Paul's nose job

Paul Janman's latest short film, which you can watch at Vimeo, documents the attempt by a team of scholars and musicians to renew the venerable and endangered Tongan art form of tufunga ngaohifangufangu, or nose flute making and playing.

You may recognise 'Okusitino Mahina, the anthropologist and graduate of the 'Atenisi Institute whom I showed jamming on the fangufangu and arguing about the meaning of tapu in this 2011 post, and Kolokesa Mahina-Tuai, the museologist and curator whose subversion of Eurocentric art categories I celebrated last year in an EyeContact review and a blog post.

I'm very pleased Paul sent me a link to his new film, because I've needed an excuse, this morning, to turn away from the telly and the radio and the scenes outside my window. In our part of Auckland preparations for the World Cup final seem to have become oddly mixed with preparations for Halloween.

As their parents sit in parked cars listening anxiously to anxious pre-match commentaries on Radio Sport and half a dozen other stations, kids are wandering the streets wearing black, and tossing about plastic pumpkins and rugby balls. Black flags emblazoned with silver ferns and skulls flap from porches and postboxes.

With World Cup hysteria peaking, transtasman relations deteriorating to a point not seen since Trevor Chapple took up lawn bowls at the MCG in 1981, and Maori Wallaby Quade Cooper being once against accused of treason and sentenced to death on social media, it must be time for me to post a link to this old blog post, in which I tried to use the Oceanian genius Epeli Hau'ofa to defend Quade.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]