Cultural Elsewhere
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THE VISUAL ARTS IN BUENOS AIRES (2010): Out in the street
11 Oct 2010 | 4 min read
You can’t help notice that the skin of Buenos Aires is heavily tattooed: not just with graffiti, but by large and vivid murals, and spray-on stencil art. You can spend a lot of time looking at the walls of Buenos Aires. Many murals are clever and colourful but the graffiti -- mostly just tagging -- is as absurd and incomprehensible as any. There are whole areas of the city which look... > Read more
Sui Generis: Bienvenidos al Tren
COMPOSER JOHN TAVENER INTERVIEWED (1993): Lifting the Veil
4 Oct 2010 | 10 min read
Late in 1992 in one of his increasingly rare interviews, British classical composer John Tavener uncharacteristically hit back at the critics who had been sniping at his most recent work, The Protecting Veil. After noting that critics want their intellects tickled but had forgotten about the intellect of the heart, he skewered them for their shallowness. “They don't know the... > Read more
John Tavener: The Protecting Veil (played by Steven Isserlis, cello, and the LSO, 1992)
PIRANESI'S ENGRAVINGS: Exploring the dark discomforts of Roman ruins
1 Oct 2010 | 2 min read
When the English author Thomas DeQuincey was describing nightmarish drug-induced visions in his early-19th-century autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he reflected on curious and compelling images he had never seen. They were a set of engravings by Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and DeQuincey referred to descriptions of them by his fellow author and... > Read more
ANDY WARHOL'S LOOK: Glamour, Style, Fashion and Moron
27 Sep 2010 | 8 min read
“People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” -- Andy Warhol. There's a scene in an Austin Powers movie in which the superspy and international man of mystery is in his London bachelor pad. Amid the iconography of the Swinging Sixties is a large multiple portrait of Powers rendered in flat, garish colours. In... > Read more
FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO INTERVIEWED (1999): Cheer up, it will all be over soon
13 Sep 2010 | 8 min read
The phone call is an hour late and catches Felipe Fernandez-Armesto at dinner with his father-in-law. Apologies are cheerfully rebutted by impossibly rounded vowels which roll across the global link direct from Brideshead Revisited. My apology includes how I relied on an international telephone operator to calculate the time difference -- and assumed she would tell the truth. He... > Read more
NEW YORK, THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11: In a New York State of Mind (2002)
11 Sep 2010 | 16 min read
Beyond the wingtip is a clear blue sky, exactly the same kind out of which tragedy arrived a year ago.It is September 11 and I'm flying into New York, America's capital of brashness but which now has a hole in its heart.Security today has been tight as expected in a country on "orange alert" (one down from "red alert") but as I have hopped from Los Angeles to... > Read more
BENNY HILL: A man out of time
9 Sep 2010 | 5 min read | 8
When writer Tom Hibbert sought out Benny Hill in the early 90s for a “who the hell does Benny Hill think he is?” magazine article, he found the shy, defensive star tucking into cod and chips in a pub surrounded by old friends. That was the odd thing about Benny Hill who died in 1992: he was desperately ordinary to the point of eccentricity. With Hill in the South London pub... > Read more
LORD OF THE RINGS: The never-ending story of music, marketing and merchandise.
4 Sep 2010 | 3 min read
A handsome blonde organ-playing Scandinavian with an interest in The Lord of the Rings? It almost sounds like a soft-porn joke, but Bo Hansson from Sweden has a small but early stake in Tolkien-trivia. In the late-Sixties, as with many of that pothead period, he was so taken by Tolkien's trilogy he decided to record an album, Music Inspired By The Lord of the Rings. It's not bad either... > Read more
Marion Arts: O Shining White (from the album Songs of the Rings, 2000)
MARIJUANA: My life in a happy place; no apologies
1 Sep 2010 | 11 min read | 1
As the 21st century dawned there was considerable argument in New Zealand about whether marijuana should be decriminalist, a debate prompted by a Green MP Nandor Tanczos attempting to bring a bill before Parliamant along those lines. People took positions on the far ends of the spectrum. As this happened I went to the editor of the New Zealand Herald where I was a feature writer and... > Read more
The Inkspots: That Cat is High (1938)
QUEEN CITY ROCK: Auckland Nightlife, Look Back in Wonder (2010)
29 Aug 2010 | 5 min read
“I hear the Queen City callin' . . . yeah, the whole place is rockin' . . . " -- Peter Lewis and the Trisonic, Four City Rock, 1960 Although Peter Lewis also noted the Windy City, the Garden City and Dunedin (rhymes with “freezin' “) in his classic celebration of New Zealand rock'n'roll scene Four City Rock, he kicked off most... > Read more
THE DIFFICULT ARTS UNDER NAZISM: The uncomfortable past -- and present
22 Aug 2010 | 6 min read
Back in the early NIneties there was a modicum of good news about the career of the German rock band Endseig whose name meant Final Victory. It was that they weren’t particularly popular and their records sold fewer than a couple of thousand copies. That however may come as small comfort to anyone who scans their lyrics. “Throw them in prison of concentration camps . . .... > Read more
ANTOINE WIERTZ: Rape, damnation and the art of darkness
21 Aug 2010 | 4 min read
Antoine Wiertz was one pretty sick bastard all right. The gallery he demanded be built to house his gigantic paintings in his adopted hometown of Brussels is testament to an artist obsessed by death, disembowelment, rape, damnation and a virulent sexuality. Everywhere flesh is impaled or torn, eyes glisten with horror, and spears drive through bodies. Over there is a beheading, on... > Read more
TODAY IN HISTORY: AUGUST 16 1977: The king is gone . . .
