Auckland, and The Outlook For Someday Sustainability Film Challenge

Earlier this year, Loulou and I threw together a short film on thrift shopping for the Outlook For Someday. From a pool of over 150 entries, we were one of the 20 winning films, and enjoyed a weekend in Auckland to go to the awards ceremony.

I'm stoked with winning one of the film awards not only because I believe in what we produced and the ideas we communicated, but also because I know I'm rather hilariously seen as an artsy-fartsy greeny. This achievement acts to show both myself and others that I can successfully act on my beliefs and abilities, and I'm willing to put the effort in to do so.

Watch and vote for our film for Audience Favorite here

In other news- our weekend away got me thinking about just how awesome Auckland is, and it's incredibly likely I will live there for a bit. During the weekend of the award ceremony, and when we went back a few days later, I enjoyed just absorbing it's multi-cultural nature and visiting the myriad of art galleries, cafes, and tasteful shops. The new play-park sorta area at the end of the viaduct was a particular highlight... what could be a cooler night out than watching the New Zealand film Love Story projected onto a large old oil cylinder?
The new Auckland Public Art Gallery is amazing too, as is Pah Homestead, and they gave me back my faith in New Zealand after losing it all in our national election.

xxx

OUSA Art Week Zine

So just found out that the 2011 Art Week Zine which I edited can now be downloaded from the OUSA website

Have a flick through - I reckon we produced quite a nice publication!

Meeting Billy Apple, And This Year's Prominence Of Sport-Related Art In Dunedin

On a Friday night a few months ago, a group of us hit up the opening for Billy Apple's "The Bruce and Denny Show" at Brett McDowell Gallery. I should make it clear here, in case you don't know me, that I'm seriously not into sports. I'm almost anti-sport. But from my childhood, Formula 1 has demanded a different sort of respect from me….

And as for art by a world-renowned New Zealand pop artist, combined with the one sport I've found tolerable, let alone enjoyed? This certainly set the exhibition up to be an interesting one. 

Apple used the gallery space nicely. Three works based around Bruce McLaren faced three Denny Hulme works on the opposite wall, the middle space projecting their race and victory footage from the 60's. I would dare say 'that was about it', but for me what proved incredibly interesting was that the best label for this body of work was 'pop art'. The reason for my interest here lies in the fact that the imagery was actually from 50-odd years ago, yet the art itself was recently created. Billy Apple had here used iconography which would suit the New Zealand pop consciousness decades ago but is now more of a retro image. Because of the connotations of its very name, Pop Art should (in my mind) be of a contemporary concern when it's made. Yet still, the best label I can find for Apple's retrospective art here is still pop - perhaps signifying to some extent an inherent ridiculousness in some elements of Art History and theory - that a work can be described in a certain way purely because we have no way of describing what it really represents. Regardless, it was interesting to see this exhibition using a sporting subject other than rugby as our country started going crazy over this looming, primitive display of masculinity and anti-intellectuality. 

Talking to Billy was an amazing experience, and thanks to my naivety, not what I expected. One thing I must first say is that, having been a contemporary of Andy Warhol's, I'm damn impressed he still turns up to his own shows! He had little to say on the meaning of this particular exhibition - it transpires that to Billy the exhibition is merely a display of his interest in vintage motor sports, a continuation of his famous exhibition which involved painting up a vintage McLaren Formula One car with the technicolor rainbow of past Apple computer logos. In fact, he came across as an artist who is extremely and primarily concerned with the idea of intellectual property and copyright. His use of the vintage McLaren logo was direct bait for the now British-owned company - although no longer in use, they still own the copyright and aren't particularly happy with him. This is another continuation of his pre-existing activities as an artist; back when he was first operating under the pseudonym Billy Apple, he had constant problems with the Apples of Steve Jobs and Paul McCartney. To be honest, I found Apple a bit difficult as a person, but the wonder of chatting to someone with such a legacy is undeniable. Plus, it was cool that he had a bottomless bag of pamphlets to help explain anything we asked him!

Now, to further the sports theme becoming apparent in Dunedin - about a week later I went to the opening of "Art vs. Rugby" at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space. First and foremost - I still maintain that I intensely dislike rugby. Yet the three artists in this combined exhibition create perfectly sound ideas. I'll primarily deal here with my favorite - James Oram's commentary on the media's role in sports in our country.

