To be honest, I’m not sure if I can write anything new about Jodi Picoult. She is to readers what leftover pizza for breakfast is to kids. We’ve grown up with her books on the coffee table or in our best friend Stacy’s Roxy backpack. And aside from that gratuitous movie adaptation of My Sister’s Keeper, anything with her scent on it has usually been a bet well-hedged. House Rules doesn’t break the mould. It’s the story of Jacob Hunt, an eighteen year old with Asperger’s Syndrome and an obsession with forensics. His mother Emma is a struggling advice columnist who rolls with the many punches of Jacob’s Asperger’s induced eccentricities—think colour-themed days, frequent meltdowns, and hypersensitivity. His younger brother Theo is a social outcast by association and starts to break into homely looking houses to feed his need for normalcy. When Jacob’s social skills tutor Jess turns up dead, his AS incriminates him more than his DNA evidence, and Emma hires rookie lawyer Oliver as his counsel. A warning: raise not your eyebrows that Jacob exhibits every symptom around—Picoult can’t sell the plot unless he manifests bad. As far as character originality goes, leave your seatbelt unbuckled; Jacob’s a doozy, but the staples (long-suffering sibling, devoted mother, and authority figure with a heart of gold) are reincarnated as the latest Picoult characters. Familiarly absorbing at the start, House Rules drags towards the end and only an author as successful as Picoult could get away with a self-indulgent 532 pages—not to mention that the final resolution comes as a finger-snap over the last four pages. To finish, I’ll leave y’all with a quote from Florence + the Machine: “Who is the lamb and who is the knife?” In Jacob’s case, that one will keep you up all night.

Sharpie Crows
Golf Course / Mass Grave EP
(Mole Music)

Sharpie Crows’ last release, Greed, cemented itself as one of the best New Zealand releases of last year exceedingly quickly; its hyperpolitical noise balladry ringing true with many of those dissatisfied with either one Mr. Key, the lack of visceral, angry music in Wellington, or both. Then, of course, they upped and left to Melbourne, leaving us pretty much high and dry—a pretty good move really, since their brand of rhythmic, grooving, sparse noise-rock is much more in tune with the likes of Bad Seeds children like HTRK than the poppier focus of Flying Nun offshoots in New Zealand.

And now we have Mass Grave, the new EP. Once again produced by band member Jackson Hobbs, the quality of the work here is immediately apparent. Sharpie Crows have a bizarre knack for self-recording to a level well above anyone else operating on the same budget. It’s not gloss, not by any stretch, but it is b.r.u.t.a.l.

The music itself switches down a gear from the unrestrained fury of Greed; opener ‘Communist Girls’ rides by on a two simple haunted house keyboard chords, the same tone carrying over into the ‘Fifteen Golden balls’ duo. It’s important to note, I think, that this EP probably has the best flow of any piece of work I’ve listened to this year—keyboards from ‘Communist Girls’ overlap into ‘Fiftteen Golden Balls’, which in turn segues neatly into the final two tracks on the EP—a credit to both their songwriting and their production skills.

The two parts of ‘Fifteen Golden Balls’ are two affecting sides to the same coin: Part 1 reprises the trailer trash guitar shreds of ‘Landlords’ from Greed, driving a 4/4 nail home. Part 2, however, sprawls much more; at almost half the speed of its first part, Sam Bradford’s vocal multitracking haunts much more than their terror-noise assaults of past, and the horn-filled exiting coda, equal parts melodic and apocalyptic, is a surprising but excellent turn for the band. Leading out the EP are ‘Country Music’ and ‘Hunterville Tire Spikes’, both employing the best of their effects—the former’s stuttering machine-gun pedal bursts jar the listener out of the childish keyboard melody, ‘Hunterville Tire Spikes’’ slow, echoing build is easily the EP’s highlight, however. Bradford’s yelling punctuates the tale of Hunterville’s redneck Tartarus over some deathly, pallid pacing: it’s a world of pain laid out in 5 minutes of unrequited angst and squalor.

Following on from this, is Golf Course. Effectively a b-sides EP, it comes free with Mass Grave, and showcases a weird, fun side of Sharpie Crows. There are live smash hits, like ‘Bank’ and the formidable ‘Sheepskin’, alongside a couple of other, rougher, less subtle tracks than those on the main EP. The real surprise here is ‘Heybro vs Keybro’, a nearly six-minute banger redux of Greed epic ‘Hebrew vs Key’. It gets grating in parts, with a solid section of the middle taken up with an annoying refrain of ‘Racheeeeel, Racheeeel’, but still, it’s a Sharpie Crows banger.

All in all, this EP marks a turning point for Sharpie Crows, it seems: Josh Jenkins is no longer a part of the band, and their future is up in the air. However, even if there is no more Sharpie Crows material in the near future, this is all you need to tide you over, it’s hateful, for sure, but compellingly so. To quote their press release: “You know when you hear it, and you don’t hear it often, because most bands can’t do it. It’s staring into the void, and then pissing into the void.” That’s pretty much them.

Buy it.

Mass Grave: 4/5

Golf Course: 3/5

Distraction Camp advertises itself as being something entirely unlike what Wellington theatre has seen recently. This might be a slight over-statement, but there is very much a sense of difference, of stepping outside of the norm that hangs over the luxurious 90 minute running time.

It takes Jean Genet’s The Balcony as a provocation and text—but stops short of being any kind of direct “production” or “performance” of that text. It is set in a “house of illusions” in Christchurch (or maybe Wellington) 2009, where men come to reenact perverse images of control. One dresses as a bishop and drips hot wax on a sinning young girl. One is a judge attended to by a gimp on stilts passing judgement on a petty thief. One is a Nazi Camp Commandant. With all this recreation and reenactment, questions of veracity, truth and role hang heavily (along with a chandelier) over Distraction Camp.

The performances range from being very good to great. Peter Falkenberg’s direction and Chris Reddington’s design are both sumptuous and controlled, showing a very fine eye has been put towards the images, the plateux of the show. There is a real joy to be taken in the looking at of Distraction Camp. The show is very clearly aware of this and plays very much with the audience’s complicity in the voyeuristic act.

Distraction Camp is so sure of its images that it sometimes hangs on to them a bit too long. The biggest fault you can find with this show is that it just lets itself take a bit too much time. The opening wordless introduction sequence is a beautiful spectacle, and its shape and development work very well up to a point but very quickly it starts going just too long. This is a show that rides a line between being abstract and what some may see as self-indulgent. On which side of that line it falls is up to the individual audience member.

Distraction Camp
Directed by Peter Falkenberg
Performed by Greta Bond, Ryan Reynolds, Coralie Winn, Simon Troon, Marian Mc Curdy, Liz Boldt, George Parker, Emma Johnston, Chris Reddington, Nicole Reddington and Sophie Lee
At BATS, 9pm, 31 August—11 September 2010
book@bats.co.nz or (04) 802 4175

Over the Weather and Under the Moon

By Francesca Brooks

On the fifty-second day of her heart-stopping crush on a girl called Elizabeth, Nora woke up and begged the universe for a spontaneous medical condition that wouldn’t quite kill her, but would give her a justifiable excuse to stay in bed and wallow. At least for a couple more hours.

She closed her eyes and, as always, replayed everything she knew about Elizabeth. Nora remembered things about Elizabeth differently to how she remembered everything else. With Elizabeth, she could actually recall the sensations of things happening for the first time, in that way when you know something really happened, instead of just the second- or third-hand experience of remembering remembering it later. She thought about the day Elizabeth dropped her pen and picked it up using only her pinky and ring finger. She thought about Elizabeth’s emerald-coloured cardigan. She thought about the way Elizabeth asked questions in class, questions that would be exasperating from anyone else, but were somehow thought-provoking and even necessary when uttered by Elizabeth, with her brow furrowed adorably in uncertainty and her tinkling laugh of self-deprecation when her queries were resolved.

A knock sounded on her closed door. “Nora? Are you getting up?”

This was why she shouldn’t have lived with people of her major. She sighed. “I’m coming.” She pulled her blankets around her and promised herself that she’d climb out in twenty seconds. Thirty. And then she would get up. Four hundred seconds later, she emerged from her cocoon and went to brush her teeth. An annoyingly perky face appeared at the bathroom door.

“Oh, good, you’re coming. We have fifteen minutes. Did you want some toast?”

“That’s okay, thanks. I’m not really hungry.”

Her friend smiled sympathetically. “Are you a bit under the weather? You’ve been sleeping so much lately. Are you getting sick?”

“I’m fine. Great. Over the moon. Just give me a sec.” She closed the door.

Nora and Elizabeth had shared exactly thirty words over three exchanges. Once, early on, during the second week of her attendance-improving crush, Nora had purposely sat directly behind Elizabeth, so she could stare at her while pretending to concentrate. Elizabeth had turned around to pass Nora the stack of handouts for that day and Nora had tried her hardest to appear casual as she said “thank you,” her pulse flickering as the fingers of her left hand slid past those of the pretty girl’s right. Elizabeth had smiled at her and quickly turned around without a word.

Fifteen days later, Nora had temporarily zoned out while wondering how tall Elizabeth was, and missed her teacher’s homework instructions. She’d asked the boy next to her, “Wait, what did he say we had to do?” but it was Elizabeth who’d turned around from her seat in front of Nora. After realising that Nora hadn’t been talking to her, she’d smiled and still answered, “Just read all of chapter six and do the topic questions,” her voice sounding even sweeter in its whisper. Nora had prayed that she would remember the facts of importance later instead of just the layout of Elizabeth’s freckles like a constellation across her cheeks.

And finally, on the thirty-ninth day of Nora’s thought-ruling crush on Elizabeth, something remarkable had happened. Nora had arrived early and garnered what she considered to be an optimal seating situation for a three-hour class: in the back third the lecture hall, at the edge of the row, with a free seat on either side of her, giving her plenty of room to stretch her legs and arrange her books while still allowing for a swift departure. She’d stopped lingering after class in hopes of talking to Elizabeth. The self-loathing she always felt from being too overcome to say anything was destroying her, so she’d resigned herself to admiring from afar. Her flatmates usually sat together with their other nerdy friends. Nora preferred to sit alone, flitting between taking notes and daydreaming about Elizabeth’s eyelashes.

The class had just started when Elizabeth had rushed in, her messenger bag bouncing against her hip as she dashed up the stairs to the first available aisle seat she could find. Which was next to Nora.

Elizabeth sat down without hesitation or doubt. As if it was her automatic place. As if they were really friends, instead of just watcher and watchee. As she unpacked her books, she turned to Nora and asked, “Did I miss anything?”

A million responses ran through Nora’s head, from witty to serious to just plain creepy. She chose the most obvious. “No, he just started.” She knew she wouldn’t remember a thing from the next three hours except the moment when her elbow brushed against Elizabeth’s.
———-
On the fifty-third day of her stomach-lurching crush on a girl called Elizabeth, Nora woke up with butterflies, slammed her alarm clock off, and tried desperately to get back to the dream she’d been snatched from. She’d been somewhere snowy, with a red jumper and frozen red hands to match. Elizabeth had been there, in a white jumper, grinning at Nora, her white teeth gleaming like the snowflakes that fell around her.

After twenty minutes of failure to fall back asleep, Nora got up and went to the kitchen, but she was too full of longing to have any appetite. So she went and had a shower instead, slipping on her way out and stubbing her toe. It hurt like heartache.

She left the house thinking that if her life were a movie, it would currently be raining. Hard. The kind of sudden downpour that only happens once a year in real life and every couple of days in fiction, and always at really dramatic moments in the characters’ lives, where it perfectly matches the epic swell of their anguish.

But instead, it was sunny, and the sunshine warmed her face and neck and forearms, and Nora couldn’t help but smile. Maybe this crush didn’t have to make her so sad all the time. She hadn’t intended for it to get like this. Originally, it had started as merely an observation, and then a reason to show up every day. She thought that if she kept it in check, not quite nursing it but not killing it off, it would be something nice to enjoy as part of her daily existence; just something to feel. She hadn’t counted on turning her back for a few seconds and having it grow exponentially and out of control, like a weed, taking over the entire garden of her mind until there was no soil left for other, wanted plants.

Elizabeth was already there when Nora arrived. She was wearing her emerald-coloured cardigan. Nora looked away and tried her hardest to think about something else.

They had slept together once. That is, they had napped briefly at the same time during an intensely dull early-morning statistics lecture, which isn’t quite the same thing. Though Elizabeth had smiled guiltily at her as they’d both stretched afterwards, and Nora had felt like her heart would explode.

After her classes had finished, Nora decided to walk home. She tried to think of the last time she’d felt like herself. Or, at least, the old version of herself, who could actually concentrate on things for more than a minute without her mind wandering to a girl. As she meandered through the city, her thoughts were entirely consumed with Elizabeth. Nora hated herself for being so superficial and ridiculous. Why did she even like her so much? They’d exchanged all of thirty words. She didn’t really know anything about Elizabeth beyond the fact that she had a tiny birthmark on her neck. She just liked her because she was gorgeous. And smart, and sweet. Fascinating and unguarded. Luminous like the sun. What other reasons were there?

Nora realised that she was sick of feeling so simultaneously empty and full all the time, bursting at the seams with emotion but having nothing real inside her.

As she approached an intersection to cross the road, deep in self-reflection, she came across a woman selling balloons. She had a zoo’s worth of balloon animals perched on her stand and a cluster of helium balloons tied around her wrist, shimmering in the late-afternoon sun. One of them was the same green as Elizabeth’s cardigan, and Nora’s eyes were instinctively drawn to it before she was even aware of her staring.

“Would you like one?” The woman’s voice startled Nora out of her trance.

“What? Oh. No, that’s okay.”

The balloon woman smiled widely, causing her pink inflatable hat to squeak. “Take one. For free. I think you need one. You look a little under the weather.”