16 Aug 2010 | 1 min read | 1
John Lennon was only half right when, on being told that Elvis Presley had died, said, "Elvis died when he went into the army". In part that was true: before his posting to Germany Elvis was the archetype for rock'n'roll; after the songs got soft and the Hollywood movies rolled out with increasingly dreary predictability. There were of course continuing flashes of greatness:... > Read more
The death of Elvis Presley
RHONA HASZARD: Portrait of the artist as a young woman (2004)
2 Aug 2010 | 2 min read
Popular culture loves nothing so much as the early death of an obvious talent. We are left with questions and the speculation on just what direction the gift might have moved in had the artist lived. Some of that discussion will doubtless be aired with the Auckland exhibition of works by Thames-born painter Rhona Haszard, who fell to her death from the fourth storey of a tower in Egypt in... > Read more
BARRY HUMPHRIES ON THE RECORD: The early life of an agent provocateur
7 Jul 2010 | 5 min read
At his first Pan-Australia Dada exhibition, Barry Humphries had packages printed up bearing the name Platitox, which allegedly contained a poison to put in creeks to kill the platypus, that much-loved, much-protected and playful native animal. “So why have an exhibit which offers a pesticide to destroy these animals? Because everything was in its place in Australia,” said... > Read more
Sandy Stone: Dear Beryl
STEVE REICH INTERVIEWED (1990): The maximal minimalist
5 Jul 2010 | 5 min read
American composer Steve Reich finishes telling of his new work – an enormous three-years-in-the making multi-media project – and then reflects on the austerity of his early music which enraged audiences two decades ago. “Yeah, it’s easy to see backwards and how all these new things came from that early stuff – but it isn’t so easy to see forwards.... > Read more
SIR STANLEY SPENCER ESSAYED (2003): Of angels and dirt
28 Jun 2010 | 7 min read
Sex fascinated Stanley Spencer. But so did angels, the transcendence of the spirit through faith, and life in his home village of Cookham where, as a child, he believed biblical events had taken place and been witnessed by local folk.This confluence of religious and rural influences, and his belief that sexual and spiritual desire were entwined, were resolved in an intellectually energised... > Read more
MOHOLY-NAGY AND THE BAUHAUS, PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION ESSAY (2003)
13 Jun 2010 | 6 min read
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy would argue that our eyesight was defective and limited. He would cite the pioneering 19th-century German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who told his students if an optician made a human eye and brought it to him he would say, "This is a clumsy piece of work".The punchline for Moholy-Nagy would be that we have a better optical instrument than the human eye: the... > Read more
HARRY BELAFONTE, ACTIVIST AND SINGER, INTERVIEWED (2000)
8 Jun 2010 | 9 min read
Harry Belafonte’s voice has been his passport. It was his passage out of poverty as a young man and has allowed him access to the hearts of people as he tirelessly articulates the struggle for human rights.As he stood alongside Dr Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela as a friend and confidant, his was a compassionate voice for equality, justice and the rights of... > Read more
PICASSO, THE FINAL MASK (2003): Into the void
24 May 2010 | 4 min read
In his last self-portrait -- a crayon on paper work done nine months before his death in 1973, at age 91 -- Pablo Picasso created a disconcerting image: the eyes wide as if terrified, the mouth taut and drawn tightly over the teeth, and the face gaunt with defined cheekbones quite unlike what his bowling ball face actually looked like. It is a portrait of the man within, the image of a man... > Read more