Oram's work consisted of three elements - a mirror with a mouthguard stuck to it, a slow-motion video of a handshake, and a sportsman's portrait covered by RGB stripes. The latter I found particularly interesting. By masking the player with RGB stripes it was profoundly stating that the people you feel you know through the RGB pixels of your TV are in fact masked by it. They're performers and you don't know them at all, no matter how well you feel they're portrayed and how well you know their game skills. The mirror and mouthguard built on top of this in a way - are players protecting themselves from the mirror of media reflection/representation? Do they guard their mouths and moves carefully enough to have some sense of normality and personality on the other side of the mirror? Lastly, the slow-motion handshake was a sensual, moving and homo-erotic commentary on masculinity. Subverting slow-mo action replays showed the hands each slide over and massage the other oh-so tenderly and lovingly.

Holding the middle ground in my preference was Edith Amituanai’s photography. Featuring two youth facing off across the gallery, her work showed the competitivity implied in the exhibition's name. The backdrop was a typical small-town rugby field and as such she showed the community importance of having a collective past-time such as rugby. Particularly appealing also was that her photography itself was quite beautiful.

Some of the other works were, ideologically, a little depressing to me - Scott Eady's 15 black pillars holding up the gallery roof to suggest that the All Blacks are the pillars of our country, and his photos showing kids dressed up in rugby gear. But having said that, I guess he's speaking a truth. In New Zealand we really are brought up to be rugby heads, even if I wish I could disagree with that. So as frustrating as they may be, these works were really just a commentary on stereotypical New Zealand life.

Having found positives in the ideas of Blue Oyster's "Art vs Rugby", and appreciating Billy Apple's "Retro Art", I still remain critical of the few remaining intellectual spaces in our meat-headed country - that is, art galleries - succumbing to sports-related art. I accept that sport is an important part of our culture for most people - just as art is for me. But when I was in Wellington for a day to chat to gallery owners about a web start-up I'm working on, I even noticed that the lawn next to Civic Square has this huge, hideous (and apparently permanent) metal sculpture of rugby players. Personally, if I was inclined to travel around the world to watch the rugby (or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), and I went in pursuit of a bit of an intellectual sanity-hunting escape, the very last thing I'd want to find in the safe-haven of an art gallery is work about fucking rugby. Just saying.

Large Scale Painting by Lindsey Horne

From the 2011 Art Week Magazine - will post a pdf and photographs soon. It was so exciting picking them all up!!!

Lindsey Horne's large-scale painting is impossible to miss. Hanging just inside the Richardson building, her portrait of a boy with braces was almost imposing.

"I've kind of always just done art," she explains as we sit down. But it was only when she went on exchange to California that she started doing a lot of it. "It was there that I had the studio space and the time to get into it."
The incredibly large scale of her canvases comes from when she started stapling them to the wall because she "felt really claustrophobic within the small canvas", and is largely influenced by her admiration of "that duality of going up really close and seeing a texture or a pattern, then having that really zoomed-out effect as well." Surprisingly, they're not very hard for her to paint, taking two eight-hour sessions to get through. "I don't really paint up close, I get sore arms from my style which is big and fast and swipey. I like working on the whole thing at once, so I use lots of linseed oil to keep the paint runny. I like how I don't let myself have rules when I paint."

Influenced by Jenny Saville, Horne's exhibited portrait has a similarly striking beauty, but not quite the same element of grotesque. Rather, the work is only slightly disturbing insofar as it looks sickly; the colours of the boys' face unnatural and feverish, his eyes longing and emptying.

A huge contributor to Art Week, Lindsey also made a fascinating presentation for the Pecha Kucha night on personification and how faces can represent something purely because of people's super-sensitivity to them. "Faces can be a really powerful tool no matter what realm you're going into. I was talking about that and how if you don't see a face people act differently. I just like faces."

They said that when Lucien Freud died earlier this year, it was the death of painting. But thanks to the likes of Lindsey Horne, I beg to differ. In the contemporary art world where portraiture has been almost exclusively replaced by photography, it's refreshing to see a painter so inspired by faces yet not entrapped by classical representation.

P.S. I found and changed an editorial faux-pas in this piece - particularly embarrassing as the writer AND editor!

A Short Film by Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

A short animated film by Spike Jonze in my favourite Paris book store :)

Wonderful and slightly creepy in a Tim Burton sort of way

David Merritt - Poet And True Role Model

Surrounded by his books, David Merritt sits on the bench by Rob Roy's. Buying us coffee, I sit down for a yarn and proceed to establish this unfortunate-looking man as a true role model, an intellectual who is kind and reasonable.

