingers (and legs) crossed girls and boys!
He won the Pulitzer for fiction last year and the critics are besotted. He jumps the wall between nerdy and cool, and his sister told him his book would never make Oprah’s list because it includes anal sex and too much swearing. So why, asks TOM FITZSIMONS at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, doesn’t Junot Díaz truly satisfy?
ANDY PALMER previews McNamara Gallery’s latest photography exhibition, currently in Auckland.OVER THE LAST few years, the McNamara Gallery in Wanganui and its owner Paul McNamara have been doing a fantastic job of promoting New Zealand photography nationally and internationally. Being based in Wanganui has meant some logistical issues have had to be worked through in order to promote both the gallery and its artists to a wider audience. To get over this relative isolation, McNamara has curated and toured a number of group shows. Close Up, currently on at Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, is the latest of these and coincides with the Auckland Festival of Photography.
THOMASIN SLEIGH returns from a busy couple of weeks at Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival.NEXT WAVE 2008, Melbourne’s emerging artists/ performers/writers festival, was an elaborate affair. I only just managed to get my plane back to New Zealand after the last ‘Nightclub Project’ the night before, one of the events where performers and artists intervened in dubious nightclub environments. I ran into the airport and was suddenly struck by the thought I might have forgotten to put on my pants. Thankfully, this was not the case. Needless to say, it was a good night.
SkyCity TheatreJune 5-26 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
WRITTEN by the father-daughter team of Roger and Pip Hall, Who Needs Sleep Anyway? is a fast paced and rather predictable romp through the trials and tribulations of parenthood, with Plunket (that’s a capital P to you) always hovering nearby. The Halls take care to say, “it’s not a play, it’s an entertainment”, and taken with this in mind, it’s a nice night out. As the puns and lame jokes fall thick and fast those looking for depth should best look elsewhere, but as a piece of entertainment, it’s not too bad.
HappyMay 27-31 | Reviewed by Melody Nixon
Songs of Hollow Hill is a musical romp through old-style faerie land. The short, cutesy piece, written and conceived by Toi Whakaari graduate Natalie Medlock, picks up on the fantasy fairy genre and narrates the sad, gruff and sometimes humorous story of two outcast fairytale characters and their love-hate relationship.
Though still a do-it-yourselfer at heart, Chris Knox – together with band The Nothing – has turned out a “warmer, more... polished sound than a lot of his more famous creations” on new album A Warm Gun, writes BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.
Gryphon TheatreMay 21-31 | Reviewed by Melody Nixon
THIS Phillip Mann production of John Whiting’s The Devils is a smoothly rendered piece, highly stylised while remaining clear and understandable. Whiting’s seventeenth century language has been simplified to a much more encompassing modern version, allowing viewers to focus on the action and plot of the play, rather than the script. The terse and poetic imagery of Mann’s direction and Keren Chiaroni’s set design combine effectively with the wit and ‘conceit’ of what is in essence a long and emotionally complex play, with an enormous cast and some tricky layers of deception. The fact that Mann, Meredith Dooley and cast manage to pull off a version of The Devils that is plausible, comprehensible and affecting, especially in the first two Acts, is a testament to their combined talent and abilities.
BATS TheatreMay 27-June 11 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
Guardians is a play comprised of the monologues of two characters identified only as “American Girl”, and “English Boy”, a London journalist aspiring to write for the Guardian. The story of American Girl is loosely based on that of Lynndie England, who was convicted of misconduct in the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At the point of the play she is awaiting trial in an American jail, costumed in bright prison overalls. The story of the British journalist is based on a 2004 scandal at The Daily Mirror, where a fabricated photograph depicting Iraqi abuse at British soldiers’ hands was published and then exposed as a fake. Taking this well know factual background, playwright Peter Morris crafts a work that explores sexual and cultural politics in the face of a scandal and the nature of victimisation.
Circa TheatreMay 10-June 14 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
THE CIRCA production of The American Pilot is a New Zealand production of a play written by a Scottish born playwright which is set in a nameless village, clearly somewhere in the Middle East or Balkans, which critiques American foreign policy. It’s a slightly bewildering multinational experience as a result. An American pilot, who consistently repeats his credentials, crash lands in an unnamed country (I thought it was most likely to be Afghanistan) that is rent by civil war. The blonde Southerner named Jason Reinhardt seems more concerned about the fate of his IPod than the villagers who appear to hold his life in the balance. The village he has crashed near is fighting in opposition to the side backed by America. Unable to walk, he is brought to a barn by the poor farmer who finds him. His fate is then up to the local captain of the rebel forces, who oscillates between the options of killing him or ransoming him, aided by his translator. The farmer, his wife and their daughter, as well as a local trader and the captain’s translator all enter the mix with their own views on the figure of the pilot and his fate. Clearly the point is that when America gets involved, it is the local people that end up worse off. The irony in that it is the American pilot who is seemingly the victim. However, they are each in turn infected by their brush with America; as one character informs the other “America has happened to you.”