Nora laughed self-consciously. “No, I’m fine. I’m over the moon, in fact.” She took the string of the balloon that the woman held out to her. It was the green balloon. “Thank you so much.” She slipped the balloon around her wrist, smiled gratefully at the woman, and crossed the street.
———-
On the fifty-fourth day of her misery-inducing crush on a girl called Elizabeth, Nora woke at the same time as the sun, the navy blue sky blending into pink like tie-dye through her curtainless windows. The first thing Nora saw was the green balloon, a bulbous shadow hovering gently against her ceiling, not quite moving or staying still. She stared at it for a long time, watching it drift slowly across the back wall. It was nice having the green balloon in her room. She could pretend it was Elizabeth’s green cardigan. She could pretend she had a piece of her here.

Nora sat up and pushed her window open, feeling the cold, dewy air rush in and suck the balloon towards it. She grabbed its shiny synthetic string just in time, winding it taut around her index finger. Maybe she didn’t want the balloon here as a constant reminder. She thought about popping it. It wasn’t Elizabeth, after all, or Elizabeth’s cardigan. It was just buoyant gas trapped in latex, empty and full at the same time.

For reasons she would later not entirely be able to understand, she leaned over the side of her bed and fished a black marker pen out of her bag. Being careful not to burst the balloon, she wrote four short words on its squeaky surface.

I AM OVER YOU.

Seeing those ten letters on the balloon stirred Nora in a way she hadn’t expected. They weren’t true, of course. But one day they would be. They marked a time somewhere in Nora’s future where she’d be able to think about other things, and when she’d care about someone who knew it, and when she’d finally feel like herself again. She took a deep, overwhelmed breath and knew what she had to do.

Nora knelt on her bed in front of the open window and pushed the balloon out the window, letting the string unravel. She clutched the last inch of it between two fingers, and then she let it go.

The balloon floated away, emerald green against the pink sky, carried high by the wind until Nora couldn’t see it anymore, and then it climbed higher still, up, until it hovered, carrying all of Nora’s aching with it, holding it safe and far away from her, trapped somewhere between the clouds and the heavens, over the weather and under the moon.

Edgar Wright has made a name for himself with his incredibly pop culture-savvy output, whether this be his BBC TV show Spaced or his knack for simultaneous genre parody/homage in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. His most recent film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is pop-culture porn. A kinetic, colourful, cluttered assault on the senses that references video games, music, TV and other films—I freaking loved it.

Of course, I am by no means unbiased on the matter. As a child of the nineties and noughties I am predisposed to squeals of glee whenever Zelda, Seinfeld or Dragonball Z is referenced. Nostalgia aside, however, this film certainly stands in its own right.

Based on a Canadian cult comic book series, Scott Pilgrim stars a reliable (if typecast) Michael Cera as the eponymous lead. He falls in love with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but to secure his place in her life he must defeat her seven evil exes lead by the repulsive Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman). While both leads are solid, the scenes are consistently stolen by various members of its huge supporting cast. Of note are Kieran Culkin as Scott’s gay roommate, Anna Kendrick as his sister, Ellen Wong as his adorable but scorned ex-girlfriend, and Schwartzman, Brandon Routh and Chris Evans shine as members of the league of evil exes. Evans’ cocky film star Lucas Lee is the funniest thing in a very funny film.

With all the things the film has going for it, it adds up to a bit too much. Wright keeps the volume turned up to 10 for the whole film, leaving no space to breathe. It is almost as if someone made an entire film out of the intertextual and cinematographic gimmicks that made his previous two films such joys (in much smaller quantities). The film could have probably benefited from having a few superfluous characters or plot points cut, and some of the more gimmicky aspects limited to just the battle scenes.

Other than that, the film was a delight and will feature in many of the ‘best of the year’ lists compiled by my fellow pop-culture nerds.

Shipwrecked! has a full title and that full title is Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself). Which, rather helpfully, is quite self-explaining. This show presents itself as Louis De Rougemont (Nick Blake) recounting to a paying audience the (based-on-a-true-)story of how in his late teens he was shipwrecked in the Pacific and the numerous adventures that followed. Louis is ably assisted by two local players (Darlene Mohekey and Jackson Coe, former editor of these very theatre pages).

As much as this is a play about a formerly-shipwrecked man recounting his tale, it is a play about story-telling, about how we connect with other humans and the desperate need to be a somebody. It is also about riding sea turtles as if they were horses.

The spare and sparse design by Andrew Foster is a masterstroke and is lit entirely by desk-lamps hanging from the ceiling controlled with on-stage switches by the cast. Gareth Farr’s music (also performed by the cast) is another total triumph.

The greatest joy to be had in Shipwrecked! is not in its great performances or emotional intimacy but in just how properly funny it is. It is hilarious. Like, very hilarious. It is, after all, an entertainment.

Shipwrecked!
Written by Donald Margulies
Directed by Peter Hambleton
Performed by Nick Blake, Darlene Mohekey and Jackson Coe
In Circa 2, 28 August—25 September
www.circa.co.nz

Tommy Ill
Tommy Ill
(Loop Recordings)

Full of catchy choruses, early nineties feel-good beats and soul samples, this debut full-length from Wellington rapper/producer Tommy Ill lives up to the hype created by his first few EPs and maniacal live show. A so-called “indie-rapper”, he inverts the usual rapper braggadocio, as others have done before, without doing away with it completely. He’s serious about his work—this is a true lover of hip hop having fun and seriously enjoying it.

Most of his rhymes are hilarious and self-deprecating. ‘Robot’ reminds me of someone like Das Racist; it’s an awesome song about his little robo-buddy who’s “gonna be bigger than big” apparently. He takes pot shots at scenesters—something we all love—on ‘Winning’(see also: LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Losing My Edge’): “Listening to Best Coast just to stay relevant. Listening to Beach House just to stay relevant. Listening to Tommy Ill just for the hell of it.” Some of it could be old Souls of Mischief material and other songs nod to A Tribe Called Quest’s energetic brand of jazz-sampling and their use of acoustic instruments. Much of it grabs 60s R&B hooks and runs with it. These songs are built to please a crowd; ‘Come Home Mr Ill’ is an instantly likable pop-rap song with chart potential.

The production is lush but clean-sounding—lo-fi but all the better for it. Obvious work has gone into these ten songs, with assistance from the boys from Crackhouse 5. Hip hop has had a bit of a mixed history here in New Zealand but Mr Ill’s tunes don’t suffer from the corniness and over-earnestness that some local stuff contains. His sound is accessible, and hopefully he’ll reach more ears with this release, but he’s definitely more Tourettes than Savage.

The sunny quality of the music should tide us over till summer. But not everything here is a party banger. Closer ‘Matchsticks’ is emo-rap at its best and a classic break-up song: “She stole my heart and all she left was nerds”, goes the mantra. It’s a highlight from this excellent little album.

3.5/5

This week at BATS theatre a play by the name of DOORS. WALLS. AND ALSO SILENCE. is being performed. It’s supposed to be quite good. To find out more we sent Salient contributor Dther Uean to interview the writer/director of the play Uther Dean.

DU: Play?

UD: Yes?

DU: You play?

UD: Me play?

DU: Yes. About?

UD: Life and stuff, I guess. We devised it then I wrote it so basically its about the neuroses of about 9 local theatre makers. It also has jokes and swearing and fighting and a man pretending to be a cat.

DU: Long?

UD: 90 minutes or so. But we’ve been working on it for about five months so yeah, long for some.

DU: Boring?

UD: No. It even has a twist and everything.

DU: Twist?

UD: You’ll have to wait and see.

DU: Story?

UD: Well, basically, it’s about these two girls who live together, Emma and Lydia. They don’t really get on. Then, suddenly, a liquid that seems awfully like blood starts seeping through their walls which starts them both on thrilling and exciting voyages of discovery.

DU: Lesbians?

UD: No.

DU: Why not?

UD: Because no.

DU: What it look like?

UD: It looks like a play. With a set and lights and stuff and projections. It’s kinda like from the future. We have these six doors that we build all the scenery out of. Things like elevators and baths. It’s pretty cool.

DU: Why?

UD: Why what?

DU: Why go?

UD: Why should you go? Why? Well, you should come because for $18 ($13 concession) you get 90 minutes of theatre. Good theatre. Theatre with people being punched and people swearing and making phone calls and talking about Karori and sitting upside down and waving their arms to the one decent song on Editors’ latest album and Ju who designs Salient designed the graphics so you should come for those, they’re pretty cool. It is has a bit where someone kicks down a door and someone tells someone a story which is really funny and someone eats Weetbix. It has everything you could possibly want.

DU: Kay.

UD: Thanks.

DU: Where?

UD: It’s at BATS theatre, which is number 1 Kent Terrace. It is on from the 2nd to the 11th of September (with no performances on Sunday or Monday) at 6.30pm. Tickets are $18 or $13 and you book them by calling book@bats.co.nz or calling (04) 802 4175.

VBC top 7

1. No Age—Glitter
2. Die! Die! Die!—Wasted Lands
3. Twin Shadow—Slow
4. T54—Julie K
5. Street Chant—Yara Aba
6. Veronica Falls—Beachy Head
7. The Body Lyre—Pastiche

VBC Presents:

JOE BLOSSOM with special guests Full Fucking Moon and Luck.

Wednesday, 8th September, San Fransisco Bath House.

Earnest but playful at the keys, Blossom’s infectiously catchy melodies are charmingly reminiscent of indie pop-stars Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or The Decemberists. Live with his band The National Average, Blossom puts on a tight, delightful and at times theatrical set. His last set in Wellington before embarking on an international adventure to the USA for a few months, this is a show not to be missed!

Gaunt avant-garde noisists Full Fucking Moon entrance with layer upon layers of haunting reverb, generally laying waste to their surroundings – epic to behold. Luck is Luc. Luc is from Ladybird. Like in Ladybird, Luc plays lilting lovely indie pop. As Luck.

Free entry, drinks specials! $3.50 Macs handles, $8 jugs, $4 tequila shots, $4 bubbles! Holy shit you better get there.

Barb is one of the most utterly predictable album releases of the year. That is to say, who took a look at the lineup of this New Zealand super-group and didn’t think this was a great idea? Barb consists of straight-up NZ indie pop royalty: Liam Finn, Eliza-Jane Barnes, Connan Mockasin, Lawrence Arabia and Seamus Ebbs. Thankfully, their debut outing is not a boring, drawn-out jam session of bustling egos, but a charming collection of swoon-worthy tunes. Barb sounds like nothing less than a well-matched group effort, with each musician’s idiosyncrasies shining through.

There are pop hooks a-plenty tucked neatly into this satisfying little gem. From the opening doe-eyed ‘Leo’, right through to the dreamy ‘Looking Through Barb’s Eyes’, Barb is unrelenting in its catchy, knee-weakening choruses. It’s hard to pick a highlight because it’s so diverse and it’s all so damn good.

‘Not a Bird’ starts with a silly, childish chanting verse before descending into a complex, intensely melodic and completely absorbing chorus. Connan’s sweet, child-like coo stands out as being particularly well-suited to this song and adds to the innocence suggested in the title. Lyrically, it veers from being cutely oddball (“I am not a bird at all”) to cutely beautiful (“I will draw you pictures of all the places we will visit when we’re old”).

‘Time to Contemplate’ gives you a break to do just that as it builds tragically with heartbreaking keys and a woeful Finn crooning about lost love. While one could easily get caught up in the melancholy at this point, the weird quirk of ‘Beatman’ will swiftly pull you out of that funk.

Barb could have easily turned into a handful of highly capable musicians competing against each other or an exercise in self-indulgence, however we are given the exact opposite. They’ve taken into account each others’ individual sounds and channelled it into one lush project. They’ve also maintained the excitement and fun of such a collaborative project, making this one a keeper.

4/5

What the fuck was the jury at Cannes thinking this year? Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is one of the few films awarded the Palm D’or that should never have been considered for it. The film is a sprawling mess, stretching what little narrative it has across disconnected events in different time periods, resulting in a bloated film. Uncle Boonmee is one of those films that begs academics and critics to ascribe meaning to it. The film’s desperation to be more than the sum of its sequences is ultimately its undoing. The result is a long, boring movie.

The story (at least what I understood it to be) is about Uncle Boonmee, an old man who is dying of cancer, and it consists of tedious scenes of him talking to his family about death. These scenes are intercut with a variety of some of the most random sequences ever assembled on film; a yeti creature that lives in a forest with red LEDs for eyes; a princess getting raped by a fish; the yeti creature being captured by a group of freedom fighters; and a coda in which a secondary character has become a monk.

The film also fails technically. The cinematography has a lot of compositions that are framed oddly, cutting off characters heads. The long takes favoured by the director highlight the oddness of these compositions. It would be nice to believe this style of cinematography had an intended effect other than highlighting the filmmaker’s lack of ability, but no self-respecting director would allow images like this to permeate their work.

The only thing the film can be commended on is the strange, foreboding atmosphere created by the yeti in the forest /fish rape sequence. These sequences worked on an instinctual level, and I found myself responding to them strongly. But they were mere moments that worked in a monumental mess of a movie. It still amazes me that this film even managed get into Cannes, let alone win the coveted Palm D’or.

Serial killer Ted Bundy just did not get why people were so concerned about his crimes. He’s quoted as saying, while on death row, that he didn’t think his victims would be missed because, “after all, there are so many people”.

I’m not going to go into the plot, but the “so many people” idea crops up a number of times in DOORS. WALLS. AND ALSO SILENCE. In one scene a character talks about taking the wrong bus and winding up in an area of town populated by a suburban mass of humanity from which he is totally disconnected. When we are surrounded by people, we can feel the most alone. Thor Heyerdahl was asked if the loneliness got to him when he was in the middle of the ocean on the Kon-Tiki. He replied it was nothing compared to the loneliness he felt walking around Wellington. And Wellington is where we are for this, My Accomplice’s second devised show, following on from the decidely more upbeat Sometimes I Don’t Like Yellow, which played at BATS earlier this year.

Well, it’s Wellington and it’s not. What we have here is another Notwellington. It’s not the Notwellington of Eagle vs Shark, not the Notwellington of Stickmen, and not the Notwellington of Once Upon a Time in Aro Valley, but it has some similarities to the Notwellington of Death and the Dreamlife of Elephants, another BATS show in which some of the key players here were participants, and which gets a mention in the director’s notes. Like that show, we have inward-looking characters rubbing up against a world which is just too bright/efficient/anonymous/stressful for them, and in some way being swallowed by their environs.