Merritt's work is astounding - a poet and artist in the traditional sense of both these words. His poetry; I can't help but go back later with a tenner for a few of his pieces. His art; the recycled book covers he uses are sustainably genius, cut and staple-bound with poetry glued in as he works on piece after piece while seated at the bench.

We chat about everything. At 52, Merritt was even active on the web development scene as it boomed in the 1980's. He actually started off as a student newspaper editor and politician in the mid-to-late 70's, but moved to Christchurch where he worked with Flying Nun Records after he "got the sex, drugs and rock n' roll bug". Five or six years later he went on to work as a tour manager for bands including The Herbs. But 'The Herbs were a fucking hard band to look after", and around 1985, after thinking "fuck this, I'm sick of looking after other people's creativity," he moved to Dunedin to do something he'd wanted to do for a long time: "become a Bohemian poet." Here he even did a stint as a guitarist for a noise band; it turns out he'd spent so much time stage-left watching performances that he'd somehow learned to play guitar. But then children started to arrive and his marriage fell through because he "was the wrong sex and the wrong colour all of a sudden".

Nowadays, when not hanging out in Dunedin and other New Zealand centers, he lives a humble and self-stocked country life in the central North Island, "sixty k[m's] from anywhere". He's a 1970's Land Rover enthusiast, too - his collection of 9 (down from 18) is his own kind of super-annuation plan.

Art Week was a small shift for Merritt. Parking one of his vintage Land Rovers in front of the OUSA lawn every day, he made and sold his poetry from a table by the bonnet. I daresay I hope people took notice; his poetry chalking around campus was only a small, but inspirational, taste of what David Merritt has to offer us all.

"You need to do what you like to do," he says. "There's no such thing as a rich poet."

*thanks to Lucy Fulford for the first photo*

Messy Performance/Visual Art

Two stunning pieces of really messy performance art… I'd love to explore this

I never realised that vomiting could be so visually appealing. Millie Brown beats Jackson Pollock any time!

http://vimeo.com/18999606

^^ Ten minutes of having chocolate poured on your face? Well… Why not?
Also, just try to pronounce this artists name. Go on. I challenge you.

Harry Potter and the Media

Over the last week I watched every single Harry Potter film from start to finish with Loulou, culminating in the grande finale (!!!) last night at the cinema. 


It sounds lame, I know. 


But with the mind-set that my current Contemporary Media paper has put me into, it's been hard not to notice some of the clever and consistent digs at politics and the media which JK Rowling and the ever-changing directors have put into the stories.  
First of all is the very obvious example of Rita Skita. Aside from the fact that she'd drive anybody potty, she epitomizes the unethical journalist who twists quotes and events to portray a false sense of reality. The media, in essence, has an obligation to the public to provide a balanced and un-weighted portrayal of contemporary facts; leaving it to the public to interpret events in coordination with their ideologies and viewpoints. Yet journalists, like Rita Skita, very rarely do this. Most of them eventually even publish books (poor Dumbledore) to mind-wash, dictate, and corrupt the public into seeing their narrow-minded viewpoint (or, at least, the viewpoint of their mass media corporation *cough cough* Fox News, *cough cough* The Daily Prophet). 
There's also the political agenda. For instance "Undesirable Number One" = Harry Potter one minute, Death Eaters another, briefly followed by a mugger and robber, then back to Harry Potter. I mean seriously, just try to interpret that in a way that doesn't relate to the seriously confused propaganda bullshit that most governments (particularly the American Republicans) try to spoon-feed us. 
A similar point is the consistent portrayal of Sirius Black as a notorious mass-murderer who's on the loose. This is echoed in the phase of ridiculing Dumbledore while promoting Umbridge, followed by ridiculing Umbridge when she completely fucks up. Her hatred of "progress for the sake of progress", combined with corporal punishment, is a clear (and totally fair, of course) attack on conservative government. And their denial of the very existence of Voldemort until way too late reeks of the governmental cause of almost everything that's ever gone wrong on a large scale in our world.


So next time your English teacher tells you that Harry Potter isn't a very deep text, give them a lecture.

Careers?

I am officially a Health Sciences dropout. Yet as everyone else in my position at the beginning of this semester are feeling disastrous, I'm stoked. Their predefined career plans as they came to university was to go through medical school and become a doctor, but now that's gone. Now they have to do an undergraduate degree first and go from there back into the medical school...