By Liz Mawlizmaw.com, NZ$64.95 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer
THE ARTIST’s book has been the staple of many artists for many years, most notably Nobuyoshi Araki and Ed Ruscha. Recent advances in publishing technology have allowed more artists to self-publish their own work. The time from designing to printing can be quicker than traditional publishing methods. Last year, for example, Matt Couper published a bound catalogue of his Sarjeant Gallery show, available at the opening, which included photos of the works as installed in the gallery. Recently Auckland painter Liz Maw self-published My Beloved Hackneyed, an exquisite book with 32 pages of poetry and 82 pages of her mythical paintings.
BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM trawls the local music calendar to bring us the month’s best gigs. This June: The Monkey Magic Tour, Liam Finn w/ Connan Mockasin and the Mot, The Bravery, Kimya Dawson, The Black Keys.
Maidment TheatreMay 30-June 21 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
“MORALITY has no home”, proclaims the tagline of this epic production by Silo Theatre, but in its own twisted way this tale of debauched gangsters and petty hoes has a morality all of its own. Brecht never wrote theatre as spectacle alone. He intended always to challenge the audience, often by inducing a discordance in their viewing, and director Michael Hurst has succeeded admirably in this.
San Francisco BathhouseMay 30 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam
Grayson Gilmour is a performer who needs to perform more solo. Maybe with a grand piano, or at least a baby grand. But I guess that would be too showy for him, the flamboyance with which So So Modern performance is replaced with a demureness when Gilmour performs solo. But his tunes are something – thunderous piano riffs and torn guitar work, lulls and carnage, and a melodic, fragile voice. It’s impressive singer-songwriter material, but a singer-songwriter who’s attacking the conventions while almost apologising for stealing our time we spend listening to it. He’s a restless musician too, driving somewhere but not really sure where he’s heading, pushing his music along without ever seeming lost. He’s adding to his burgeoning barrel of releases with another EP on June 2, and his constant noodling and experimenting suggest there’ll be plenty more opportunities for Gilmour to divert an audience’s attention.
San Francisco BathhouseMay 29 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam
THE BAND with the ungoogleable name came to Wellington armed with a bit of hype from their memorable Auckland show, and their dance-punk/funk/angular guitaring was sure to get the indie kids moving their feet along with their heads. And they got a good groove on – their polyrhythms and riffage were impressively relentless – and the crowd got moving and shaking. The singer, Nic Offer, did his best to distract me though. His un-self-conscious (which I suppose is kinda cool in his not caring) moving reminded me a little too much of Will Ferrell playing the cowbell on the famous Saturday Night Live sketch, and his voice scrambled to try and hit a note but rarely found it. He played the cowbell well though.
From their launchpad of eccentric hip-hop, Coco Solid release an ambitious double album, Radical Bad Attack, in June. Titular frontwoman Jessica Hansell talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about going to the next level.
By Bridget van der ZijppVUP, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Jennifer Van Beynen
THE SET-UP of Misconduct could be the making of a dream chick-lit book – a likeable heroine, the moody but charismatic boyfriend who left her for the neighbour, followed by our heroine going to extremes and burning said ex’s car, among other things. This could be a decent 100-page, emotionally shallow, drama-driven paperback complete with a sugary pink cover. However, in the entirely capable hands of Bridget van der Zijpp, such material gets entirely different treatment. Rather than fleshing out the above drama over the whole book, van der Zijpp sets her Misconduct after the initial drama of protagonist Simone losing her boyfriend, in the aftermath so to speak. At this point Simone is recovering from losing the boyfriend, job, driver’s licence and hefty blows to her self-esteem that come with it all. The book is set up nicely when a friend gives her the offer to housesit for an ailing relative in hospital, leaving Simone in a haphazard, craft- and doll-filled house near the sea. Throughout the book, she gets to know the locals, the beach and, hopefully, herself.
IAN C SMITH lives in Australia with his wife and four sons. His short fiction has appeared in Australian Book Review, Island, Meanjin, Overland and Westerly, and his non-fiction in The Age. His narrative verse has been published in The Weekend Australian, Best Australian Poetry 2004, Malahat Review, Quadrant and Southerly. His books of verse are published by The Ginninderra Press.
After they sold the Water; Bower Bird; The Apple Picker; Atlas; Marie Antonia, by Sarah Jane Barnett
SARAH JANE BARNETT is a heritage professional who lives in Wellington with her partner Jim and cat Chicken. Her work has appeared in Sport, Landfall, JAAM, Catalyst, Takahe and on the e-zines Blackmail Press, Deep South, Snorkel and Turbine. Her poem ‘The Drop Distance’ was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2007. During 2006 Sarah completed the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