The Notwellington here is peopled with people not helping people. Then again, most seem to be their own worst enemy. Kate Clarkin’s Emma is a stubborn mistranphrope who overdramatises her life in order to maintain power over her flatmate, the put-upon Lydia, played with heart and, eventually, hopelessness, by Hannah Banks. When help is offered, it is either false – early in the piece Owen Baxendale plays a type of Tony Robbins Jnr., imploring those gathered at the Newtown Community Centre to part with their cash in exchange for the promise of a better, brighter life – or the requests are denied.

As with Sometimes I Don’t Like Yellow, there is often an uneasy tension between humour and pathos. Some of the stand-alone gags are great – my favourite being the ‘Morepork man’ – and some of the heightened sequences within vignettes are a treat. However, jokes often feel like jokes, popping up out of nowhere to give us a chuckle. There is a physical sequence in a cafe scene which works well, offering something visually interesting and serving both mood and theme. There is also an extended sequence where one actor takes on the roles of all but one of the characters with whom he interacts. I enjoyed it a lot. But I wasn’t quite sure what it was doing there. I don’t know if we got any more information out of the exercise, and I question it being employed at such a pivotal moment plot-wise. Things get dark in the world of DOORS. WALLS. AND ALSO SILENCE., but aside from Emma and Lydia, none of the characters really seem to show much development.

Paul Waggott’s oderly, while engaging, is held at pretty much the same level the whole way through. Elle Wootton’s fitness freak Claire is effervescent in just the right, bland way, and believable in a situation which some audience members may struggle to give credence. Theo Taylor makes a swell work-a-day journo, and an absolutely smashing attention-seeking housecat. A note should also be made of Baxendale’s Biblio Cafe worker, who adds authenticity by going just the right distance over the top.

The bizarre story which gave Sometimes I Don’t Like Yellow its bones let the company roll around in the devising process and deliver a potpourri of memorable stage images, snappy gags and broadly-drawn incidental characters. All are present again here, but the darker, more grounded subject matter demands more cohesion. Yellow was a shaggy dog story, but DOORS feels shaggier. The show’s intriguing set (which seems to make the BATS space DEEPER, a feat in itself), subtle lighting and thoughtful costuming help, even though you are never sure what it is exactly that you’re watching. In his director’s notes, Uther Dean says DOORS. WALLS. AND ALSO SILENCE. is just one of the many shows which could have eventuated from the process and, though all the story strands are tied up, the whole feels as if it lacks a centre. But so do records. Records like White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground. And if you’re in the mood, that’s some spooky, rocking shit.

DOORS. WALLS. AND ALSO SILENCE.
devised by the company
dir. Uther Dean
perf. Hannah Banks, Owen Baxendale, Kate Clarkin, Theo Taylor, Paul Waggott and Eleanor Wootton

At BATS, 6.30pm, 2 – 11 September 2010 (No Sun/Mon)
$18/$13
book@bats.co.nz / (04) 802 4175

Katydid is a very, very good piece of theatre. I laughed and smiled and then got all teary-eyed (didn’t actually cry, but I don’t cry without extreme provocation. Or onions.). From the moment I entered the theatre to the simply fantastic audio work of Tane Upjohn-Beatson, to the unsettling lights (designed by Rachel Marlow) illuminating the gorgeous space (designed by Robin Kerr) I was ready for a night of quality and I wasn’t disappointed.

Lucy O’Brien has crafted a work here that is well on the way to being brilliant. I did leave with a few questions – not counting those I’m assuming I was supposed to have. In all honesty, my biggest gripe was in wanting the play to be longer. O’Brien has created characters of such intrigue, brought to life so well by the stellar cast, that I simply wanted to spend more time with them. There were such wonderful opportunities to really delve into the world in which the four existed that I felt were touched on, but never truly explored as much as I might have liked.

Charlotte Bradley’s direction is assured and her pacing was spot on for my taste (the only time I felt lags were in a couple of the transitions). The performances she has elicited from her cast are a joy to behold. Rachel More, Robert Tripe and Ralph McCubbin Howell all shine in their roles, toying with our emotions and confusing our loyalties throughout. Sophie Hambleton’s Katy is the role on which this play hinges – it is lucky then that Hambleton delivers a performance that made the back of my mind run through a list of superlatives throughout the show. I didn’t settle on one in the end – just make up a list of your own and you should be about right.

With such strong performances throughout the cast, and such great design across the board, Katydid is a show you shouldn’t miss. Seriously. You will leave with questions and things to ponder that will (if you’re anything like me) sit with you for days afterward.

Did Katydid do good?

Katydid did do good.

Very good.

–
Katydid
wri. Lucy O’Brien
dir. Charlotte Bradley
perf. Sophie Hambleton, Ralphen McCubbin-Howell, Robert Tripe and Rachel More

At BATS theatre, 7.30pm, 18 – 28 August 2010
book@bats.co.nz / (04) 802 4175

The December Brother has a lot of expectations to live up to. Not only is it “The Bain Play” that everyone has heard about but it is also the latest work from SEEyD theatre company.

SEEyD began in 2000 with a show, unsuprisingly, called SEEyD. From the very beginning they have been a company of profound and tremendous creativity and theatrical flair. Their stock in trade being the indepth and extremely balanced discussion and exploration of big issues. SEEyD was about genetic engineering, inSalt about the Māori land claims, Turbine was about wind power (and much better than that sounds written down). SEEyD, led by Tim Spite, are a power-house. A force to be reckoned with. If there was ever a theatre company that should make a work about that one horrible morning in Dunedin on the 20th of June 1994 it was them. It should have been great. It should have been amazing. Yet, I found myself underwhelmed.This is the problem with expectations, you see. The December Brother is, without doubt, a good play. A great play even. It’s just not SEEyD good.

Split very clearly into three acts, with each act being a self-contained show in and of itself, The December Brother’s structure is much more of an equation than an actual dramatic shape. The first act – a retelling of Spite’s father Tony Spite’s search for his real parents and the labyrinthian family tree that uncovered – plus the second act – a clinical and hyper-accurate re-enactment of both the prosecution and defense’s stories for the Bain killings – equal the third act – a totally fictional work that takes the previous two acts as a clear starting point. Telling the story of Rebecca (Nikki McDonnell), a vet who discovers that she was adopted. Her search to find her real parents throws her into the middle of the tangled legal case of Cain Fraser (Brad McCormick), a man convicted of murdering his parents. Though evidence that may have proven that his father was in fact the murderer was rejected on shaky grounds. 1 (Spite) + 2 (Bain) = 3 (Cain).

All three of the acts fair very differently and while it is an interesting way of structuring a piece – showing the audience your working, if you will – it doesn’t feel like a total success. The second act, the Bain act, the one everyone will be talking about, is by far and way the highlight of the world. It is a master class in tension and audience manipulation. The way it invokes, expresses and sustains incredibly complex emotions with such simplicity, efficiency and style confirms Spite’s place as a world-class director. The performances by Hadleigh Walker (as David) and Spite (as Robin) are breathtaking. Gil Eva Craig’s soundscape comes into its own in this act, with each tiny click and pop perfectly placed and timed. Jennifer Lal’s lights are an beautiful exercise in subtlety, isolating spaces in the group created set – a floor-plan of the Bain house. This second act is 20 minutes of heart-breaking theatrical perfection.

It is by their juxtaposition with the middle act that the other two falter a little. The opening act, written by Tony Spite, is clearly part of an ongoing exploration of the form of theatrical auto-biography by Tim (he directed Biography of My Skin and Lullaby Jock at Downstage in the previous year, both of which explore extremely similar ideas in extremely similar ways) and while he clearly has a flair for this particular form that does not stop if from feeling self-indulgent. I, personally, found it hard to care as much as he was asking us to.

The final act felt simply unfinished and rushed. All the right ideas are there, most of them in the right order. It really stumbles with where to pitch its comedy. The use of stereotypes – the gay lawyer for one, the broad South Island skank for another – doesn’t sit well within a work that asks its audience to question its assumptions about everything. There is a very fine full length work in this third act hoping to get out. I really hope that Spite and the rest of company revisit it and expand it into a fuller, more refined work at a later date.

SEEyD’s work always soars to its apex when Spite surrounds himself with people who are just committed, talented and mad as him. He works best when those around him can give his creativity a run for its money. While McCormick, McDonnell and Walker, are all very, very fine actors in their own right, they just aren’t the endlessly re-shape-able Tim Spite. SEEyD has in all their previous work, had a great sense of the ensemble, of the group, of a cluster of people chewing up the world and spitting out theatre, each cast and crew member and individual tooth in that theatre gob. What drags The December Brother down from being SEEyD great to just normal great is that that ensemble nature doesn’t seem to be there. Tim Spite is SEEyD but SEEyD should never just be Tim Spite which is the feeling you get walking away from The December Brother.

–
The December Brother
by SEEyD
wri. Emma Kinane, Brad McCormick, Nikki McDonnell, Tim Spite, Tony Spite and Hadleigh Walker
dir. Tim Spite
perf. Brad McCormick, Nikki McDonnell, Tim Spite and Hadleigh Walker

At Downstage, 12 August – 11 September 2010

Broken Social Scene
San Francisco Bath House 07/08/10

I spent $300 on seeing the Pixies play Christchurch, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Just kidding-the Pixies were awesome, thanks, and the Doolittle shirt’s pretty good, too. But I couldn’t help but feel just a little cheated when I saw a superior performance at good ol’ San Fran less than a week later-and for a sixth of the total cost of my mission south. In fact, Canadian indie outfit Broken Social Scene’s show on 7 August was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and though the CBS Canterbury Arena compares unfavourably with the intimacy of the Bath House, the thrill of the gig had more to do with the band’s charisma, their energy, and the audience’s evident elation at being present.

Even though I’m not enamoured of Broken Social Scene’s latest album Forgiveness Rock Record, it came to life when played-well, live. Opener ‘World Sick’ took on a new spaciousness when experienced in person; ‘Texico Bitches’ transformed into a vivacious, playful romp. The triumphant ‘Meet Me in the Basement’, the last track of the set, showcased the brass section, at least two members of which were Wellington musicians.

Naturally, though, it was old favourites such as ‘Fire Eyed Boy’ and ‘Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Half)’ that elicited the biggest response from the crowd. It was clear that most present were long-standing fans of the band, and frontman Kevin Drew-a personable chair of the fuid, frenetic assembly on stage-seemed to bask in their near-palpable adulation.

Fellow founding member Brendan Canning treated the audience to ‘Love is New’, from his 2008 solo album Something for All of Us, while current touring frontwoman Lisa Lobsinger ably flled the shoes of Leslie Feist and Emily Haines on tracks such as ‘7/4 (Shoreline)’ and ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ (yep: Wellington heard it, Auckland didn’t). Drew’s intimate solo rendition of ‘Lovers Spit’ sent girls reeling into the arms of their boyfriends and even (I have it on reliable authority) moved a couple of young men to tears, much to the derision of other young men present.

The band’s apparent delight in performing, coupled with their audience’s effervescent energy, made for a never-to-be-repeated gig, yet friends who saw them play San Fran in early 2008 maintain that they were just as good then. Broken Social Scene is best experienced live: make sure you catch them on their next trip down under. And buy the t-shirt, too-you’ll still get value for money.

Billed as “Bitte Orca’s hotter, younger sister”, this mini-album does feel like an accompaniment to Dirty Projectors’ brilliant album. Conceived and composed by Dave Longstreth in less than two weeks, it was first performed at an exclusive benefit in New York attended by the arty elite (David Byrne, St Vincent, Vampire Weekend, Battles, M.I.A…).

A year on it reaches a wider audience with this recording. Although on the surface the collaboration may seem unlikely, these two acts do share some common ground: an obsession with the natural world which is reflected in their wild voices and idiosyncratic way with melodies. And wow, do they sing. The project is a happy medium between Bitte Orca and Björk’s own all-vocal album Medúlla—acoustic instruments are kept to a bare minimum to make way for the vocal acrobatics which ensue, particularly of the three “Projectors” girls (Coffman, Deradoorian and Dekle).

It plays as a concept album about a day when singer Amber Coffman went walking on Mount Wittenberg in California and saw a pod of whales. It recreates “the moment Amber saw this whale, and the whale saw her”. The girls are employed mostly as accompaniment to the two main characters of the show: Björk as the ‘mother whale’ (of course) and Longstreth as ‘Amber’. Where the harmonies of the Projectors girls are astounding in sheer technical prowess, they can sound clinical. Björk’s primal voice is the perfect antidote/counterbalance to that: it’s a force of nature. Although this is essentially the Projectors’ album, the best moments are those where Björk features.

The stripped-down nature of the album gives it a directness in the vein of The Microphones. And it contains the same awe and humbleness in the face of nature. Perhaps it was the speedy process in which the songs were made, but they sound like the most instinctual and urgent set yet from Longstreth; Less knotty than Bitte Orca, but they retain that same skewed groove.

The denouement in closing song ‘All We Are’ is where the project reaches its pinnacle. Longstreth and Björk finally sing in unison, “We looked out across the long horizon/ We looked in each other’s eyes/ Through a moment we could glimpse an infinity/ And through an infinity we could see all in all is all we are” (Lyrics borrowed from Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’). It’s a powerful moment from a powerful album.

4/5

The Real Hot Bitches are nothing short of a phenomenon. Started only a few short years ago by a group of friends, the Bitches are a collective of “semi-professional” dancers. Their work always sweats pure energy and lycra. They don’t let a lack of technical dance skill or an active rejection of modern social public dress codes get in the way of having a good time.

After many small seasons at venues throughout Wellington, The Fierceness is the RHB hitting the proper big time. Downstage’s normally epic space is made to seem petite by the 30-strong cast being packed onto it. It is gratifying to see that something as rough, ready and Fringey as this making its way to one of the mainstream stages of Wellington. Especially when they sell out weeks in advance as they did with The Fierceness.