Not me. 

I'm now doing what I want. 

But what's got me thinking is that I have absolutely no career plan in front of me. I've been brought up in a world to think that this should be concerning, yet somehow it's the single best aspect of where I'm at now. 

It's not the fact that I'm studying Biochemistry, Communications and Visual Culture, all of which I find fascinating. 

It's not that these have exciting prospects for the future- from biochemistry aiming to increase longevity drastically, to communications promising a vastly different media landscape in the future with the likes of Murdoch gone, replaced by a grounding in online social networking. 

Nor is it any of the other myriad prospects of our future, such as the "singularity", where the exponential growth of computational ability surpasses humanity, promising to aid both the biochemistry and communications I'm studying now. 

It's not even the fact that, yes, I am rebelling to an extent.

Rather, I recall Chris McCandless of Into The Wild. 

"Careers are a twentieth century invention, and I don't want one."

Thinking about it, I'm happy to regard this statement as totally true. And I'm more than happy to entertain the thought that we could, in fact, head back to the time known by our grandparents where you took life and work as it came. Our parents have created a world where we feel it's compulsory to, say, do a BCom and become an accountant, or an LLB and be a corporate lawyer, just because this supposedly enables us to have a 'comfortable' life. We have even been taught to 'know' that if you do a BA you'll probably become a teacher. Yet as I approach this semester, the last thing on my mind (if it's even on my mind at all) is a long-term 'career' plan. Sure, I'm taking papers that are vaguely related to where I think the world is heading, but this is only a general self-made guideline I'm using which combines my abilities, enjoyment, and some crystal ball gazing (or something of the like).

Loulou and I have been talking about it a lot, and what I'm doing instead of career planning is looking forward to the times when I'm earning money just to live. Enjoying experiences and writing about them. Living in China, America, Europe; settling down after a good twenty years or so overseas. I'll be over-qualified for the jobs I'll inevitably put up with in fast food chains and theme parks, but who cares! And if I somehow find myself in the journalism school in Florida, or a media office in China, then that'll be a lovely turn of luck. 

But until then, I'm searching for jobs to pay for the "college life" I'm now experiencing in Dunedin. I'm investing in shares so that when I do try to settle down in twenty years time I might actually have something to set me up. I'm pursuing Biochemistry and learning computer programming because I could even create diagnostic machines to replace doctors.

But most of all, I'm enjoying not knowing what's ahead. Life's a theme-park ride on which we have a front-row seat.

Suji Park- That Which Opens at Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin

A couple of Fridays ago I went with friends to this sculpture exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery 

They were REALLY cool and you can buy them for $350 - $850. In my opinion, totally worth it if you have the money

Here's the review I wrote for the Art Writers group I belong to...

Suji Park's That Which Opens at the Brett McDowell Gallery is somewhat proof that cute and discomforting are not oxymoronic. Imperfect mounds of clay, the artists hands still clearly visible, are transmogrified into realistic human postures, combined in collections, presented on podiums. At 20cm high they're not intrusive, they sit comfortably in the small gallery space amongst the crowd of observers. It could be mistaken for an unsettling version of a Frankie exhibition, yet it's this sinister innocence in which Park finds a beautiful juxtaposition. And if you fancy it, there's even a religious undertone running through the collection. 

As you enter, you find to your left a collection of Swimmers, barely raised from ground level. They seem content, passively happy in their activities. A child's dream. The clearly drawn-on watercolour and graphite detail feel obtainable and familiar, the two figures almost inspiring you to go away and replicate them. However, this simplicity is purely superficial. Our self-consciousness permeates through the characters. Why is it that they feel the need to go and sun-bathe under bright gallery lighting? Or is it more to show a necessity for us to open ourselves up to receive enlightenment from Park’s work? For the rest of the room contains pedestals bearing sculptures in which Spirituality and Sexuality would seem to reign Sovereign. A relationship is found in nakedness and prayer, evidenced in Park’s interest in showing the genital area.

The sharpest details of most pieces are the eyes, observing the observer. They're captivating, somewhat unsettling as they ceaselessly look longingly from their ceramic bodies. What are they missing in life? What the heck are they making us feel..?

