BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM trawls the local music calendar to bring us the month’s best gigs. This September: Peaches w/ Hawney Troof, Dizzee Rascal, Lucky Dragons.
BodegaAugust 29 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam
Beach House are like a summer sun-shower, their music a weird kind of euphoric melancholy. The Baltimore duo (plus one) kicked off their brief New Zealand visit with a show to a Bodega crowd who swam away with their visual music. It was a very good gig, given that the support was by two of New Zealand most under-appreciated talents. The show featured three artists for whom back-beats and driving rhythms were, for the most part, unnecessary. Instead their music floated up to the ceiling, for the audience to try and snatch down as it drifted past.
Circa TheatreAugust 2-30 | Reviewed by Helen Sims
Mammals takes a glimpse at the most ordinary but also unusual social grouping of the human species – the middle class family. Jane and Kev Hammersby have a comfortable home on the outskirts of London and 2 daughters, Jess and Betty. He works while she stays at home to care for the girls. But their seemingly happy marriage is about to be rocked and Jane in particular will be forced to re-examine the choices that have led to her current life.
By Charles Bock John Murray, NZ$39 | Reviewed by Sam Gaskin
CHARLES BOCK’s debut novel Beautiful Children follows the misfortunes of runaways and parents, sex peddlers and cartoonists, all damned and decomposing at different rates in the author’s home town. Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas.
Bock’s depiction of Vegas probably isn’t endorsed by the city’s tourism board. Over the course of one evening – the night 12-year-old Newell goes missing – we’re introduced to Daphne, a ketamine addict with a pregnant belly “the colour of uncooked bird”; a callous porn actor who injects something to harden his oversized cock; and a tragically suggestible stripper named Cheri Blossom who has flammable tits, “the dyed stubs of red wax and tiny red wicks … packed into her surgically hollowed-out nipple casings.”
Edited by V. Sherson, D. Cook, A. WilkinsonRamp Press/Wintec, NZ$48 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer
Baches of Raglan is the type of book I am surprised more educational institutions don’t attempt. Published by Ramp Press, Wintec’s in-house publishing label, the book is a collaboration between photography, journalism, and design students and tutors at the Waikato Institute of Technology.
Herald TheatreAug 14-Sept 7 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
FROM THE moment Ian Hughes steps on stage, he’s on intimate terms with us as an audience. That he manages to do this in the steeply raked space of the Herald Theatre is testament to his craft and of the stories he tells. There’s something friendly, even familiar, about Hughes. He looks like someone you’d see in the corner of the pub and not even notice. An ordinary bloke. But for 75 minutes, he has us entranced.
By Charlotte Simmonds VUP, NZ$25 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett
THE OPENING page of The World’s Fastest Flower tells me the Canadian Bunchberry Dogwood opens in 0.4 milliseconds and, because of its speed, has only been discovered since technology managed to catch up with nature. It would be easy to read Simmond's book with the same haste. The ninety pages are filled with lyric poems that build racing and addictive narratives. There are no sections to this book, no breaks or breathers for the reader and I wonder, if I ever have dinner with the author, if the evening would be spent in silent but rapt attention.
By John ReynoldsGodwit, NZ$69.95 | Reviewed by L M Wallace
MAN IN A HAT, planter of plants, word-fanatic, cloud-enthusiast, and the list goes on. John Reynolds has eluded definition in the New Zealand art world for almost thirty years. He appears to dance around lines of categorisation and expectation, and the book Certain Words Drawn is loud applause for this talent.
ALEXANDER BISLEY looks back on the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival in May.I WAS inspired by the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival; and not just by the courage, wit and grace of blind Canadian poet-memoirist Ryan Knighton (Cockeyed). He made my nebuliser-suckling hospitalisation, which messed with my Festival and my journalistic duty (after getting me a yellow card from splendifirous Japan a couple of days early), seem trivial.
Princess Theatre, Melbourne21 May-August 10 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley
LUST PICKINGS were on offer in Melbourne with this thoroughly accomplished production of Guys and Dolls. Broadway style through and through, this classic musical benefited from strong lead performances. Lisa McCune, aka Blue Heelers’ Maggie Doyle, was suitably cute as Salvation Army Mission Doll Sarah Brown. Big Shane Jacobson, aka Kenny’s eponymous hero, imported Kenny’s fulsome geniality to the role of hoodlum Nicely Nicely Johnson. Magda Szubanski, aka Kate ‘n’ Kim’s Sharon, brought the house down cross-dressing as fiercely rotund Chicago gangster Big Jule. In one highlight, Szubanski snappily insulted Jacobson, launching him into leading a showstopping rendition of ‘Sit Down You’re Rocking The Boat’. Ian Stanlake rounded out a strong quartet as gambler Sky Masterson, who falls for Sarah Brown. As anticipated, Stanlake’s rendition of ‘Luck Be a Lady’, “A lady never leaves her escort/It isn’t fair, it isn’t nice/A lady doesn’t wander all over the room/And blow on some other guys dice”, was a highlight. Witty, sassy and energetically choreographed and performed, Guys and Dolls showed why it’s a trump.
ALEXANDER BISLEY peeks beneath the covers of the Christchurch Writers Festival, from September 4.NOT ONLY is Auckland inspiringly challenging Wellington’s Writers’ Festival, now Christchurch is having a go, too. The big draw is legendary war correspondent Robert Fisk (who will also appear at an Amnesty International event in Wellington). I interviewed this appealing tsunami of a man, synonymous with writing and fighting savvy, during his first visit to Wellington in 2006. “I think film has an unstoppable power to convince if it’s properly made. When I was at school I wanted to be a film critic,” he enthused.
BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM profiles the ‘chiaroscuro’ sound of the Willard Grant Conspiracy by way of its band leader and founding member, Robert Fisher.