The Fierceness had everything you want from an RHB show, which boils basically down to semi-competent-yet-unrestrained-and-infectiously-unselfconscious dancing and many gratuitous costume changes. It was all there. The house was packed. The audience loved it.

And yet… Well, I just didn’t have nearly as good a time as I wanted or expected. The Fierceness works really hard under the guidance of Gabe McDonnell and Rosie Roberts to have a plot. We are paying witness to famed former world class semi-professional dancer Cynthia Sachet’s (Candy le Coque) auditions for her latest work. That work being The Fierceness. Time between extravagant dance numbers is spent meeting the auditionees and learning a little about their love lives. This attempt at story is far from wholly successful. It never really feels like anything other than filler as the offstage costume changes take place. It all ends up feeling just a bit too self-indulgent.

The Fierceness is, at points, the infamous party you aren’t invited to. Everyone having too much fun on stage to let you have a good time yourself. But not for long. While the story may leave something wanting, The Real Hot Bitches still rock.

The Real Hot Bitches in: The Fierceness
wri. Gabe McDonnell
dir. Gabe McDonnell and Rosie Roberts
dance dir. Emma Chinnock
perf. Bambi du Bois, Bonnie Lee, Candy le Coque, Cherry Ripe, CJ Lurtodanz, Coco la Chanelle, Cyndi Lamas-Arquette, Debrelle van Haler, Desaree Knightshade, Diamantina, Gem Wilder, Hellsta Murgatroyd, Je’mappelle Jeff, Lee-Roy Swayze, MaXine Hendrix, Megatron, Mercedes D’Silhouette, Mystique, Pearl Lusta, Pop Tart, Randi Knights, Rockit, Sasha Hot Sauce, Rex Carlisle, Tiffney Jan-Harket-Wahlberg-Wahlberg-Norris, Trixie Boom and Zontelle PomPom
At Downstage, 5 – 7 August 2010

The Burgundy Room is an underutilised space. Its small dimensions, low ceiling, underground location and twilight-style (think circadian, not vampiric, guys) lighting ensure even an audience of thirty will make the venue feel both intimate and well attended. Here there were probably around 80 people in attendance, making for a pretty optimal size of crowd, and rightly so, given that the night’s lineup made for a fine showcase of all-Wellington talent. One man + Gameboy act Old Grey Wolf kicked off proceedings with a hard-todislike set of dance beats and videogame glitch. He probably played a couple

songs too many (given the nature of his setup it’s pretty hard to differentiate most of the tracks), but his energy and enthusiasm was largely appreciated.

Up next were Glass Vaults, whose unhurried approach and delicate vocals immediately distinguished them from the dancier acts that made up the rest of the bill—TV DiSKO’s eclectic between set beats all but demanded headnoddery. Live, Glass Vaults more than match the command of tension and dynamics that marked out their recently released debut EP as a local release of the highest calibre. Richard Larsen’s achingly gorgeous voice was all the more compelling when experienced at close quarters, and drummer Rowan Pierce turned in a potent shift on the skins.

Complaints? It would be interesting to see them stretch everything out a little more, but this was neither the time nor the place, and after one last round of tasteful TV DiSKO disco it was 47 Diamantes’ turn to take command of the room. The effect was not dissimilar to a mass contraction of nerve stimulant; everyone danced in a convulsing frenzy, while synthist Kelvin Neal played massive drop after massive drop (and also mashed a keyboard with his beardface). Unleashing her trademark shriek, vocalist Gemma Syme swooped into the crowd and was soon thrashing about on the floor, catching the audience in two minds. Did we keep dancing, or get the hell out of the way? By the end of their set it didn’t really matter, as nothing was going to stop the duo from having their way with us. In the best way possible. Thanks guys.

The Go Solo Season at Toi Whakaari is an annual event in which the third-year acting students perform 20-minute-long solo works. As a woman sitting next to me put it, “Go Solo is usually the cheapest and best theatre in Wellington.”

Group A

Helen Grant—Basted. Grant’s solid, interesting performance of Daphne Day, has-been TV host and plastic surgery addict, doesn’t save Basted from the fact that it doesn’t really seem to develop its ideas beyond their surface meaning.

James Tito—Untitled. While there is something undoubtedly worthwhile in the content explored about troubled childhoods and the universal yearning for fame, Tito’s presentation—that of just a man, a mic and a guitar—quickly becomes wearisome and self-indulgent.

Simon Leary—The Election. An interesting ‘high concept’ (a high school head boy election framing a discussion of homophobia) and an assured performance from Leary mark this out as a work that would be rewarded by expansion into a longer form work.

Meg Alexander—Untitled. Alexander spends too much time judging her character, the bolshy bar hound Karen, to let the audience really connect with her on her own terms. Also, the interesting storytelling device of karaoke is underused.

Group B

Jamie Smith—Untitled. Smith’s highly impressive circus skills—he climbs across the freaking ceiling—fail to carry an uninspired and underdeveloped ‘post-apocalyptic wasteland’ setting and story.
Ivana Palezevic—Promena. Palezevic’s brave decision to perform the whole piece in her mother tongue of Serbian is rather undermined by a pedestrian plot (that is entirely spelt out in the programme blurb). However, there are smattered throughout it some breathtaking images.

Michael Leota—The In-Between Space. Leota’s dynamic use of Krump as performative device stands out although the work as a whole disappoints in its lack of development.

Jennifer Martin—Ivylution. A delightful and quirky performance is enhanced by a glowing (occasionally overly erratic) text which gets the audience to take joy in the pure power of imagination. Also, dinosaurs. Would be lovely to see again.

Group C

Chelsea Bognuda—She Said, I Made, Done It. The rather beautiful performances in this piece about aspiration and bullying struggle with a text that at points seems to over-complicate itself for no reason, alienating the audience from the story.

Richard Osborne—Dickie’s Meadow. This high-energy exploration of ideas of prejudice doesn’t really live up to its promise due to a too terse running length (eight minutes when I saw it) and a failure to really unpack its ideas.

Tola Newberry—Pohatu. Newberry’s juxtaposition of the personal (the mundanity of plastering) with the political (the public reaction to the recent “terror raids”) is highly effective in its understatement.

Tess Jamieson—Untitled. Jamieson is clearly a very talented comic performer but she spends too much time over-emphasising her point (the distorted relationship between dreams and ambition) when she could be exploring it.

Group D

Catherine Waller—The Creeps. With endlessly impressive vocal and physical dexterity, Waller channels an engrossingly disturbing cast of characters that inhabit what seems to be a nightmarish fun fair. Unforgettable. A highlight.

Robert Hartley—D.R.E.G.S. Hartley paints an entertaining and in-depth portrait of self-inflicted social awkwardness. His character, Eugene, is a triumph of both performance and writing. Hope to see it return. Another highlight.

Melissa Reeve—Camera Obscura. La Donna Bruno Meets the Light. An intriguing and perfectly pitched exploration of the politics of the pictorial representation of women. A jaw-dropping combo of style and substance. Completes a hat trick of highlights.

Bianca Seinafo—Untitled. A very accomplished look through ideas of addiction—the use of KFC as the addictive substance is a masterstroke. Let down by some ill-judged and slightly racist humour.

Group E

Moana Ete—I Love You… Toru, Wha! Beautiful singing and a top notch performance hold up a needlessly flimsy plot. Also, you should not learn more about the inner workings of a character from the programme blurb than from the work itself.

Philip Ward—Untitled. Ward tells interesting stories and has a real charm about him. His failure to really commit to his ‘What should I do with my Solo?’ concept, however, makes the whole thing seem lazy and unfinished.

Esmée Myers—Curiousity Killed the Kid. A well-shaped story dotted with a few marvellous comic set pieces—condoms as waterproof socks, for instance—distract from a lack of thematic development.

Jonathon Kenyon—Untitled. Kenyon’s perfectly pitched almost robotic clowning is entrancing and the only real mark that can be made against this piece is that when he finally speaks, it is not quite as interesting as you want it to be.

Go Solo 2010
dir. Sophie Roberts
in the SEEyD space at Te Whaea, 26 July – 7 August 2010

Poetry
Director: Lee Chang-dong

In the wake of the release of Peppermint Candy, the film’s director, Lee Chang-dong, came under fire for the ‘gendered’ approach to South Korean history that the film seemed to advocate. One prominent critic, Kim So-young, suggested it rendered the struggles of women in South Korean history “invisible”; indeed, the title of her essay boldly stated, ‘Do Not Include Me In Your Us’. It’s not odd, then, that Lee addresses that critique in his latest film, Poetry, a scathing attack on the exploitative and patriarchal ways of modern South Korean society, and essentially a direct response to Kim’s criticisms.

Poetry’s focus is squarely on our female protagonist, the kind-hearted and unappreciated grandmother Miji. The stroke sufferer she looks after sexually harasses her; her grandson is a disinterested, lazy shit; her daughter is too focused on her career to care about either Miji or the son she left behind. When Miji’s grandson and his friends are incriminated in a local girl’s suicide, their guilt unquestionable, she finds herself being cajoled by the boys’ rich fathers into coming up with five million won as a ‘settlement’ for the dead girl’s family. Miji’s meagre income is of no concern to them. She escapes from these pressures through a poetry class, searching for “poetic inspiration”, and slowly coming to terms with the world around her and the position it’s forced her into.

The film’s power hinges on Yoon Jeong-hee’s performance as Miji, and she delivers in stunning fashion. She perfectly encapsulates Miji’s apparent need to be everything to everyone, and it’s hard not feel a profound sadness for her as she reluctantly allows herself to be exploited by a society that couldn’t care less about her. Meanwhile, Lee’s direction is typically incredible, the striking stillness of his camera as poetic and evocative of the anxieties bubbling under Miji’s surface. The film suffers from Lee’s apparent struggle with making the revealing of life-shaking criminal activity seem realistic, but with Poetry and his previous film, Secret Sunshine, Lee’s ‘us’ is no longer gendered or restricted by age or infirmity—rather, it is all-encompassing, universal.

Paper Scissors Rock is a story of both sisterhood and what it is to be a daughter. Bex (Bonnie Soper), Sophie (Colleen Davis) and Penny (Yael Gezentsvey, who wrote it as well) are three sisters. The day after a shock announcement at their mother’s 50th birthday celebration effectively destroys the bedrock of their family unit, and the sisters are left in the house they grew up in to reminisce about both the previous night and the previous few years—during which they have all been separate.

Gezentsvey’s script has a strong dramatic shape to it. The themes and feelings she’s wishing to evoke are also very worthwhile. However, it often gets bogged down in needless cliche and leaves things a bit too open at the end for the story to be satisfying in and of itself. Paper Scissors Rock is, all things considered, a strong first work for Gezentsvey and one cannot help but hope she produces more refined work in the future. Her heart is really in the right place; she just needs to be a bit surer with the structure and form within which she is expressing herself.

The performances are across the board solid. Bonnie Soper’s uptight but not rigid elder sister Bex finds just the right niche between being sensible and being cold and distant. Gezentsvey’s Penny, pregnant and conflicted, is more than workable, though there are snatches of the usual problems associated with a writer performing their own work. She has written for her own voice so at points seems to be failing to really do anything—she hasn’t written a big enough challenge for herself. Colleen Davis stands out as wild child Sophie, bringing a real heart, soul and arc to a character who very easily could have grated and annoyed.

The direction by Dena Kennedy is clean and clear, though a mite more modulation of the rhythms of the piece would have stopped it noticeably falling into a distracting monotonous rhythm from time to time. The uncredited set is nice, if somewhat standard—two couches and a table—and the great scenographic provocation of hanging strips of wallpaper is disappointingly not utilised at all.

Paper Scissors Rock is a solid and strong first work, one that would be worth further development and a longer form (this production runs to 40 minutes).

Paper Scissors Rock
wri. Yael Gezentsvey
dir. Dena Marie Kennedy
perf. Yael Gezentsvey, Bonnie Soper and Colleen Davis
at BATS theatre (www.bats.co.nz), 6.30pm, 5 – 14 August 2010

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls
Author: Steve Hockensmith

Whoever said that you can’t judge a book by its cover clearly hasn’t read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. It’s all there in the title, and it even has a blood-spattered monster child on the front for the benefit of the less literate among us. The book’s blurb beats us to it by making the obligatory joke about Jane Austen rolling in her grave, but luckily that’s about as terrible as the jokes get.

Set four years prior to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we’re deprived of the characters that fleshed out the original novel and left with the Bennet family as they hesitantly set off on the path of monster-hunting, katana-wielding social ruin. The plot wastes no time, opening with a funeral where the reanimated flesh of a dead guy rises from his coffin to signal that all is not well in regency England. Forgoing the traditional ‘cup of tea’ approach to crisis management, Mr Bennet—previously a human metaphor for detached fathering—quite literally leaps into action, revealing himself to be a martial arts trained warrior, sworn to defending the living against the scourge of the undead.

According to his code of honour, the Bennet brood must also be trained in the deadly arts, prompting the arrival of Master Hawksworth, their (young, handsome) instructor who falls for Elizabeth’s skills with the sword. But he has competition. (Young, handsome) Dr Keckilpenny likes Lizzy “for her mind”, and attempts to woo her with his scientific prowess. The zombie apocalypse plot happens in between the awkward love triangle, so at least we know the author had his priorities straight. While clearly piggybacking off the success of its quirkier, more satirical sequel, one can’t help but accept the inevitable: zombies are here to stay, whether Jane Austen likes it or not.

It’s almost ironic that you’re reading this now, because Alan Wake is a game about writing. No, it’s not Shakespeare, but something more akin to Stephen King’s Secret Window, Secret Garden. Alan Wake is an author of a series of thriller novels. He’s actually pretty famous too. But at present he’s having a bit of writer’s block, and thus escapes to a picturesque village named Bright Falls. Over the course of his story, some pretty weird shit goes down. Alan wakes up in bizarre places, his wife goes missing, and there are these shadow demon dudes (also known as the Taken) who seem to want nothing more than to impale an axe into Alan’s face.