A piece of the Procession collection looks skyward, kaleidoscopic triangles on his stomach posing a sharp contrast against deathly grey body as they point with his stare. Is he dying or praying? His cheeks redden and he screams. Does prayer breach the wall between here and death? Every aspect of this moribund figure is distressingly attractive. His back arches. Then his poised mouth is no longer screaming. He's taking a long, soul-catching breath. But he was doing that the whole time, of course, drawing you in. Still, the eyes!

Conspiracy is haunting, the title is perfect. Postures lean in, whisper. Institutionalized religion? Where has the naked Spirituality gone? 

"And as you go out into the world, may the Lord make you truly thankful," says the priest to the collection of sculptures gathered around him in Sermon. His magic works, it's difficult to leave the exhibition feeling otherwise.

Procession

That Which Opens- Poet

Visitation

Another Opening

The best things in life are those which are exciting and happen several times.... I love mail again!

Naked Lunch

Heya!!!


Just reviewed David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991) for the awesome Dunedin zine "Marrow"... Also been postering for their promotional gig for the last few days with my illegal bucket of paste hehe so much fun! But don't say I told you that because I'll deny it to the authorities. 


And here's the film review! I rented it from the coolest DVD rental place- Mint. It's next to the Dunedin train station and you get stuck in it for hours every time. 

Although this film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel is, at most, only abstracted from the literary work, by no means does it detract from the overall experience. Widely criticized for not being close enough to the original text, it's important to remember that Burroughs himself wrote "it is probably an understatement to say that the novel does not obviously lend itself to adaptation for the screen". What Cronenberg does instead, and very effectively, is combine aspects of the hallucinatory and disjointed novel with other works by Burroughs, alongside his biography and the psychological effects of narcotics use, switching them around to be suitable for film. We are thus presented with what is quite a comprehensive commentary on all that is William S. Burroughs and the culture surrounding him.

Burroughs, also the author of Queer and Junkie, was born into a wealthy American family in 1914. Educated at Harvard, he graduated with a degree in English and Anthropology and went to study Medicine in Verona, Italy. But despite the potential to have such a romantic life story, he got hooked on opiates-  monetary support from his family gave him an immense freedom, and he instantly got in with the underground crowd of the time. Now, there is always unrest in the world- that's inevitable- but when Burroughs was writing it was particularly strong. World War 2 had ended in 1945 and what proceeded to occur was a period of absolute conformity. The self-reliant hero had survived in the depression songs of Woodie Guthrie and the novels of John Steinbeck and had been transformed into the GI during World War 2, but young men returning from the South Pacific and Europe were not told to brave new frontiers. Instead they were to get an education, a family and a home; all at government expense. The final years of this was epitomized by President Kennedy, leading the very conservative "new frontier" back to the favorite high-school English theme of the American Dream. Basically, Burroughs was an integral part of forming the public mind-set which got the president assassinated. I wasn't there, and I couldn't possibly imagine how boring life would have felt during those years without the Beat Generation. There's no wonder why they came about. They were a strong liberal movement which involved experimentation with drugs, different forms of sexuality, minimalism and personal expression. You could go so far as to say they were related to Bohemians and evolved into Hippies, and the main creative works of the movement were Allen Ginsberg's extended poem "Howl", Jack Kerouac's novel "On The Road", and Burroughs' "Naked Lunch". These three writers weren't just contemporaries but also great friends, and had a huge influence on the world. 

Anyway, the cinematic technicalities of this film are a solid effort on Cronenberg's part. Peter Weller is amazing in the role of protagonist Bill Lee- a character who represents Burroughs himself. His gaunt face and distant gazes are perfectly matched to the images of a young Burroughs we've all seen, as he convincingly stumbles after injections, stares blankly over coffee, and shoots his wife in drunkenness. The Mugwumps of Burroughs' invention with their jissom-excreting phallic head crests are wonderful considering there are no special effects, as are the type-writer-cum-beatles which talk to a doped Bill. The film even has an original jazz score for the soundtrack- both chronologically and cinematically fitting because of the atmosphere it creates and the influence of opiates on the jazz culture around the same period. Another point Cronenberg seems to understand implicitly is that a lot of the beauty of Burroughs' novel is his prose. The particularly striking chapters are often experienced simply as a dialogue by Bill Lee- they're far too obscure to attempt on film and would lose beauty and meaning without Burroughs' exact wording. Cronenberg achieves quite an interesting feat in doing so, as he maintains prose and film as separate entities, playing to the strengths of film in replacement for the strengths of prose. As far as film-for-film's-sake is concerned, Naked Lunch is stunning. 

With the central themes of sexuality and drug use in both the novel and film, there is still variation between the two. Cronenberg only alludes metaphorically to the homosexuality and violent sexual encounters Burroughs wrote of, and the strong anti-narcotics message of the novel isn't felt at all to the same extent in the film. Rather than showing the heroin and cannabis Burroughs wrote of, Cronenberg substitutes his own fictitious drugs such as Mugwump jissom, bug powder and The Black Meat. I must admit that at first I was deflated by this sense of the film being dumbed-down, but enthusiasm returned with due haste as I realized that this was Cronenberg putting his own personal stamp on the work, finding horror in the alluded-to rather than the explicit. It's hard to believe this film was made 20 years ago (happy 20th birthday!!!), yet this also could possibly explain his restraint from presenting marginalized subjects. Although Burroughs' novel was released 32 years prior, censorship in film has been a lot slower to progress, and had Cronenberg not taken precautions in the subject matter, it is a feasible proposition that it may not have made it off the ground. 

The creative process, and in particular the writing process, is also a central idea because the plot is built around it. At the end of the day, this is quite fitting considering it's about a writer. His type writers give him missions and attack each other, he has to 'prove' he's a writer to cross the border into a fictional country called Anexia, and he can't remember writing most of the manuscript. Burroughs himself said that he wouldn't have become a writer had he not shot his wife, and this key event sits nicely at the start of the film before all the crazy heroin trips start. A really kick-ass moment for this aspect of the film is as Bill Lee writes Naked Lunch in Interzone (an opiate-clouded Tangier). The characters who represent his friends Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac tell him to "stay until you finish the book, but then come back to us." Having seen the chaotic and dangerous haze Burroughs writes in, it's surprising any writer or artist ever finishes a creation alive. 

Love this film!!!

Interview with Anna Coddington

Following up from Computers Want Me Dead... I also interviewed Anna Coddington last week! It was cool that both my interviews were with people who've played down here in Dunedin recently...

Where and when do you write music?
I go through phases with it. When I'm in a writing phase I just write all the time. First thing when I get up mostly, then muck around in the studio in the afternoon and evening doing demos and arranging. But I do find first thing in the morning to be the most productive time for song writing, I think because my brain is always foggy and thinking in tangents...

Who would you work with if you were to do an album full of guest stars?
I kind of feel like I've already done that! I consider my band to be stars and they gave me exactly what I wanted for my new album Cat & Bird. They are Ned Ngatae (guitars/co-production), Riki Gooch (drums), Mike Hall (bass), and L A Mitchell (keyboards). Ooh but if Prince offered to produce an album for me I would say yes.

I read that you're also a black belt in karate. Do you find that balance in life is as important for you as everyone makes it out to be?
Yep. I'm pretty sure the same goes for everyone though. I divide most of my time between music and karate (Kyokushin karate), but all musicians and karate people I know have other commitments/interests/hobbies etc. Sometimes I feel like I don't have enough time left between the two, but after 12 years of training I've just come to accept that I'm better off to keep it up. I get funny in the head when I stop training for too long...

Is it important to be a singer-songwriter rather than just a musician?
Ummm... for me it's important to be a songwriter. That's where I get the most personal satisfaction. I love watching a song grow from an idea to a fully formed thing that other people enjoy. And it's fun to be a singer. I've done a few gigs where I just sing (no guitar). I used to think "shit, what do I do with my hands?!" but I enjoy it more now. I reckon that if you haven't written the song, singing and being a musician are the same thing, except your instrument is your voice. If it's not your song you are ultimately just helping the songwriter/producer see out their vision, same as the other musos. I think?! Maybe not for Britney Spears and people like that. Oh I don't know!...

What are your top 5 favorite foods?
Avocado, tofu, pineapple, smoothies, and coffee (technically not a food, but it's essential).

And top 5 favorite musicians/bands?
Ask me tomorrow and you'll get a different answer but for today I'll say: Michael Jackson, Billy Bragg, Band of Horses, Radiohead, and Julia Deans (who I am touring with through April/May!)
What are your pet peeves?
Burning my toast. My crappy phone. People who do not indicate!
Do you have specific hopes for your future?
Releasing the new record overseas and touring more and a few other music projects that are underway... just playing more music really.

