Posted
CommentPost a comment
There's definitely way too much going on this fine Sunday afternoon in Wellington! But a top pick (especially if you are wrangling small humans) would be Bryce Galloway's free two hour zine workshop taking place at Wellington's Museum of City and Sea at 2 PM. Many events on at moment leading up to the 2014 Wellington Zinefest on 22 November, but this promises to be a memorable one!
I caught Margaret Gordon's fine documentary on the long running Christchurch indie band Into The Void Thursday evening at the Dowse. Post(free)screening there was an entertaining set of old school instrumental dirge rock from 2/3 of the band. Missed the Friday gig at Moon in Newtown but reports were favourable from the arty crowd that was in nostalgic attendance.
I read loads of dumb books about pop music and so it’s even better when one that’s not dumb comes along. Packaged as a rather garishly designed mini-coffee table book, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and songs that defined the 1980s, is hilariously amusing, as it should be. What a cast of characters! And it spans the forgettable one hit wonders and MTV phenomena to the “cooler” stuff. Often Mad World might be seen as a funhouse mirror offering up some of the radio junk that didn’t make it into Simon Reynolds’ superb postpunk book for example. But there are overlaps too, such as the inevitable Joy Division. But for me it was terrific to see sharp insightful quotes from the likes of Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants, and The Psychedelic Furs. And the amazingly prescient DEVO! Gerald Casale comments on their early shows: “We became a performance art group, and a lot of it was based on aesthetic confrontation that wound up in verbal and physical confrontation. The more that happened the more excited we became. The kind of crowds we were able to get in front of irritated us. The feeling was, If these people hate us, we’re on the right track because we don’t respect them either. We wore black plastic trash bags, poked holes in them for our legs to come out, taped them up around our necks so they wouldn’t fall down, and we’d be naked [underneath]. And we wore clear plastic masks; they were creepy, the had lips and eyebrows. We would play local bars, and it would get really nasty. A guy would scream, ‘You guys are assholes!’ And I’d scream back, ‘No, you’re the asshole.’ Then he’d go ‘I’m gonna smack your fucking head in!’” That’s entertainment, eh?
Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station was one of my favorite books of 2012, as I mentioned on the NZ Listener’s blog. Thus I picked up his most recent novel 10:04 with great anticipation. Lerner, a poet, gained a huge amount of critical attention for Atocha Station, and 10:04 follows as a kind of metafiction/autobiographical novel. For example the author was a resident at the prestigious Chinati Foundation in Marfa Texas and the same thing occurs in the book. Yet Lerner especially loves to use frames within frames, a mise en abyme approach to writing that, however, pulls back from disorienting the reading unduly, using a readable style that often recalls early Paul Auster, more than say, Ben Marcus. In this way, Lerner often creates a deceptively compelling (non-)narrative, albeit one that takes temporality as its main theme, circling and weaving around various reoccurring themes, motifs, and cultural reference points (the film Back to the Future, the neo-conceptual videos of Christian Marclay, and the glacial monuments of Donald Judd). And Lerner is more empathic in his delineations of characters, even when barely sketched out, than darker NYC satirists (and critical favourites) like Sam Lipsyte. For more on Lerner, here's a recent interview from Bookforum magazine.
