This month Luckless (the musical project of Ivy Rossiter) and Nadia Reid (the musical project of Nadia Reid) head out on the road in a station-wagon, taking their respective New Zealand Gothic Rock and New Folk musics from one end of the country to the other, playing at least sixteen shows, maybe more.
Watch a short documentary about legendary visual artist and musician Mingering Mike.
Remember the one about Ernest Hemmingway’s six-word short story, For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn? Recently writer, photographer, and art historian Teju Cole used Twitter to write seven short stories about unmanned military drones. Each story was in one tweet. They’re quite moving. When I hear stuff like this, it makes me want to immediately run [...]
If you were waiting for someone to come along and explain Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation to you, you could do much worse than this video from PBS’s The Idea Channel. Baurillard’s original text carried many examples of the phenomenon that he outlined, but since the book was published thirty years ago, one example has emerged [...]
November is National Novel Writing Month. I have no idea which nation that title refers to, but it doesn’t really matter, since anyone from any country can take part. National Novel Writing Month, which goes by the unwieldy shorthand “NaNoWriMo” is basically an effort to get amateurs writing novels. And they have a neat little website [...]
Kiwi author Michael Morrissey is releasing his first full-length novel two weeks from today. It’s called Tropic of Skorpeo, and judging by that cover to the left there, it looks like super camp sci-fi (which is the best kind of sci-fi.) You can download a free sample of the novel here. Tropic of Skorpeo is a departure [...]
Did you know that it was a piece of science geekery led to the European discovery of Aotearoa? Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Pacific was partially for the purpose of travelling to Tahiti, to observe the planet venus crossing the sun from the southern hemisphere, because that would somehow help the people at the [...]
…In this bizarre webcomic that looks like it was drawn with a ballpoint pen. It’s the near future, Watch The Throne 3 is set to be released. Blue Ivy is a creepily erudite malevolent toddler. And Jay-Z, Kanye, and Beyonce are the heads of a shadowy organisation who refer to themselves as the “council of seers,” [...]
Edited by Bruce Russell (of The Dead C), in association with Richard Francis and the Audio Foundation, Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound In New Zealand is a wide frame survey of the history of other/different and unpopular music (and music culture in New Zealand.
IO9 has a fantastic article on the legal dos and dont’s of fanfiction. Now, while I realise that fanfiction is the domain of the sorts of people who also maintain the Harry Potter Wikipedia page, the subject has a lot of implications in other art – It has implications for any artist whose art references [...]
Vanguard Red is frequently putting out appeals to writers, so we must appeal to a few writers – i.e there must be a few aspiring writers reading this. If you’re want to get into writing, why not give this short story competition a go? It’s pretty simple – you just have to be a New [...]
Remember a few years ago, people used to argue that Paris Hilton must be a secret genius to have infiltrated every facet of media in the way that she did, but then she turned 30, and everyone forgot about her? Those sorts of arguments are kinda inevitable - we just don’t like the idea that a woman [...]
Using law-enforcement identikit software, artist Brian Joseph Davis recreates book characters. He posts them to his Tumblr blog, along with the descriptive passages that the images are based on. You can check out the rest of them by following that link there. And I suggest you do. The images have an uncanny quality that’s absolutely captivating. [...]
One of the most beloved New Zealanders has passed away – author Margaret Mahy died yesterday at the age of 76. The author of over 120 books, Mahy was prolific to the end. Just in the last week, her family had received copies of her yet-to-be-released book The Man from the Land of Fandango. To the [...]
My reaction to bad art has always been one of tolerance – after all, it doesn’t erase the good art, does it. I.e. the Star Wars prequels didn’t erase the original Star Wars from history, all the Twilight in the world can’t make us forget a century of modern vampire literature. However Fifty Shades Of [...]
A celebration of writing and reading.
Word.