This is the game Remedy Entertainment, the developers behind Max Payne (another game named after its main character), have been working on for the last five years. So if you haven’t guessed it already, Alan Wake is basically a horror survival game like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. There’s also some television thrown in for good measure. The game is split into episodes and even features “Previously on Alan Wake” titles, and live-action shorts displayed on in-game televisions.

During the day as Alan you will be scoping out the town of Bright Falls, asking questions, bothering the local inhabitants, trying to find your wife and solve those freaky mysteries. You’ll come across manuscript pages, foretelling things that haven’t yet happened but will—typed by Alan’s own hand, though he doesn’t remember it. There’s also these coffee thermoses you can collect too, but they don’t seem to offer any sage advice.

During the night Alan will go into the forest armed with nothing but a torch, some batteries, and maybe a revolver. Shotguns, flare guns and other offensive materials can also be found along the way. So why does Alan need this much fire power? For those shadow demon dudes I mentioned earlier. Shine your torch at their shadowy body and BAM, shoot them in the face while they’re weakened.

So what else can you do in Alan Wake? Driving, running, climbing, dodging, more running and more shooting. It does get a tad repetitive, but the story’s enough of a driving force to get you to the end. It’s not extremely scary, but I must admit there were a few times I had to check my underwear.

Hey what’s this? I just found a mysterious letter left on my desk. Here, I’ll type it up for you:

I immediately closed Salient, knowing now what I must do. I stood up, and headed to the nearest video store. I spotted the Xbox 360 exclusive Alan Wake sitting nearby on the shelf and rushed it to the counter. For three to four nights I escaped and gunned down shadow demon dudes like there was no tomorrow. I went to bed confused, but satisfied, turned out the light and embraced the darkness.

Near the end of The Killer Inside Me, there’s a moment when psychotic lawman Lou Ford makes a glib observation regarding the characters surrounding him: “The gang’s all here—Howard Hendricks, the DA; Chester Conway, the villain; Hank Butterbean—don’t say anything, Hank, I haven’t given you any lines.” It’s a slight moment, but regardless of how you interpret the film’s final act, it acts as a gateway to many of the film’s themes. This is because it reveals The Killer Inside Me as not just a portrait of a violent, misanthropic lunatic in sheep’s clothing; in fact, it is as much a rumination on the nature of violence, the nature of fiction, and the nature of identity.

The film’s ostensible protagonist is Lou, a small-town deputy whom everyone knows as a stand-up guy—but as director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran peel away the layers of lies and deceptions that define Lou, we are given a glimpse into a black, sociopathic heart, one bereft of even basic human empathy. Lou’s moral compass isn’t so much skewed as it is stuck on a moral magnetic pole, going haywire; for him, violence is simply a natural method of expressing himself that he’s had to keep hidden for fear of transgressing.

As a character study of a man in name only, the film definitely succeeds—Casey Affleck gives an excellent portrayal of the deceptive, distant Ford, and the way he chews and dribbles out his dialogue suggests a blasé attitude that chills to the bone. But the film also examines the nature of what makes us what we are and what makes characters what they are; small hints like the above line, or Lou recalling his “laughing” at the ridiculousness of needing to kill people before resigning himself to it, call us to question Lou’s ease with the lies he lives in and the actions he’s compelled to perform. Winterbottom’s anti-auteur status means it’s difficult to tell whether he’s riffing on noir films or simply doing what’s stylistically expected, and other characters are often sidelined in order to develop Ford, but the end result is effective despite this—it’s a brutal, uncompromising tale of violence, the monster inside all men and women.

It took near on ten years for Aussie writer/director David Michod to make this film; a grueling process in which he meticulously edited and re-wrote the script until he didn’t feel it could be improved. Whether or not it could is up to the audience, but one cannot deny the power that lies in his debut—a dense, emotive crime film about the bonds of family and survival.

Animal Kingdom operates more as a family drama than it does as a crime thriller—there is still plenty of tension and bloodshed, but the film’s pacing is slower, favouring the Cody family’s relational dynamics and their gradual disintegration, over that of a plot-heavy narrative. Our narrator is 17-year-old Joshua “J” Cody (a solid performance from newcomer James Frecheville), who moves in with his family, a gang of criminals, after his mother passes. It’s a coming-of-age story at heart, as Joshua learns to navigate between his explosive family and their battle against the local police force.

The characters are works of skill; expertly written and realised through exquisite performances from a cast of Australian greats. They feel like real people and the film’s tension can be largely attributed to the unpredictability of its players. You won’t be sure who to trust—even Sgt Leckie (Guy Pearce, sporting the breakthrough moustache of the year), who acts as a guardian to Joshua, renders doubt to his true intentions throughout. The cast is uniformly superb, highlights being Ben Mendelsohn’s explosively unhinged Uncle “Pope” and Jacki Weaver’s mesmerising performance as the family matriarch; both charming and chilling (“You’ve done some bad things, sweetie”). Additionally, Animal Kingdom manages to balance its rich characterisation with immaculate production—feeling like the work of a seasoned director rather than a first-timer from across the ditch. It looks and feels fabulous, with its choices in shots, music (Air Supply’s ‘I’m All Out Of Love’ has never said so much) and lighting all feeling fully realised and polished.

Animal Kingdom emerges as a remarkably accomplished and affecting film, possibly one of the year’s best. Here’s to hoping Michod doesn’t keep us waiting a decade for his next.

A Town Called Panic
Director: Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar

Any kid of the 90s knows that when it came to Sunday afternoon television, the place to be was Kablaam!—V8 Supercars and Carters Gone Fishing couldn’t hold a candle to the wildly inconsistent animated sketch show. The only part of that show anyone really remembers, though, was Action League Now!, a series of stop-motion masterpieces about a group of action figures whose bizarre adventures were gallantly relayed to us by a booming narrator.

Their relation to A Town Called Panic? Ten years after the Action League’s heyday, the big screen plays host to their spiritual successors, a bonkers Belgian television series following the similarly bizarre adventures of three plasticine housemates; the immature Cowboy, big-thinking Indian, and straight man Horse. But, unlike ALN!, whose spin-off television show never achieved the heights it promised, A Town Called Panic blows the lid on convention and does whatever the hell it was, to brilliant effect.

The film is structured similarly to a Family Guy or late-era Simpsons episode, with a small storyline feeding into the narrative that takes up the rest of the film. Here, Cowboy and Indian have forgotten Horse’s birthday, and Indian, great thinker that he is, decides they will build Horse a barbeque. However, a screw-up with a coffee cup causes problems with their order of bricks, and things go hilariously downhill from there. Aubier and Patar then spend the next seventy minutes mining their unparalleled imagination and throwing all manner of shit at the screen to see what sticks, and it shows in the rapid-fire gag rate and crude, off-the-cuff animation.

Thankfully, their Airplane!-esque humour experiment works, and A Town Called Panic is home to some of the most brilliant comedy moments of the last twenty years. From barracuda chases to snowball-lobbing penguin robots, from farm animals playing instruments to the incorrigible, loud-mouthed STEVEN, Aubier and Patar complement their sharp, good-natured comedy with the kind of lunacy and surrealism that owes as much a debt to the aforementioned Airplane! as it does to David Lynch and Jan Svankmajer. All the elements of the film—the rough plasticine figures, the voice acting pitched at hysterical, the sublime physical comedy, the pastel-coloured settings—possess both a heart and a funnybone, and the slightness of the resultant product is in no way detrimental to its brilliance.

End Game is the latest work from Capital E for the 8 to 14 market. It follows on the tail of last year’s stellar Stealing Games. It tells the story of Alex (Dan Weekes) and Rosie (Amy Tarleton) his single mother, two people divided by their addiction to technology—Rosie to her Blackberry and Facebook, Alex to Fable Story, a MMORPG clearly modelled on World of Warcraft. When visiting Rosie’s dying father in hospital, a power surge throws them into the game Alex loves so much and they have to learn to work together to get back to the real world.

While End Game’s theme—that we have to appreciate what we have while we still have it—is very nice, and surprisigly complex for a children’s play, it is laid down rather heavy handedly in the script by Kate Morris and Rachel Callinan. The characters spend just a bit too much time explaining how they feel in every situation and every epiphany they have is restated into the ground. Also, while the use of the levels of a video game as a structure is an interesting one, it quickly forces the play into being just a bit too episodic for its own good. The work never really sticks together.

End Game, however, has a real success in its staging. Under the direction of Leo Gene Peters, puppeteer and voice artist Kenny King and stage manager Rebekah Sherratt bring to wonderful life the world of the videogame. The large Tetris-like pieces that make up the set are transformed (with the help of a large piece of fabric) into a swamp, a shifting mountain and a large talking trader robot. End Game’s sumptuous and simple theatrical spectacle would be impressive in any play, whether it be for children or adults.

This, along with solid performances from both Weekes and Tarleton, make End Game a success. Maybe a slightly qualified success, but a success nonetheless.

End Game
wri. Kate Morris and Rachel Callinan
dir. Leo Gene Peters
perf. Dan Weekes, Amy Tarleton and Kenny King

At Downstage, 31 July – 7 Aug
www.downstage.co.nz / www.capitale.org.nz

Arcade Fire—The Suburbs
Merge Records

Win Butler has always had a fervent preoccupation with ‘the kids’, be it the youthful escapism of debut Funeral, or anger and concern for the kids with no future on Neon Bible. Here, on their third full-length, it seems to be maturing—they’re no longer running with ‘the kids’, but they’re contemplating settling down and having their own. It’s a more tempered record than what has come before—their propensity towards arena anthems is dampened considerably, replaced with a focus on rhythm across many tracks.

‘The Suburbs’ opens the album, bouncing along as Butler sings “Grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving”—still preoccupied with the kids, but not as joyously as before. ‘Ready To Start’ and ‘Empty Room’ couple their string section with an upped pace, to great effect. Butler’s vocal apex on the former, particularly, is a highlight. Unfortunately, the highlights are somewhat disparate across The Suburbs. At sixteen tracks, the album is overlong. By quite some distance. ‘Wasted Hours’, ‘Deep Blue’ and ‘We Used To Wait’ have no place here—their pacing is too similar, their melodies too ineffectual to warrant making the final cut on this album. ‘Month of May’ attempts what I guess you could label Arcade Fire’s version of ‘punk’, but Butler lacks the bite to pull off the viciousness that the song strives for, calling out all the “kids standing with their arms folded tight”. That’s not to fault the band though, they pull off a driving, heavy(ish) rhythm that I wouldn’t have expected of them. All in all, however, the album drags far too often, and when it drags, it draaaags. However, all is not lost, as the band redeem themselves wonderfully on the final two tracks. ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’ totally sparkles, with echoes of both Funeral’s ‘Haiti’ and Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ in a vibrant, upbeat number. Regine Chassagne takes centre stage and makes the most of it, completely eclipsing any vocal turn by Butler on the album. Then the album is bookended by a downbeat closing to the track ‘The Suburbs’, melancholic and pretty depressing, really. But these last two tracks easily make the biggest impression on the listener, and ‘Sprawl II’ is totally one of their career highlights. I just wish there wasn’t so much fucking filler to work through to get to it.

3/5

Circa Theatre’s production of The Great Gatsby certainly had a lot of expectations to live up to as one of the most popular novels of our time, and this lively production directed by David O’Donnell certainly does that.

What really made the show for me was the singing and dancing. The cast, with choreography by Sacha Copeland and musical direction by Michael Nicholas Williams prove themselves to be multitalented as actors, singers, dancers and musicians. Jessica Robinson opens the show with the beautifully performed ‘Butterfly’ that sets the tone perfectly.

The 1920s-style singing and dancing by the cast throughout captures the playful party atmosphere of the time and the frivolity of the upper classes that contrasts with the tragic story of the garage owner and his wife. Overall the cast is solid, despite a few dodgy accents. Erin Bank’s Jordyn and Guy Langford’s Nick were the standouts for me.

The set looks good and is functional. Its simplicity allows the many changes of setting to work smoothly and effectively for the most part, and, to begin with, the miming of some props and set was clever and fresh. However, as the piece continued, inconsistencies jarred somewhat, such as the characters setting up a car and then walking right though the door, or the mimed wine glasses that some cast members fully committed to and others didn’t. Although the set is simplistic, the lighting tends toward melodrama at points, and the two styles don’t really work together.

I also had a few technical concerns, in that the lighting was a bit too dark and sometimes the characters spoke too quietly, so I had to strain a bit to see and hear. It’s true that I was seated in the second to last row but, from chatting to other audience members afterward, I wasn’t the only one troubled by this, which was unfortunate because overall it was a very good, clear, entertaining and strong production.

If you love the book, you won’t be disappointed, and if you haven’t read it, it doesn’t matter; this production will take you on a journey with the strong performers providing an engaging and entertaining night at the theatre.

The Great Gatsby
wri. F. Scott Fitzgerald, adapted by Ken Duncum
dir. David O’Donnell
choreographer. Sacha Copeland
mus. dir. Michael Nicholas Williams
perf. Ray Henwood, Guy Langford, Miranda Manasiadis, Erin Banks, Jessica Robinson, Nathan Meister, Paul Harrop and Danny Mulheron

At Circa Theatre (www.circa.co.nz), 31 July – 28 August

In a year littered with releases from great New Zealand bands, it kinda looks like Auckland three-piece Street Chant topped them all. Their debut album Means has been quite some time coming (via Arch Hill), but turns out it’s worth the wait. Despite some of these songs being initially written almost four years ago, little, if anything about this album feels dated. On that note, nor does it feel particularly ‘trendy’, or adhering to a certain sound / aesthetic of the now. Means is, simply put, a collection of fucking good songs.