ALEXANDRA FRASER lives in Grey Lynn. After some years teaching science she now has a quiet job in a doctor’s office. This gives her time to write poetry – her poems have appeared in magazines in Australia and New Zealand, including Landfall 215, JAAM 25, Poetrix and Catalyst – and to work on a children’s science fiction book.
RAECHEL REES has been versed into shape by poets Cliff Fell, Jessica Le Bas, Chris Price and Rachel Bush. She has had poetry published in the anthology Work and Space and was once featured in Coyote magazine but the whole article is in katakana so she doesn’t know if it was any good.
OSCAR TUNNICLIFF grew up in Newtown, Wellington. Now at the age of 21, he spends most of his time trying to grain something from observing the lives of strangers. He was influenced by Frank Sargeson and J. D. Salinger in the writing of ‘Country Pubs and Waiting Rooms’.
BATS TheatreJuly 31-August 9 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst
AT ONE POINT in this duologue (I hesitate to call it a play) one of the characters says to the other, ‘Let’s be nothing together’. If this is the theme for the night, they certainly succeed, as this is a stunning example of the parts being greater than the sum.
Summer 08/09July 18 | Reviewed by Thomasin Sleigh
Lela Jacobs unveiled her new collection of clothes on a wintery night in Wellington. It was dark and cold, and it felt like it had been raining for about three years. Mary Newton Gallery, where the launch was held, was packed with black-clad fashionistas eager to see the Jacobs’ new range and grab a glass of wine.
BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM trawls the local music calendar to bring us the month’s best gigs. This August: Renee-Louise Carafice, The Breeders, Stereo Total & JD Samson, Beach House w/Bachelorette.
Baltimore, visuals, and covering Daniel Johnston are on the agenda as Beach House’s Alex Scally chats to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGHAM ahead of two shows in New Zealand.
City Gallery WellingtonJuly 12-October 19 | Reviewed by Thomasin Sleigh
THE Fiona Hall show is cohesive. Cette exposition est cohérent. I went to the show with my friend for our French conversation class. Now botanical imagery, colonial ambition, and struggling to find the right French verb are inextricably bound together in my mind. Perhaps this isn’t such an irrelevant collection of ideas for a Fiona Hall exhibition. Force Field deals with the transference of information between the cultures, and as an English-born Zimbabwean living in New Zealand learning to speak French I am often amused by the complexities of my situation. C’est drôle, n’est pas?
The Basement (fmr. Silo)July 23-August 1 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
“Every now and then… strangers break into our carefully arranged worlds, leaving us with no point of reference, no language, no understanding…” This is the program’s introduction to the closeted world devised by Medlock and Musgrove in their two plays, Spurs and Blinkers. Each two-hander play is complete in itself, but the link is the performers, and the fact that both involve horses.
Auckland Town Hall July 19-26 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
“YOU DON’T find your own happiness,” they say, flashing smiles over confidently tossed shoulders. “You make it.” It is a statement that these eleven young women truly live. The Girls Show is about being young, about being a woman and about being an Aucklander – all things which have received bad press in the past, but which is celebrated in this pastiche of true stories.
Gryphon TheatreJuly 16-26 | Reviewed by Kate Blackhurst
IN THE SPIRIT of full disclosure, I will admit that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is my favourite ever book. Stagecraft’s latest production is Jane Eyre, but not as we know it. Polly Teale’s adaptation imagines Bertha Mason, the mad woman in the attic, as Jane’s alter ego, with implications that don’t always work, but Paul Kay’s direction masterfully highlights all the areas he wants us to notice.
Maidment TheatreJuly 10-August 2 | Reviewed by Renee Liang
IN THIS revival of the classic play by Tennessee Williams, the action is transposed from a 1950’s Missipippi river estate to a modern day “hotel”, complete with designer furniture (promoted in the programme!), plastic walls and obeisant hotel staff. The reasons for this staging decision are never entirely justified, and I found myself confused as to which era this play was set - the dialogue and themes seeming to refer more to the original 1950’s while the set and soundtrack suggested a contemporary setting. Apart from this distraction, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof retains its original power as a study in human relationships, focussing on two pairs in particular: frigid Brick and his lustful wife Maggie, and Brick and his dying father, the patriarch Big Daddy.
GENE BANYARD. A 31 year old who resides in Wellington and holds a BA in Theatre and Film Studies. A poet who is cautiously entering the arena of prose. An actor, whose greatest influence is Antonin Artaud. A visionary who tends to look at the darker aspects of human nature and relationships. An artist who wants to give up his day job. A person who is happy to be alive.
KIRI PIAHANA WONG is a poet, editor and graduate student living in Albany, on Auckland’s North Shore. She has nearly completed a first collection of poetry, an exploration of the colours blue and yellow. Kiri is pleased to report that her husband (the boyfriend from her poem ‘Of Books and Bookcases’) has recently made her a lovely totara bookcase that holds approximately one quarter of her book collection.
Edited by Jean AndersonVUP, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Amy Brown
THIS COLLECTION marked the opening of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria University in March. It gathers together, in alphabetical order according to their country of origin, 21 diverse stories and excerpts from novels, most of which are previously unpublished in English. Acting as a showcase for some of the lecturers in Victoria’s language schools, Been There, Read That! is a good way to sample recent, and in many cases unfamiliar, writing from 21 different countries.
Pico Iyer has been conversing with the Dalai Lama for 33 years. Iyer talks Tibet, faith and Martin Scorsese with Lumière’s Associate Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY.
The Phoenix Foundation’s Samuel Flynn Scott talks acoustics and politics – both sounded out on his new album, Straight Answer Machine, with band Bunnies on Ponies – to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.
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.
