South Island
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So amped right now
Harry Dawson’s Nixie amps have a heart of glass. SOMETIMES FUNCTIONALITY TRUMPS BEAUTY. SOMETIMES HISTORY DOES TOO. BUT SOMETIMES BEAUTY WINS. EXHIBIT A: THE VALVE AMPLIFIER. The garage-slash-workshop in Harry Dawson’s garage is, in square meterage, as big as his house. It has two spaces: a “dirty room” and a “clean room”. Much of the…
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Dirt, the new snow
Is mountain biking the future for the resort towns of the past? WHEN WE USE THE PHRASE “RESORT TOWN”, WE GENERALLY MEAN ONE OF TWO THINGS: A PLACE WITH A BEACH, OR WITH ONE OR MORE SKI HILLS. QUEENSTOWN IS THE LATTER. IT’S PROBABLY THE COUNTRY’S BEST-KNOWN SKI RESORT. CORONET PEAK, AOTEAROA’S FIRST COMMERCIAL SKI…
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Music Review: Change, For a Fiver
Barry G Barry G is an Irish singer, songwriter and impressive strummer of strings who is a familiar figure on the Southern Lakes music scene. His first album, Change, For a Fiver, showcases everything his audiences love in his live performances to great effect. There’s his voice, which has an endlessly listenable Passenger vibe, except…
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Book Review: Dirge Bucolic
By Jasmine Gallagher (Compound Press, 2022) Jasmine Gallagher’s debut collection is like a series of fractal prisms. She takes moments, spaces and stories, then breaks and turns them so we see them from all sides. As implied by the oxymoronic title, there’s a lot here. Dirge Bucolic delves into and through Jasmine’s personal experience of…
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watching us, watching them
1. Toroa ingoingo. In 1937 there was one pair on the Peninsula, marked and wrapped by Doctor Lance Richdale, breeding. Better banded, perhaps, than starved, egg-sucked, stuck in ship masts or dismantled for muffs, tobacco pouches, cigarette holders and walking stick handles. 2. Now they flock to the camera like Kardashians and we sit and…
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Book review: Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar – A window into Miocene Zealandia
By Daphne Lee, Uwe Kaulfuss and John Conran (Otago University Press, 2022) This generously illustrated book takes the reader through the story of, and significance of, the Foulden Maar site in Otago. Formed by a volcanic eruption 23 million years ago, the Maar’s undisturbed sedimentary layers are chocka with rare, well-preserved fossils. It’s an extraordinary…
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Rationalise this
Because we’re nothing but a cross between Caligula and monkeys wearing pants. THESE DAYS, EVERYONE’S AN ENVIRONMENTALIST. TO BE OTHERWISE IS TO RISK BECOMING A SOCIAL EXILE OR HAVING YOUR BUSINESS BOYCOTTED. OUR SOCIAL CHANNELS MAKE US ALL SEEM LIKE THE LOVE CHILDREN OF JANE GOODALL AND DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. MESSAGING CORRECT, BRANDING ON POINT. It…
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Waste not, want
IT ALL STARTED WITH A FIELD FULL OF RUBBISH. IT WAS NEW YEAR’S DAY 2020, AND RUBY URQUHART WAS HELPING WITH THE CLEAN-UP AFTER THE RHYTHM & ALPS MUSIC FESTIVAL, IN THE CARDRONA VALLEY. Scattered amongst the usual post-party detritus (beer cans, vape cartridges, flickering smart phones with shattered screens), there were a heck of…
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Book review: The Wandering Nature of Us Girls
by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2022) “Those girls are making a scene,” writes Frankie McMillan in ‘The movie of your life’ and oh she sure is. Fifty seven scenes in five sections. Are these scenes poetry, are they prose, are they prose poetry, flash fiction? The lines between these categories are blurry at best anyway…