Opener ‘The Fatigues’ comes forth from some electronic squeal (possibly the only non bass / drums / guitar / vox input on the album) and storms the gates, its fast / medium pacing turns, keeping the listener engaged all the way. By the time it hits the chorus, you realise just what a fucking incredible opener this is. All the ‘hits’ that Street Chant fans will know are here—‘Scream Walk’, ‘You Do The Maths’, ‘Yr Philosophy’ and ‘Less Chat, More Sewing’ sound superb. Bob Frisbee’s production isn’t overbearing by any means (lol), balancing everything—the bass is fuzzed out slightly but super forceful, Emily Littler, whose vocals have never really been a ‘wow’ point of the band previously, establishes herself exemplarily as a quality vocalist, and, of course, Alex Brown’s drumming becomes a focal point wherever he is given room to move (see the end of ‘Less Chat, More Sewing’—or anywhere on the album, really).

Means exhibits excellent variation in pacing too. Slowburner ‘Stoned Again’ chronicles weed escapism and boredom in a fantastic buildup of a song, while ‘Yara Aba’ brings out one of the catchier riffs on the record. Littler’s vocals don’t quite match the frantic breaks, but as a colleague pointed out, that’s more of a production issue than anything else. Album closer ‘The Password is Password’ comes as a particular surprise. Quiet, with minimal drums and hushed vocals, it rounds out the album calmly and effectively. Even if it does sound like a track which might have benefitted more from being a full-blown grunge monster, the decision to pare it back was inspired and successful.

In any case, I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on enough about this record. There’s a sort of timeless quality here, these are songs that merit returning to again and again. For those who know the material, it’s a near-perfect summation of their career to date. For those who don’t, it’s a stellar set of heavy guitar-pop songs. Either way, this album is an essential purchase.

3/5

Summer Wars
Director: Hosoda Mamoru

Coming out of a film that is completely different and much better than you expected gives you this wonderful feeling, a feeling as if you’ve discovered something new. You have a desire to talk about it endlessly. This is exactly the feeling I had leaving Summers Wars. Expecting cutesy Ponyo meets Pokemon with creatures battling each other in the summer, I was instead privy to an intense family drama with rounded characters and a great riff on the dangers of modern technology.

Kenji is a maths nerd who is recruited by Natuski to be her boyfriend for her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration. The complicated domestic situation Kenji is thrown into is difficult for him to handle, so he retreats to the online world of Oz. Oz is a place where people have online avatars that interact with each other in a variety of ways—a sort of Final Fantasy meets Facebook. Furthermore, Oz is a network that all emergency, military and civil services depend on. When a militant AI starts taking over the network, Kenji, Natuski and her family have to use all their strength, skill and imagination to stop it.

The portrayal of Natsuki’s family is pitch-perfect. Despite being animated, all the characters feel as if you know them. The writing and composition of these scenes are heavily influenced by Yasujiro Ozu, but a moment of comedy or a fast-paced fight in the world of Oz always stops the family drama from becoming too intense.

The film starts to drag around the end of the second act, with the family beating the AI only for it to rise from the dead again and again. Some of the animation techniques, such as a character’s body going red when they were embarrassed, didn’t seem right for the tone of the film but provided comic relief. Summer Wars is a thoroughly entertaining film, where the style of the animation hides so much of the film’s deeper meaning.

I’m going to be honest with you. I have read maybe three Peanuts comic strips in my life. I don’t have any deep-seated hatred for it or anything of the sort. I’ve just never gotten into it; I’m sure it’s great. This puts me somewhat on the back foot when reviewing Dog Sees God, a play that centres on the concept of what the Peanuts gang would be up to in high school. Or, at least, I thought it did. One of Dog’s strengths is its openness; someone with no knowledge of the source material whatsoever can enjoy this show without feeling like they’re missing something.

However, Playwright Bert V. Royal has written a mass of contradictions into Dog Sees God. In a play that actively seeks to explore the facts and repurcussions of bullying, the audience is constantly invited to laugh at (as opposed to with) the protagonists. The contradiction of a play that asks its audience to judge themselves for the cruelty we inflict on each other in the same breath as getting you to laugh mockingly at the characters is not addressed to any satsifying degree, and there is the distinct air of Royal trying to have his cake and eat it too.

It is also far too long. This production advertises a 75-minute running time but, on opening night, ran to 100 minutes. Characters endlessly repeat themselves, every joke is riffed on just a bit too long and every plot point is stated and over-stated into oblivion.

Lori Leigh, the director, clearly feels a deep connection to this text and it’s a pity that, at least for me, that passion did not transmit. Leigh is a talented director with a good eye for images and great sense of shaping scenes. She has gathered a talented cast and crew who together have produced an amazingly well put-together show. They should all be immensly proud of their work towards this production and it really should be noted that the audience I saw this show with had a very good time. It’s just a pity that they’re working with a text that shoots itself so heavily in the foot.

Dog Sees God : Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
wri. Bert V. Royal
dir. Lori Leigh
perf. Alex Greig, Alison Walls, Anna Harcourt, David Goldthorpe, Jessica Aaltonen, Louise Burston, Paul Waggott and Theo Taylor

At BATS (www.bats.co.nz), 8.30pm, 3 – 14 August
book@bats.co.nz / (04) 802 4175

• Golden Axe’s Fantasy Footwork leaks on the internet. OMG!
• Cheeseontoast.co.nz announces ‘Awkward Feelings’—47 Diamantes play on a boat in Auckland, 4th September. Probable occurrence of a Lonely Island cover.
• Apology time! Sorry to Flora Wassilieff, credit to her for the photo of Sharpie Crows in last week’s Mole Music article.
• VBC and BTD present Xiu Xiu, San Fransisco Bath House, September 11th! May prove to be controversial and amazing. Support from dreamboat Grayson Gilmor (as Siamese) and Glass Vaults. For 25 dollars, hoooly!
• Nathan Williams a.k.a Wavves calls Walt Disney a Nazi—no one really cares.
• Christchurch Press music ‘writer’ Vicki Anderson, on Die! Die! Die! opening for the Pixies: “Proof that the Dunedin sound and Flying Nun are indeed Alive! Alive! Alive!” Anderson’s contract possibly shortened significantly.
• BBC calls Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs “Better than OK Computer”. Salient Arts Editor James Beavis begs to differ.
• Kanye West opens a Twitter account, world collectively loses it’s shit. VBC co-director Teresa Samuels opens twitter account also. Now has sixteen followers.
• Lindsay Lohan gets out of jail, drives home drunk.
• Object Lessions; A Musical Fiction open now at Adam Art Gallery. London-based art collective blow your mind. Woah.
• Vote for me and my abs in Academic Idol!!!!!

xoxo Peter Andre

The Human Centipede
Director: Tom Six

The Human Centipede proves that a unique (and disgusting) premise is not enough to make a bad film watch-able. With a questionable plot that has had horror fans salivating for months, Centipede is about a demented ex-surgeon who decides to build a human centipede by sewing people together, mouth to anus. Like last year’s Dead Snow, Centipede deteriorates into a series of largely intentional comic moments. But it never lives up to the intensity or possibility of an experience of true horror promised by the film’s premise.

The biggest problem with Centipede is the acting. Actresses who play the victims in horror films have a reputation for being cast for their looks instead of their abilities as thespians, but this film takes horror acting to a new low. These girls make B-grade pornstars look like they could handle themselves in a dramatic scene against Cate Blanchett. The villain of the piece, Dr Heiter (Laser) nails the terrifying doctor, but this can be attributed less to his acting ability and more to his utterly disturbing face.

Also disappointing was the fact that Dr Heiter’s handiwork remained covered by surgical bandages for the entire film.

Perhaps due to financial constraints, the film failed to take us into the horrific territory it promised, falling into another generic cliché of not revealing the monster. In a film which is as transgressive as Centipede, not showing the monster is the film’s crucial flaw. The terrible acting would have been forgiven if the film actually delivered. Tom Six’s direction is poor, the only things that work are the odd bus scare and an undercurrent of black comedy that runs through the film. All The Human Centipede is is a bad film, not the intense, degrad classic everyone was hoping for.

Band Substances was the second Fringe Bar musical comedy night of the year. While it couldn’t live up to the first one, where the Flight of The Conchords did a “surprise” set, it was a better produced and more sustained night of musical comedy. I am crediting producer and supporting performer Robbie Ellis for much of this. The man is a musical genius with an acute comic bend. Bringing the musical comedians/comic musicians of Wellington together and making them perform with a seven piece band instead of just a guitar and a smile was a good idea executed well. Rumour has it that he arranged most of the music too.

The night was a mix of comic song, musical gimmickry and “normal music”. Some was amusing yet disposable: The Fringe Bar Operatic Soloists performing operatic versions of popular music is a sort of thing that I’ve often heard before but was happy to listen to. Other sets were rather marvelous though: I consider Matt Mulholland Wellington’s best kept comedy secret; every time I see the lad he delights me, and his new songs were no exception.

The different energies of the performances gelled together rather breezily, with the exception of three staggered character songs performed by members of improv soap The Young and the WITless (Paul Sullivan and Karen Anslow), which melded a brief moment of character-based improv with a musical standard. I didn’t get these sequences—they weren’t funny enough to be comedy and not captivating enough musically to keep my attention. The songs were really well performed, but it felt like unnecessary filler.

I understand that musical comedy takes ages to write and score, but I saw a large portion of material that I, and most of the crowd were overly familiar with, including stuff that was performed at the last music comedy gig in April. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but it makes me fear for the sustainability of such a show.

Ellis’s new arrangements did keep the old content from becoming overly stifling and, in fact, made some of the songs more interesting than they ever were. Sarah Harpur’s songs especially benefited as her lyrics are grand but her music is often a bit mechanical. Gabriel Page, the headliner of the night, also responded well to the backing band treatment. The man writes some highly amusing love songs, and seemed almost like a legit rocker up there, and that was cool to see.

Band Substances
July 30, Fringe Bar

City of Lost Girls
Author: Declan Hughes

Prepare to have your preconceived, Southpark-based notions about Irish detectives demolished. Running with a crime-fiction genre this week, City of Lost Girls is the fifth instalment of Declan Hughes’ Ed Loy series, about the aforementioned private eye kicking ass and taking names in his native Dublin. The story reintroduces us to Loy as he enjoys a rare lull between tempestuous storylines and a promising relationship (for once) with All the Dead Voices character Anne Fogarty. As fate would have it, renowned director Jack Donovan, Ireland’s favourite son and Loy’s estranged friend, is shooting his latest epic in Dublin, and has called on his old amigo to find out if the hate mail he’s been receiving has anything to do with the disappearance of two ‘extra-special’ extras.

Inevitably, Loy’s detective intuition slithers to life and he unearths a connection between present-day events and the similar disappearances of three female extras on a Jack Donovan film ten years prior. Light bulb moment: a killer is on the loose! After wading through allegations of incest, psychotic breaks, and of course, gold-digging ex-wives, Loy narrows the suspect pool down to Donovan and his three-man inner circle. What’s refreshing about Lost Girls is that it manages to adhere to the basest of crime fiction conventions without needing stake-out overkill or smoke-encircled vixens to remind us of what we’re reading. Although slow-moving in parts, where the plot drags, the Irish quips come a’rolling, and as long as you skim through the italicised chapters of the killer’s internal monologue, you should have a pleasantly engaging read on your hands. Oh, in case you’re wondering, Bono is referenced as the most annoying Irishman to have ever lived, and no, strangely enough his mention doesn’t cheapen reader enjoyment, and for that, I can almost hear Raymond Chandler applauding from his grave.

She said of winner Benjamin Kemp’s winning poem:

“In ‘Ju-ni Gatsu’ the writer has entered ‘the arteries’ of where he/she lives. I love the way an emotional state is conveyed through the careful detailing of physical life. The writing itself is ‘delicate’ and attentive—rich in detail and full of surprising images. This is a strong, quiet poem which fully realises the sense of a ‘delicate’ landscape and concludes with a gorgeous final image.”

Ju-ni Gatsu (‘December’ in Japanese) by Benjamin Kemp

Japan is delicate,
& in December when snow settles
upon the branches,
it feels like a Buddhist prayer…

listening for you
for Manutuke…
the Te Arai river…
& the sound of oranges growing.

American: The Bill Hicks Story
Director: Matt Harlock

There is a myth of Bill Hicks. We are told of a bright-eyed young stand up who, like the progressive rockers of old, threw away his old stuff and strove for reinvention and righteousness, chasing his art’s truth through drugs and alcohol, before cancer killed him at the peak of his excellence. According to American: The Bill Hicks Story, it’s surprising where that legend maps onto what actually happened in his life. His relationship with alcohol and eventual abstinence from it and most other drugs doesn’t sit well with what I felt when listening to Tool. That’s what’s cool about honest documentaries: you can learn stuff that will alter your perceptions. There was little romancing of drugs or sobriety, or of being a comedian or a star, and while you could see the personal love in the interviews, you could see that he fucked those people off quite often as well.

Director Matt Harlock’s visual scheme for the film was unique and profoundly personal. They matched a collage of archived photographs to animation, scored with music that Hicks’ band made, to the interviews with his close friends and family. This created an authoritative narrative with a sense of amusing and psychedelic timelessness. I’m so stealing that concept if I get the chance, it was beautiful.

Three distinct types of people sat around me at the screening of American: comedy geeks (guilty), drug culture nerds (guilty), and the over sixty(?!)­—I don’t understand why there were so many geriatrics there, maybe they like watching films about dead people and the past, maybe their feet were sore and they wanted to sit down. I can’t begrudge them this, as I too often have aches in my feet. My point though, is this: you don’t think of the ravaged by age enjoying counter-culture stuff, unless they look like a burnt-out hippy. That misses what Hicks was about. He’d write intellectually honest material that would play well with a literate HBO-style crowd. Part of the aforementioned Hicksian canon sees Bill frustrated with his lack of recognition in the borscht/bible belts of America, heading to Britain where he became an international icon. As long as you’re intelligent you can appreciate what the man stood for.

Ned (Gavin Rutherford) and Joy (Heather O’Carroll) have been married 11 years and the spark is gone. Their cheeky chappy neighbour Dale (Christopher Brougham) narrates their tale of cookie-cutter suburbian repression. Things start disappearing from their house. First, it’s small things; cufflinks and the like. It soon escalates with larger and larger objects disappearing. As the house empties, Ned loses his grip on reality and things start to go a bit weird.

Parlour Song has an interesting premise, and for a few of the early scenes, it looks like it’s going to deliver. However, as the tension builds and the twists get turny, Parlour Song bottles out. The questions raised at the beginning are left limp through the overlong middle only to be answered, almost as an afterthought, at the end. However, the third act grinds so crunchily and inelegantly into a totally different tone and style that you are too busy being jarred by the new, unneeded theatrical grammar to care about any of the resolutions.

The cast all give well-shaped performances, especially Brougham, whose knack for comedy shines through. O’Carroll and Rutherford’s evocation of a relationship run cold is also well rendered. Susan Wilson’s direction is clear and clean. She does, however, struggle with the over-length of the script—it runs to 105 minutes and should, at most, be 75—you very quickly feel the length of the work. It should, at least, have an interval.

The set by John Hodgkins and lights by Jennifer Lal work together extremely well to carve a particular sense of place into the tricky space that is Circa Two. The AV projections by Andrew Simpson are a creative triumph in and of themselves, but feel often like a superfluous addition to the work as a whole.

Parlour Song is, at the end of the day, harmless. It is American Beauty writ small. And a bit dull. But it is far from a failure. The assured performances and stellar design simply need a leaner and more focused script to work with. When you leave Parlour Song you do not feel that you have wasted your time, you just haven’t gotten much in exchange for it.

Parlour Song
wri. Jez Butterworth
dir. Susan Wilson
perf. Christopher Brougham, Gavin Rutherford and Heather O’Carroll

At Circa Two (www.circa.co.nz for booking deets), 24 July – 21 August 2010

Ronald Hugh Morrieson is something of a Kiwi literary outlaw. An author who consistently challenged the prudent literary values of his time, Morrieson spent his years living and writing in South Taranaki until his death in 1972. Throughout that time, he wrote four novels—The Scarecrow, Pallet on the Floor, Came A Hot Friday and Predicament, all depicting copious amounts of gambling, sex and murder in small town New Zealand. The first three all had their film adaptations in the 80s, and now, in 2010, Predicament finally gets its big screen treatment.

Jason Stutter’s adaptation faithfully follows Morrieson’s coming-of-age tale of naïve teenager Cedric Williamson (newcomer Hayden Frost), drawn into a blackmailing scheme by two would-be crooks: fast-talking Mervyn Toebeck (Heath Franklin—best known for his comedy character Chopper ‘Harden the Fuck Up’ Reed) and ‘Spook’ (Jemaine Clement). But as one can expect, the con goes awry, resulting in betrayal and murder.

Clement has brought the most press and attention onto the film, even though his role is relatively minor. Nevertheless, he is at his scene-stealing best here and provides the film with the bulk of its giggles. Franklin is well cast, conveying the necessary charm and menace the role demands, and Hayden Frost, given the unenviable task of playing straight man to the two crooks, contributes an admirable effort, even if he overplays his stammering schtick a little too frequently.

Predicament looks quite brilliant; there is some fabulous gothic/noir influence in the art direction and the cinematography is suitably elegant, capturing a dark and palpable feel for Morrieson’s crooked Hawera. Director Stutter has clearly improved dramatically as a helmsman from earlier efforts, exerting obvious control, but he can occasionally still be a little too heavy-handed, preventing the film from breathing on its own. In keeping faithful to source material, Stutter snuffs this out a little, keeping things at a medium simmer. It’s still tense and comic, but with a tightened script and looser tone, it might have really been a knockout for wild laughs. Yet despite its flaws, Predicament is a fitting tribute to Morrieson, a fun slice of Kiwi black comedy and proof of a blossoming director on the rise.

Predicament
Director: Jason Stutter

Sam Hunt is one of New Zealand’s most eccentric characters, known for his personality as much as his poetry. Purple Balloon is a loosely structured narrative of Hunt’s life. Included are the biographical details of his upbringing in Auckland, significant milestones, various jobs and numerous road adventures. The film is not arranged in chronological order, rather information is presented randomly, much like the perplexing compositions of Hunt’s poetry.

Interviews with prominent New Zealand artists, personalities and literary figures such as Robin White, Dick Frizzell, Gary McCormick and C.K. Stead provide varying angles of Hunt. Interestingly, Stead receives a large proportion of screen time with no clear intent, except to perhaps contrast traditional literary style with the idiosyncrasies of Hunt. The image of Hunt that transpires from these interviews is one of stark authenticity, and it appears that the documentary is attempting to achieve this same sense. The inclusion of raw interview footage (awkward questions such as “Are we filming now?” are not edited out) presents a somewhat earnest impression, but the effect is lost after the second occurrence.

A captivating opening scene depicts Hunt reciting some of his much-loved poetry, with quick editing to complement the lyrical flow. Yet this slows for the duration of the documentary, causing some points to become tedious. Fortunately, the quirk and charisma in the words of Hunt, rarely shown without a glass of wine or smoke in his hand, carry the film forward. Strangely enough, Hunt asserts that he did not utter a word until the age of four (a tale which is confirmed by his brother) and suffered from a stutter throughout adolescence.

A great deal is made in reference to James K. Baxter, who was a significant influence and early mentor for Hunt. When talking about writer’s block, Hunt fuses Baxter’s poetic notion of listening with his own, describing how one must go to a place in order to listen to it. The documentary delivers a candid portrayal of a local icon, and would be warmly received by those who enjoy him and his work.

Sam Hunt: Purple Balloon
Director: Tim Rose

When I reviewed Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland’s first iteration in the International Festival earlier this year I said that it was a “brilliant mound of clay needing a firmer shape”. It was too disparate, too liquid to fully satisfy as a theatrical experience. Its many moments of sublime beauty and profound weight felt disconnected from each other, playing as more of a selection of scenes than a cohesive work.

What a difference a few months make. The company and crew of Mark Twain have clearly developed and refined it as they have toured it around the country. The bulk of what made up the first run of the show is still there, but with many minor tweaks, Mark Twain has had its Lego moment. It all clicks and fits together now, it is a whole and complete work. And what a work it is.

This return season of Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland is, easily, the best show I have seen all year. It is almost too good. It is the kind of great that makes you somewhat jealous that you will never produce anything of a similar scale and quality.

The play tells a fictionalised version of the most famous person in the world, Mark Twain, as he tours through New Zealand in the late 1800s to pay off his numerous debts. Stopping in Whanganui, he becomes embroiled in the aftermath of local land wars and, more specifically, the divide it created between the Maori who fought for the Pakeha and those who defended their land. It uses these events as a cipher to discuss much wider issues of the place of both Maori and Pakeha in modern New Zealand.

As much as Mark Twain is an elegant, subtle state-of-the-nation work that is brave enough to know that if it poses the right questions it does not in fact need to answer them, it is also an interesting and invigorating exploration of historiography. Historiography is the theory of how history exists as a system of stories that humanity speaks into existence. Mark Twain, with its stripped, almost-Brechtian staging, hides nothing and takes pleasure in revealing the technique behind their tricks. A boat paddling downstream is simply and effectively evoked with the sharp swishing of a water bottle. Empty coats fill the stage to be a corpse-strewn battlefield. The stage manager becomes almost a sixth member of the cast, bringing on and off smoke machines and hitting gallon bottles for gun shots. In its transparency, in its openness, Mark Twain makes you question the very nature of storytelling and how we communicate and mediate the past. Director John Bolton and writer David Geary expertly balance the wider philosophical and political gestures of the work with perfectly pitched personal stories, expertly expressed by the world-class cast.

Every element of this show is nothing less than breathtaking. From Martyn Robert’s sharp and simple lighting to Kasia Pol’s single white stripe of a set to John Gibson’s emotionally epic soundscape. Everything about Mark Twain works in perfect harmony to produce a stunningly complete and effective experience. The cast (Stephen Papps, Ngapaki Emery, Aaron Cortesi, Allan Henry and Maaka Pohatu) are universally excellent, all giving career-best performances and operating as one of the finest ensembles I’ve ever experienced. The sheer sense of connection and sharing between them was palpable and a commendable achievement in itself.

It is so easy to be apathetic in the theatre. It is so easy to sit there and just not care. Actors are, after all, professional liars. Pretenders skipping dementedly in a made-up land who you pay to see and encourage. The theatre audience is too often a landscape of knowing smirks and pointless, pretentious toffs. It is hard to connect in the theatre. It is often hard to feel in the theatre. This is not the case in Mark Twain. The overwhelming reaction I had after seeing this return season was not one of wonder at the technical brilliance of it or joyful curiosity at the questions it raised, but one of just being blown away by how much I had felt. By showing its process and sharing so much of itself, Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland allows you to connect on a very profound level with what is being undertaken. This is a play with a brain, a heart and a sense of humour. This is everything the theatre tries to be but isn’t.

Basically perfect.

Mark Twain and Me in Māoriland
Written by: David Geary and the company
Director: John Bolton
Cast: Stephen Papps, Ngapaki Emery, Aaron Cortesi, Allan Henry & Maaka Pohatu

At Downstage, 14 – 24 July 2010

Today, climate change is defined by images of smoking industrial towers, footage of polar bears stranded on broken icebergs, and caricatures of American politicians. Breaking this stereotype, There Once Was an Island examines climate change through the eyes of those experiencing it first-hand. Yet, what should been an emotional examination of an island threatened by water results in a content-bloated flood of information that essentially loses focus and sincerity.

The film’s credit lies in modesty. A film about a world issue, it engages its audience by capturing it on a local stage and conveying it on a personal level that isn’t married to scientific jargon, multicolored diagrams or the pretension of Al Gore. Devastation isn’t depicted by dramatic footage of melting ice shelves, but in the humble loss of makeshift huts and school books. Supported by an impressive score, the film has some genuine emotional moments where culture loss and memory, and the concept of home, are truly conveyed and dealt with.

However, while it manages to put a human face on a somewhat distant issue, the film struggles in its ability to sustain the emotional response it hopes from its audience. Personal strife, political complications, social discord and the history of the culture proves to be too much content for the film, and the result is a muddled, rather than informed, product. Similarly, the film’s supposed focus on three main islanders isn’t made particularly clear, and their experiences are lost in the surrounding detail. Most disappointing, however, are the seemingly staged interactions between the islanders. Appearing scripted and forced, the exchanges come across as a device to plug more information or ‘depth’ into the film and its parallels with Hills-esque conversations are sorry ones.

There Once Was an Island has a premise of promise in its capture of this quietly frightening situation, yet the film fails by trying to incorporate too much background, and neglects the issue at its foreground. Ironically, in trying to develop a story from the context that surrounds the islanders, the film forgets its modest essence—its people—and produces a confused, slightly falsified, version of real experience.

There Once Was an Island: Te Henua E Nnoho
Director: Briar March

It was The Truman Show that revealed Jim Carrey’s serious acting chops to the world—an unexpected revelation against the goofy slapstick he is famous for. The subsequent films he has made since have been a mixed bag of both restrained dramatic performances (The Majestic, Eternal Sunshine) and his trademark OTT comedic stylings (Bruce Almighty, Yes Man). I Love You, Phillip Morris provides Carrey with what might be his best-suited role yet in real-life con man Steven Russell—a character that allows room for both Carrey’s physical comedy and emotional depth.

Based off the fascinating true story of Russell’s exploits—his cons, arrests and numerous prison escapes—the film has plenty to keep us interested in the way of Catch Me If You Can-style con capers. Even if you don’t go see the film, you could do worse than Googling the actual guy (his resume is pretty impressive). But as the title suggests, the film is romantic at its core, centering on Russell’s relationship with his boyfriend/prison roommate: Phillip Morris (a likable Ewan McGregor). Directors Ficara and Requa cut no corners sexually, with quite a brave and explicit depiction (well, as far as mainstream cinema is concerned) of the couple’s relationship.

But the actors save it from being meaningless shock with heartfelt and dedicated performances. Ewan McGregor’s quiet and sweet Morris is a delight, and makes for a perfect contrast to Russell’s confident exuberance. While most of the characterisation is spent on Russell, kudos to McGregor for managing to still make Morris believable and human. But the film belongs to Carrey, who gives a fantastic performance; funny, affecting and sometimes, offering glimpses of a desperate torment within. By the time the film builds to its climax between them, there is a darker, tragic tone underlying the screwball comedy, ending on a surprisingly moving note that sneaks up on you. The comedy occasionally misfires, and the film isn’t as cohesive as it means to be, but I Love You, Phillip Morris is a bold, romantic and ultimately tragic comedy, boasting great performances and compelling, fact-based entertainment.

I Love You, Phillip Morris.
Director: Glenn Ficara & John Requa

The announcement that Seth Frightening would be opening for Jonsi Birgisson—of acclaimed Icelandic act Sigur Ros—on the Australian leg of his upcoming world tour came as a pleasant surprise to Wellingtonians who have grown fond of Sean ‘Seth Frightening’ Kelly’s melancholic brand of indie folk. So it was with much anticipation that a healthy cluster of warmly clad hipsters descended on Happy for a reorientation VBC showcase—standing on chairs, even sitting on the bar—for a final intimate glimpse of the humble and über-talented minstrel before he jets off to perform to larger, more intimidating audiences.

Moments into opener ‘Can We Eat It (Truth) So We Know What To Say (Visions)’—also the opener on his debut album, The Prince and His Madness—Kelly’s eyes were closed, his face strained as if in a trance as his charming vocals filled the venue. Unafraid to explore the entire spectrum of his vocal range in what is becoming an increasingly diverse live set, Kelly startled viewers with explosive, Sung Tongs-esque shrieks that shatter his customary fragile wail.

Accompanied by two backing guitarists rather than the usual one, Kelly’s emotionally charged lyrics took on a heavier, almost grungier feel (perhaps an influence of his recent ‘metal’ side project, Cancer). Not only was ‘Selfish’ played at fiercer pace than before, but it was also driven by layers of distorted sound, giving the lyrics a darker, almost sinister resonance. Yet it remains Kelly’s near angelic voice and his poignant, crestfallen lyrics that linger in your head long after listening that is winning over audiences and tour promoters alike. An entertaining and emotionally charged final performance then, we can only hope for more of the same upon his return.

Earlier in the evening acoustic two-piece Ogliocene Drowning, the band of Kelly’s younger brother, charmed early attendees with their wide-eyed, fresh-faced enthusiasm and homespun minimalist folk. Driven by a lively beat, garage-punk three-piece ‘Mammal Airlines’ roused a merry cluster of groupies into a lively jig. The ever-idiosyncratic Alex Wilson, performing under the pseudonym of ‘Ocelot’, entertained too, with distorted chanting and singing over trippy spaced-out psychedelic beats.

Seth Frightening
Live at Happy, with Ocelot, Mammal Airlines and Ogliocene Drowning—Friday 16th July

The name How to Destroy Angels conjures images of a big, long-haired bogan screaming over a deathly guitar riff—for me at least. It’s with some relief that How to Destroy Angels is nothing like that at all. In fact, they’re oddly quite amiable. Not in the post-Juno, twee boy/girl acoustic-indie couplet way, but with the harder edge that their name suggests. How to Destroy Angels is the latest project from Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, along with wife Mariqueen Maandig. While Reznor’s influence is distinct on this self-titled EP, he takes a (slight) step out of the spotlight with Maandig taking on chief vocal duties. Though she doesn’t have a particularly distinctive voice, that’s not to say that it’s insipid or no good. Quite the opposite. The pairing of Maandig’s vocals over blustering guitars and abrasive electric drum loops complement each other, and she shows she can hold her own alongside Reznor as they share the mic on ‘Parasite’.

Though How to Destroy Angels’ six tracks give it a teasing length, it is well structured and progresses soundly. Opener ‘The Space in Between’ is gratifyingly menacing, with drums that sound like the hammering of weapons to… well… destroy angels. It is a worthy starting point, building the sinister atmosphere before unexpectedly ditching you into the aforementioned ‘Parasite’. A reprieve from doom comes midway through the EP, with the irrepressible swagger of ‘Fur Lined’ and ‘BBB’, which not only welcomes you to strut along, it all but demands it. But the fun has to end somewhere, and ‘A Drowning’ makes for a satisfying conclusion, blending many of the elements thus far explored on the EP but pulling the reigns on the swagger and submerging it in a bit of despair. Thus as a whole, this EP sounds less like a choir of angels and, aptly, more like their impending destruction. Hopefully it’s a taste of what is to come.

Band: How to Destroy Angels
Album: How to Destroy Angels
Label: The Null Corporation

Age: 4 (ish)
Salient Picks: Sharpie Crows, DHDFDs, Rifles, Nevernudes, Deer Park… fuck, all of them
Website: molemusiconline.net

After a brief hiatus, the series of pieces on New Zealand record labels has returned. This week I talked to Sam Walsh, of Auckland-based Mole Music, who are responsible for bands such as Nevernudes, ex-Wellingtonians Sharpie Crows, Deer Park, and Wellington residents The Body Lyre.

It all began about four years ago, with Walsh working with bands such as The Vacants, and moving from there: “There have been some pretty big gaps in regards to the label’s output, as it’s always been run on a part-time basis, which is why our releases are a bit muddily. I was overseas for a while but moved back to New Zealand earlier in the year to study, so Deer Park, Rifles, Nevernudes, Sharpie Crows, Mild America and Body Lyre are all fairly new projects.”

Mole’s approach to the label-artist relationship shares a similar ethos to those that we have covered before: they don’t have binding agreements (Walsh quips “I’m not sure what I would actually offer them if I did.”), rather it is a mutually beneficial partnership between the two parties: “In the past, we would create weird mini-partnerships with bands, and depending on what the project is, provide organisational and financial support. This year I’m trying to do it a little bit differently though, and have been working much more collaboratively with bands to create something more like a family or small gang, which has been way cooler, and I think (hope) the bands feel like they are part of something communal rather than a strict, creatively subdued business arrangement.”

While the relationship between Mole and their bands echoes that of previously mentioned labels, the point of difference with Mole would have to be production quality. Across the board, their roster appears to have a definite onus on quality of recordings, something which Walsh admits is a factor in who they collaborate with, even if not the defining quality: “In regards to production, we are pretty strict about quality (within a releases context), but the production varies from band to band with each release. We do have a studio we have started working with, and a few of our upcoming projects were recorded there, but by no means will every future Mole release be taken there. Believing what you hear when you watch a performance or hear a song is super important to us and would definitely be the main factor in choosing bands. Also what type of people are in the bands—their work ethic, personality, ideas and stuff can sometimes be just as important as the music they are making, so that also helps shape our overall aesthetic.”

Thus, with this framework in mind, Mole has set about working with the aforementioned bands, promoting, funding, recording and assisting their groups where possible. It will always be difficult to get your bands’ material out into a wider audience, but that’s not Walsh’s short-term target: he understands the limitations of what Mole is doing, and embraces it, pushing his bands towards audiences that he knows will enjoy the output, rather than incessant promotion of bands everywhere he can: “Promoting our stuff is definitely something we have have started getting better at, but also an area we still need to improve on. There are so many avenues available with Facebook and Bandcamp and MySpace and Twitter and blah blah blah, which are amazing resources, but it can sometimes get really overwhelming. With Mole we have platforms for letting people know about what we are doing and we have relationships with media and radio etc, which is helpful for our bands and something I really want to continue to develop this year; we are also trying to figure out who actually listens to what we put out, and focus our promotional efforts on them. We are just a tiny label so angling what resources we do have towards the smaller but evangelic group of supporters makes more sense for us than a watered-down attempt at preaching to a larger group of the uninterested.”

It’s a method that has resulted in good exposure for Mole music over recent months, particularly with the release of their band sampler, The Burrow, Pt 1. Walsh not only works with his bands, but also together with other labels and people around Auckland and Australia. “Everyone seems to want to work together rather than compete with one another, which is pretty special… There has been an increase in the number of worthwhile bands coming out in New Zealand over the last year or so and lots of younger kids are starting to get involved in making and presenting music, which is super rad.”

Effectively, everyone seems to be working towards a situation where everyone can help one another out, between bands, and between labels. It’s this appreciation of mutual benefit that has helped so many bands across the country (mostly in Auckland though) get started, and get the recognition that they deserve. Mole Music has planned six releases, in addition to tours and shows on the back of these, just in the next few months. It’s the busiest they’ve ever been, and is probably a reflection of the burgeoning quality in the work that they are releasing. Walsh is contemplating a move to China next year, so will either “take Mole with me, or put it to bed. I’m not quite sure yet”. Either way, Walsh and Mole are yet another label reinforcing the quality of current music around New Zealand, and leading from the front too: they’re not just another independent New Zealand label, they’re one with the best roster of current bands around. Look it up.

Ponder this spine-chilling thought: if two geeky Harvard undergrads had gotten enough sex at uni, Facebook may never have happened. Thank you social hierarchy, thank you! Because Facebook rules. Even your gran has it. And while I’m sure she appreciates the profanity-laden status updates and classy post-town Maccas photos, we all know that without Facebook, the world would die. From SARS. Or Mel Gibson. Or reruns of Friends.

The point I’m so elegantly making is that The Accidental Billionaires chronicles the life and times of Eduardo Saverin, a wannabe businessman/social climber who befriends awkward computer genius and future Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at an underground Jewish fraternity. In and around such exotic locations as said frat, toilet cubicles and Silicon Valley office space, unfolds the conception of Facebook, and its early growth as an Ivy League networking tool. Things start to go awry when Saverin, who fronted the start-up cash they needed to get Facebook off the ground, is systematically worked out of the picture when he prioritises Harvard living over the website. Adding to the complications are the Winklevoss twins, a pair of male Evers-Swindells who sue Zuckerberg for stealing their business idea.

Don’t expect a soul-stripping exposé or accolade-garnering writing here, as the author, Ben Mezrich, relies on Saverin for the majority of the firsthand accounts. Without any input from whizz kid Zuckerberg himself, we’re stuck with Mezrich’s imagined, excessively naff descriptions of what may have possibly, maybe, perhaps have gone down in the guy’s head. Most surprising is the fact that the blurb on the book’s sleeve is better written than most of the ‘non-fiction’ novel, but that said, if you’re blessed with the ability to enjoy narrative intended for the lowest common denominator, there should be enough hot Asian chicks and James Bond references to keep your boat floating.

Author: Ben Mezrich

Mā ngā waiata o te manu tīoriori, a Toni Huata, e whiti ana ngā rā o te wiki o te reo Māori i tēnei tau.

A te Rātapu nei he rā whakahirahira mō tēnei wahine o Ngāti Kahungunu me Rongowhakaata, i te mea ka tuku atu tōna kōpae waiata tuatoru ki te rohe. Ka orua tēnei whakangahau me Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori.

Mai i ngā karapu pā auahi o Rānana, ki ngā ahurei pūoro o ūropi, ka hoki mai te Kōkā ki Te Whanganui-ā-Tara, ki Te Papa Tongarewa hei tuku i tōna kōpae – Whiti – ki Aotearoa.

Ko Te Papa hoki te wāhi i tuku a Kōkā Toni i tōna kōpae waiata tuatahi – Te Māori E – i ngā tau e iwa kua pahure.

Nā te kaha o tēnei Kōkā ki te tū māia ki runga i te atamira waiata, te whakamahana me te hōhonu o tōna reo waiata i āhei ia ki te tū māia ki Aotearoa, ki tāwāhi hoki. Ko te whakangahau mō tōna kōpae tētahi o ngā mea whakamutunga hei oti i Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, ā, ko tēnei wiki tēnā.

Ko te tikanga o Whiti, hei tiaho, hei kawe atu te kaiwhakarongo ki runga. “Ko tōku tūmanako mō Whiti, ka hikia i ngā kaiwhakarongo ki runga,” tā Kōkā Toni kī mō tōna kōpae.

Heoi, e kore e riro mā Kōkā Toni noa iho e hari i a koe ki runga i tēnei haerenga pūoro. I te hanga o tēnei kōpae, ka mahi ngātahi ia ki ētahi o ngā tohunga o te ao pūoro Māori. Arā, ko Maaka McGregor e whakaaria i te hanga o Whiti. Nā Gareth Farr i tuku a tōna reo ki te waiata “Taku Tamaiti e” – ko tēnei waiata hoki te hiringa o Whiti. Nā Charles Royal i tito i te waiata “Koa”. Tino āhuareka a Kōkā Toni i te pātai a Te Taite Cooper ki a ia hei waiata i te tino waiata o ngā pūoro Māori a “Te Hokinga Mai”. E rua tekau ngā tau i mua ka tuku atu tēnei waiata ki te rohe. Tautokohia mā runga rakuraku a Karl Teariki mō taua waiata, mō te waiata Soul True hoki. Nā Hira Huata hoki i tautokohia i te Kōkā hei whakanui i te reo o tō rāua whānau o Ngāti Kahungunu.

Ka tau te whakangahau mō te tukunga i tēnei kōpae o Whiti ki te taumata tuawhā o Te Papa, arā, ki te marae, a te Rātapu, te tuatahi o Here-turi-kōkā, a te rua hāora i te ahiahi. Ka taea ki te hoko i te kōpae Whiti huri noa i te motu mai i te rā tuarua o Here-turi-kōkā.

Kaiwaiata: Toni Huata
Kōpae pūoro: Whiti

Tērā pea ka maumahara koe i tēnei manu tīoriori mai i te hōtaka o Homai Te Pakipaki i te tau kua pahure. Engari, inā kāore anō koe kia mātakitaki i taua hōtaka, i tae a Susan ki te pō whakamutunga o taua whakataetae. Nā tērā, i huaina ngā kūaha o te ao pūoro ki a ia. I ngā marama whai atu, ka pukumahi a Susan kia whakataka i tōna kōpae waiata tuatahi i tēnei tau.

He tino ngākau nui a Susan Rose ki tōna kāinga a Mill Pā, Te Kapu (Frasertown), ki Te Wairoa. A ka whakaatu ia i tēnei kōingo mō tōna tūrangawaewae ki roto i te waiata Haukāinga. Ahakoa ōna haerenga ki roto i te ao whānui, kei Te Kapu tōnu tōna manawa. Nā kōnā, he tika tōnu tāna kia whakataka i tana kōpae tuatahi me tētahi konohete ki te tāone o te Wairoa.

Ko Nei Ko Au ­– This is my story te ingoa o te kōpae nei. He wheako whaiaro te āhua o ngā waiata ki runga i tēnei kōpae pūoro. Nā tēnei ka tika tōna tīmatanga me tētahi karakia whakatuwhera, hei whakatau i te hinengaro. Ka whitiwhiti haere ia i ngā reo e rua – arā te reo Māori me te reo Ingarihi.

Ka kōmitimiti a Susan i ngā momo pūoro e tāngia ki tēnei kōpae, pērā ki te āhua bluesy/jazzy o te waiata ‘This is my story’ me te waiata ‘What about our son’ ki te discoey-poppy ‘Mr. Right’, anō hoki te RnB/roots āhua o te waiata ‘Haukāinga’. Heoi, nā te kaha o te hiere o te reo o tēnei wāhine māia, he tino mahana te āhua o tēnei kōpae. Ka rongo hoki te māia, te aroha hoki, i roto i ōna waiata.

Ko tētahi o ngā mea tino pōuri o te kōpae nei ko te waiata o Goodbye. He waiata tangi tēnei ki tōna Pāpā i mate tūkino i te wā he kōtiro tōnu a Susan. Ka waiata ia mō tōna mamae me te mamae o tōna whaea me tōna whānau anō hoki.

Ki ahau nei, ko ngā waiata autaia o tēnei kōpae, ko This is my story, Mr. Right, Goodbye, anō hoki ko Haukainga. Engari, ko tāku he rawe rawa atu te katoa o tēnei kōpae. Anō hoki, te waiata whakamutunga At Last, he tāruaruatanga o te waiata aroha nā Glen Millar mai i te tau 1941.

Kaiwaiata: Susan Rose
Kōpae pūoro: Nei Ko Au—This is my story