Sunday, November 29, 2020

Tomorrow

›
It was a pleasure to speak at the launch of MK Joseph's long-lost anti-fascist novel Tomorrow the World last weekend. Jack Ross has wri...
85 comments:
Thursday, November 05, 2020

Dark enlightenment

›
She's probably got bigger things to worry about right now, but I've queried the suddenly notorious Olivia Pierson's understandin...
38 comments:
Saturday, October 31, 2020

Weka Pass

›
Last week I tramped to Weka Pass Cave, where people made art with charcoal and ochre five hundred or more years ago. Now I wonder: was that ...
50 comments:
Monday, October 05, 2020

Warriors in wood

›
  I've written about the syncretic and subversive sculpture of Whare Joseph Thompson for EyeContact . 
21 comments:
Monday, September 07, 2020

The old gods

›
Some conservative older Pakeha are complaining about Labour's promise to make Matariki, or Maori New Year, a public holiday. They say Ma...
58 comments:
Friday, September 04, 2020

Influence

›
  Many critics say that Rothko is outdated, irrelevant, that his blocks of layered colours & mystical ambitions represent a cul de sac i...
37 comments:
Sunday, August 23, 2020

A wormhole

›
Aucklanders may not be able to move far in space, but the realm of time is still open. A wormhole took me back to 1887. I wrote about the j...
9 comments:
Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Lockdown reading

›
When I was ten years old Khmer refugees arrived at my school, & my parents took me to see The Killing Fields at St James cinema. Since t...
12 comments:
Monday, August 03, 2020

Rekohu notes

›
19/7 In one day Rekohu/Chatham/Wharekauri gave us five rainbows. I kept thinking of the back cover of Binney's great biography of ...
23 comments:
Thursday, July 02, 2020

Five theses on the non-existence of the present

›
1 Wars are fought first in the imagination. The invasion of the Waikato was planned in Auckland; the city's toponyms record its guilt...
138 comments:
Sunday, June 21, 2020

Suddenly his mind went blank

›
Cities smoke, statues collapse, & the oranges in our yard swell & brighten. The indifference of nature is both frightening & ...
27 comments:
Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Listen to the bishop

›
As a few articles in the media show , I've been busy arguing that Akaroa's Bully Hayes restaurant and Bar should change its name,...
16 comments:
Monday, June 08, 2020

Akaroa's slaver

›
In the US & UK monuments celebrating slavery are coming down. The people of Bristol have thrown the statue of their slaver Couls...
6 comments:
Tuesday, June 02, 2020

The ruin

›
We spent the long weekend with my brother-in-law, who has resettled in the Kaipara. We watched his old American neighbourhood burn on TV, t...
17 comments:
Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The uses of culture

›
The world is buzzing over the story of the Tongan teens wrecked on 'Ata Island in the mid-'60s. I've written for Newsroom ab...
5 comments:
Sunday, May 10, 2020

An 'Atan utopia?

›
Rutger Bregman has written about the adventures of some young castaways on the Tongan island of 'Ata for the Guardian . In the ...
3 comments:
Saturday, May 02, 2020

Amendments

›
Along Awhitu's coast, south of the Manukau, the sea has eaten millions of tonnes of clay, of cliff. The red soil ends up on the north s...
Sunday, April 26, 2020

Why build a fort?

›
'Ata is a tiny, remote island with virtually no reef and almost impossibly sheer cliffs. Why, then, would its inhabitants build a fort?...
1 comment:
Saturday, April 25, 2020

Dream during a plague

›
I stand hungrily on a locked down Ponsonby Rd. I notice a sign, a flashing miracle: it says CAFE OPEN. I go inside, & a smiling Jacques...
2 comments:

Feeding the monster

›
This photo reminds me of the story of Athens assembling its young & sending them to be devoured by a monstrous minotaur. Instead of a mi...
3 comments: