Category: Uncategorized

Take a dose of art

Feeling rather depressed by newspaper articles today. One is about working people struggling to pay their bills and to keep warm over winter, and another, from the Washington Post, records the dire effects on people in the US who have lost their public service jobs. I’ve heard that Wellington is quiet these days, with fewer public servants about and, with today being Budget Day, I worry about what further cuts will be made by our government. An elderly man in the first news article commented that this government ‘lacks compassion’. Coincidentally, I’m part-way through a Listener article subtitled ‘How to cope when the world is going crazy’.

Somewhat cheered after Singing for Pleasure this morning at the WEA, I hoped a dip into art might lift my gloom further. This particular piece intrigued me. I noticed it from two flights up when I heard running water and looked for the source. It was in the space under the stairs.

Fountain in Transit by Yona Lee
Art Deco influences, perhaps?

From below, I was able to investigate other features, including the lighting, but also the way the water is directed to each part of the installation. It reminds me of all the plumbing options we considered when renovating the bathroom. I like its playfulness.

The exhibition about our relationship with the land was too sombre, so I revisited the Francis Shurrock exhibition. Traumatised by his World War I experiences, he came to NZ in the 1920s and taught and inspired his students at Canterbury College School of Art – even introducing Morris Dancing. I like this Art Deco piece he did in Oamaru stone, and the bronze sculpture of writer Frank Sargeson by one of his students, Alison Duff. Across the street from the Gallery an Art Deco-inspired block of flats caught my eye.

Perhaps the government will decide art galleries are a waste of space too. But, on further thought, that is unlikely; too many rich people invest in art. Monetary value seems to be what counts when, clearly, art has a value more ephemeral than that. Now I’ve depressed myself again.

Domestic disaster and delight

Disaster’ and ‘delight’ are perhaps overstating it. My 32 year old washing machine finally did what I’d been expecting – broke down on the last spin. Over the phone, my regular repair man (well, I’ve needed him twice in 32 years) said he was semi-retired now, but suggested I try wrenching the bowl to reset it. To my relief, that worked and I was able to hang my heavy flannelette sheets on the line. However, he advised that my old Hoover Commodore, purchased in 1993, had had its day. Some quick research (including reading helpful reviews) and consultation with my sister resulted in the purchase of a new energy efficient Fisher and Paykel machine.

Old and new

My sister and brother in law replaced their dish washer the same day. Their son had picked it up for them. Before long, he arrived to collect my new washing machine. There followed a Dukes of Hazzard adventure in his girlfriend’s black, double-cab ute, with his younger (but taller) brother riding shotgun and me in the back wielding the credit card. We roared up the road to a northern suburb distribution centre where a man donned a helmet and safety harness and collected the boxed machine from a high shelf with a large fork lift. My nephew had the gear to strap the machine onto the deck of the ute and we took the scenic route along back roads to home. There the two young heroes un-installed the old machine and installed the new one. Just like that.

I read the manual carefully, ran a Quick Cycle to check the pipes were correctly connected and then a Hygiene Cycle to clean away any residues from the manufacturing process. There are 14 cycles available! I was awake in the night strategising the alteration to my usual ‘chuck everything in together’ routine.

This morning, it was good to go and proved efficient – and quiet! My old one sounded like a jet plane taking off and creaked and groaned and even shrieked. The new one has greater capacity, but is about the same size otherwise. It is also gentler on clothes, with no tall central agitator to tangle things up.

It’s a little sad to see an old stalwart go – but the delight of watching a digital control panel go through each cycle will win me over in time! Maybe it has already.

Goodbye, old friend.

Art and architecture

Today was so beautiful I had to get out and into it. Walking to Singing was great, and after a good old bellow there, I popped across the street to the Art Gallery. The visual delights started with an amazing whale-tree suspended from the foyer ceiling. It was quite meditative looking at the art upstairs, and moving too.

The huge triptych ‘Colonization’ by William Dunning is more essay than painting. The kawakawa tree in the foreground is by Shona Rapira Davies (who also did the ‘whale-tree’ in the foyer). I was pleased to see a Robyn Kahukiwa painting (on the right) as she recently died. I love her work in Wahine Toa with Patricia Grace. The book was in my classroom for years until it disappeared. Someone else loved it too, as I’d hoped.

Out on The Terrace, the colours were brilliant and it was hot. I stopped for ice cream, then headed off to explore.

Pre-earthquakes, High Street had a row of lovely old buildings, home to specialty shops and cafēs. Now, it is a street of restored buildings and new buildings housing boutique businesses. Some façades have been preserved, while inside and out the back you can see how new the buildings are.

Old and new sit cheek by jowl (photo below). A new floor (perhaps a penthouse apartment) has been added to the building in the middle, so I suspect only the façade is original. The building under construction on the right, has amazingly massive timber beams, some curving around the corner. It replaces the old Excelsior Hotel, which stood in its post-earthquake ruined state for ages until it was demolished. No-one would take on its restoration, despite hopes to preserve at least the façade. The landmark palm trees at the front remain.

An idea of what High Street used to be like (with imaginative additions) is preserved in Kate de Goldi’s book From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle.

Cover design and illustrations by Gregory O’Brien
Back cover design by Sam Bunny

Changes

The cherry tree is losing its leaves. The camellia is flowering.

Autumn is a time of contrasts. You begin wearing shoes and socks, then change to jandals – then back to shoes and socks. A day begins misty then clears to sunshine. Leaves are turning yellow and falling, and new flowers are coming out. Fruit is ripe, and birds are making the most of the myrtle berries and grapes before they rot.

Ripening feijoas
Blackbird eating myrtle berries
Grapes ripe and rotting

Changes are happening in the city all the time. The new Court Theatre opened this week. A few doors down the street, the old Isaac Theatre Royal with its traditional architecture reminds us of the past, even when it is zhooshed up at night.

The End of the Golden Weather fits for the first performance at The Court Theatre. The play reminds me of the beginnings of professional theatre in NZ (I saw Bruce Mason perform it solo in the 1970s) and of a time when summer centred on the beach, and families ate afternoon tea from tea trolleys and played charades – and many made sport of the less fortunate. We still do, it seems; more brutal when it is government policy.

It makes me think of what has changed and what hasn’t. I change from my sixties (freedom: I may do as I like) to my seventies (I may do as I like but can I?) this month. It is daunting (checking for signs of decrepitude), yet I’m curious to know what comes next (not the decrepitude bit). It’s plays, books, the newspaper and history which remind me that a lot changes in the world and a lot does not. That’s why Shakespeare – and Bruce Mason – remains relevant. I’m still waiting to see what we can achieve to redeem ourselves.

The astronauts in Orbital circling the earth continually, get the big picture. They see night turn to day, note weather patterns changing, and observe other evidence of our impact on the planet. They conclude that the solution to our survival is not in outer space.

I can imagine what they see, but I’m pretty short-sighted, just living in the moment: Is it time to put extra blankets on the beds? what’s for dinner? what’s the weather like? what will I wear today? – that sort of thing.

Time may change me

But I can’t trace time.

– David Bowie gave us a masterclass in adaptability and re-inventing yourself. Even he sounded uncertain when he sang ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch -changes’.

Fabulous fundamentals

In these days of uncertainty – currently rain, wind and floods – it’s good to have a firm foundation. To that end, I swear by Thunderpants. I have a drawer full of them, several with matching bra or crop tops.

Locally and ethically designed and made, they have a firm fan base who send in photos, poems and endless praise for these comfy, cosy, slightly crazy and always good humoured fundamentals. Today’s newsletter was too good not to share. Enjoy!

There’s a lot of weather lately

I received a text as I walked along the flooded Avon River in the rain. It was from my brother with a photo of the place he and my sister-in-law were having lunch in Arrowtown. I sent back this photo from under my umbrella.

Often people sit on these steps and watch the eels in the river. Not today. It began raining during the night and has not stopped since.

I had been to the second session of a course on US History and it was refreshing to walk despite the weather – if only to the bus stop!

At home, Felix was keeping warm on the heat pump. I did some vacuuming, lit the fire and baked Anzac biscuits.

Post Script: Felix has just come in soaking wet and looking unimpressed.

He loves being rubbed down with a towel which I am happy to do, particularly before he dries himself all over me! Perhaps the rain has intensified. I can hear gusts of wind blowing branches against the window.

Shining example

The sun is shining after a rather frosty start to the day. My inspirational figurine, Lisa Simpson, is glowing as if from within. She used to sit above the whiteboard in my classroom as an antidote to Bart’s determination to be an underachiever and proud of it. Holding her saxaphone and a glowing report card she is a shining example, particularly at this moment caught by the sun.

Upside down

It might be Easter, but in the Southern Hemisphere Easter is in Autumn, not Spring. Yet there were ducklings in the Botanic Gardens this morning.

Rain threatened, so we walked in the city (via the Gardens) rather than the beach. At the Arts Centre we saw the Ghostcat exhibition of miniatures. The buildings modelled are ones which didn’t survive the earthquake that turned us upside down in 2011. A painting in the hallway gives an artist‘s impression of the Arts Centre as a place full of creative people.

Maxine Burney

We discovered a display space new to us. It shows the work of the stone masons who are repairing the Arts Centre. There are activities for children, and a family sat around a table gluing coloured squares onto paper. From the window you can see repair work in progress and neatly stacked piles of stone and brick ready for re-use.

It still hadn’t rained by the time I got home, so I risked doing some washing. Just as the spin cycle clicked off, down came the rain. So the washing went into the dryer or onto the airer. There was nothing for it but to light the first fire of the year and sit beside it with a good book – and chocolate. How did I manage to eat two thirds of that chocolate bunny?

Spicy bun time

The approach of Easter is time to get out the bread maker and make spicy buns. I use Mum’s hot cross bun recipe – always a family favourite – adapted to the bread maker dough function. It’s very satisfying to turn the dough mix out onto a floured board and shape the buns into rounds. It takes about 30 minutes for them to rise and 20 minutes or fewer to bake. Here is the result:

I don’t bother with crosses on top. In previous years we have enjoyed these buns so much that I’ve continued making them through winter, varying the flavourings such as using crystallised ginger instead of sultanas and mixed peel. Yum.

Space

I have finished Orbital by Samantha Harvey which I had to steel myself to read due to the dread and horror I feel at the thought of being in outer space. I was recommended it as ‘beautifully written’ and that is true. It also gives a devastating assessment of the human condition from the perspective of a crew on an international space station.

Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the centre of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal. They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very centre of the waltzing universe, and they could forget all those truths men and women had uncovered (via a jerking and stuttering path of discovery followed by denial followed by discovery followed by cover-up) that the earth is a piddling speck at the centre of nothing. They could think: no negligible thing could shine so bright, no far-hurled nothingy satellite could bother itself with these shows of beauty, no paltry rock could arrange such intricacy as fungus and minds.

So they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking earth around which all things orbited – the sun, the planets, the universe itself. You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness. It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; its not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways – in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines – the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours us humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

They sail at their in-between distance of low earth orbit, their half-mast view. They think: maybe it’s hard being human and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.

Maybe human civilisation is like a single life – we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone. If there are who-knows-how-many solar systems just like ours, with who-knows-how-many planets, one of those planets is surely inhabited, and companionship is our consolation for being trivial. And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope, humanity looks outwards and thinks they might be on Mars perhaps, the others, and sends out probes. But Mars appears to be a frozen desert of cracks and craters, so maybe in that case they’re in the neighbouring solar system, or the neighbouring galaxy, or the one after that.

We send out the Voyager probes into interstellar space in a big-hearted fanciful spasm of hope. Two capsules from earth containing images and songs just waiting to be found in – who knows – tens or hundreds of thousands of years if all goes well. Otherwise millions or billions, or not at all. Meanwhile we begin to listen. We scan the reaches for radio waves. Nothing answers. We keep on scanning for decades and decades. Nothing answers. We make wishful and fearful projections through books, films and the like about how it might look, this alien life, when it finally makes contact. But it doesn’t make contact and we suspect in truth that it never will. It’s not even out there, we think. Why bother waiting when there’s nothing there? And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit and earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.

Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.

Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can’t quite scratch; to look to the void (which isn’t answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleams like a spotlit mirror in a pitch-dark room, and speak into the fuzz of our radios to the only life that appears to be there. Hello? Konnichiwa, ciao, zdraste, bonjour, do you read me, hello?

Harvey, Samantha 2024 pp 49-52 (Vintage ebook edition)

It’s a book of 204 pages (ebook version) and I might just about have exceeded the 10% limit allowed before copyright is infringed with this extract. But it was the bit that particularly resonated with me, although perhaps the descriptions of Earth from Space were more beautifully written and the parallel account of a fishing family in the Philippines sheltering from a deadly typhoon which the astronauts are tracking added another layer and dimension of reality (we can’t all be billionaires joy-riding into space).

As good as it is, I am happy to put aside my horror and dread and escape into some Earth-based crime fiction.