As one of the top popular musicians in New Zealand, are you proud of what you've achieved?
Yes I am. People always ask me if I have another job- I don't. And that in itself is a good gauge for me. I feel lucky about that. And I'm very proud of Cat & Bird. It sounds how I wanted it to sound.

What's the coolest small New Zealand town and why?
Raglan! Because it's my home town. We recently did an awesome gig in Port Chalmers, just out of Dunedin, and that was pretty cool. I also love Wanaka. It's beeyoootiful.

How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
It is not the number of roads, but the journey that maketh the man... Something like that.

Wow I love my job!

Interview With Sam and Damien from Computers Want Me Dead

Heya! Here's my Tearaway interview from last week with Computers Want Me Dead. Fun guys, awesome music.

Sam picked up his cell phone almost immediately. He fetched Damien, closed the door to their Auckland office, and put me on speakerphone. This retro/indie/synth/pop duo who originally performed together at a friend's apartment- formerly a gay brothel- on K' Road in Auckland, are very modest about their music and success. Currently in the process of planning a world tour to Australia, New York and Japan in October, they've found that the key requirements for forming a band are like-minded individuals, patience, and similar ambition, although "you don't need quite as much skill, as everything is all computerized now."

With their first album coming out this year, the guys like to pretend they're not famous. Or, at least if their music is, not them personally. "We're relatively anonymous," Damien points out, "we're not featured heavily in our videos. We have friends in bigger New Zealand bands with much bigger attention. It's actually quite cool being able to walk down the street and not have that attention."

That's all well and good, but what's striking is that these guys are incredibly talented. Sam has designed the album cover and he also directed their first video. And with their EP cover comprising geometric shapes and a simple Computers Want Me Dead title, they joke that the ideal album cover is "simple but complex" (get your mind around that one!). Their films are about the "idea, not the budget. So they're quirky and out-there." The first video- a Youtube hit- is about a guy traveling back in time to visit his girlfriend, where the time machine is made out of crystals. The next one, however, was produced by Liam Barclay based on his interpretation of their lyrics. "Entertainment is important. It was cool how Liam interpreted the lyrics without being cheesy." On the idea of creating an image, they find that "a big part of it is attitude. We're not really into creating an image as such but we're addressing it more and more. By making a multi-media live show we're re-thinking things visually. But also, everything's about marketing these days and where people are looking."

It was April Fool's day when we had the conversation, so as for their best pranks? Earlier in the day, Damien had sent his girlfriend a link to a website for 2 hour dolphin rides. "She was really nervous about being in the open ocean with this dolphin. But she had told everyone in the office before calling (me about it) so she was really gutted (it was a prank)." As for Sam, when he was six his family had a boarder staying who was always fighting with them. So after one particularly bad evening, "I left something for him on his toothbrush. He left the next day."

Their main pet peeve is the same as any musician- instrumental gear breaking- but also people who can't take a joke. "We like people with a sense of humour and who don't have to be so serious all the time."
And on the subject of pet peeves- someone who's annoying everyone without fail at the moment gets an interesting rap. "I'm not into (Rebecca Black) myself. The case of point being that anyone can make a song and music and voila. There's always gonna be a market for what you're into. But she didn't have to do anything with her music and video. She just mouthed words. Good on her because she's doing what she loves just as any 13 year old girl would, but to be honest the music video is famous because it's so bad. I don't hate her but I hate the song. It puts a smile on my face just talking about it- it's entertaining for all the wrong reasons."

Thank goodness Computers Want Me Dead are entertaining for all the right reasons. 

And a few more random questions...

How many times have you been asked what your name means?
-Every singe interviewer has asked what our name means. We made an effort to have a unique name, it was catchy because of that and it's why we get asked our name so much.

Who's the coolest New Zealander you've ever met and/or want to meet?
S- Jordan Lake. Is there anything he can’t do?
D- John Campbell. I've met him serval times and he's the loveliest, coolest guy.

What's the coolest small town in New Zealand and why?
-We were really stoked playing in dunedin. Everyone down there is so ennthusiastic about gigs. Unless you go to McDonald's and get punched to death (this happened to them).
[this interviewer comments that he lives there]
Didn’t know you were down there...$5000 in your bank account.
Hamilton is also pretty rad, but I guess neither of those are small towns as such...

What do you guys make of the whole "Indie" ideal that's happening at the moment?
-"Indie is so broad and misconstruited and misinterpreted. We have a Pop element and Indie element. Basically, an underground thing becomes mainstream. It's not a fad- it's always been there. An independent thing becomes well known, something good becomes fashionable.

Buy the album people!!!


Love


xxx

Annie Leibovitz

At the moment I'm totally inspired by photographer Annie Leibovitz. This has been started by an exhibition on in Sydney at the moment entitled 'Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life 1990-2005' which combines the photos of her private and family life with the portraiture she's so famous for. The idea that the two contrast so heavily yet can be combined seems quite interesting to me, purely because it creates such a visually obvious juxtaposition between the two, a stark contrast from glitz and glamour of celebrities to her subtle and banal personal life. The exhibition has an underlying feeling of mortality, also an interesting idea because of the capacity we believe photography to have- to immortalize a moment in time. And now what I really want is the accompanying book to the exhibition...

Over her career Leibovitz has photographed for both Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair magazines, toured with The Rolling Stones on their 'Tour of the Americas '75', and has since been frequently commissioned by celebrities. Here is some of her stunning photography:

Brad Pitt

John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Queen Elizabeth II

Keith Haring

Anyway, all this has inspired me to try some portraiture! Any volunteers for models?

xx


P.S. The next step for me is to look up Susan Sontag, a beautiful writer and essayist who was romantically involved with Leibovitz. I bet her writing was amazing...
Also, here's a good article on this...

I Love Mail

Yesterday contained a small but exciting change to my health sciences routine; in my pigeon-hole at Knox was an envelope addressed to me in beautiful, elaborate handwriting. Of course, it's not often that you receive such mail, and the sheer beauty amidst the typed university bills everyone else was receiving made it feel so very special. Part of the charm was that I honestly couldn't answer the looming question of who the heck was writing to me.

A slight disappointment was that it wasn't a long hand-written message after all. It contained no news of the weather in a little French town, the political situation in a huge American city, nor the family gossip back home in Wellington. Instead these romantic images floating through my head thanks to an excess of movie-watching and Jane Austen reading, along with thoughts of a secret admirer, dissipated as a small pre-printed card fell out.

But that card itself was wonderful- an invitation to preview the Ben Cauchi exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery this Friday, which I'm now definitely going to of course.

Anyway, it's made me think just how great hand-writing actually is. And although it turned out not to be one, the  beauty of sending physical letters rather than emails. Sometimes I do curse the age we've grown up in and long for the times of the Bronte's.

Looking back at the envelope now I also realize that the Gallery is stamped on it. Awkward how an emotional response changes how you view things (or don't)...

xx

Intense

Intense, originally uploaded by Zaaane.

Loulou

Loulou 1, originally uploaded by Zaaane.

Sleep

Sleep, originally uploaded by Zaaane.

A photo I took in Colombia, January 2011

Night

Night, originally uploaded by Zaaane.

From my last night out with Alasdair and cameras last year... Good times

Photo Essay: Amazing Libraries Around The World

This photo essay is just inspiring, and I even feel they could have used the library here at Otago University

Ahhh such inspiring places to study! They're certainly much more attractive than the Physics lecture I'm struggling through as I blog this. I can only dream... 

xx

Barnaby Weir

Hey'all!

I'm back after a looong break from the blogging world, excited as hell to get back into it. First and foremost, my thoughts go out to all those families affected by the devastating earthquake in Christchurch last week. It was certainly a sobering down-buzz to our Orientation Week at Otago University. The minute silence yesterday was a great way to think over it; to put yourself into the mindset of families who have lost loved ones and homes, the architecture which has been ruined (the cathedral even needs to be demolished), etc. 

Anyway, to try and bring a bit of positivity back to life: the very day that the earthquake happened I was due to interview Barnaby Weir. This was only two hours after the rumble and so all the phone lines were dead, but luckily the next day it was all sorted. The interview (along with a review which I'm yet to do) will be appearing in this year's second issue of Tearaway, but for now here's the title track from Tarot Card Rock:

Barnaby Weir is the go-to guy of New Zealand music; he would seem to be New Zealand's present-day equivalent to, say, Bob Dylan. His previous projects included the incredibly successful band The Black Seeds, followed by Fly My Pretties and the lesser-known Flash Harry. His music is wonderful and my mates were all willing to confess their jealousy at my interview opportunity. 

Here's to Christchurch, here's to starting Uni, here's to New Zealand Music, and here's especially to Barnaby Weir

xx