-Everyone comes into their creativity in a slightly different way.  When did you realise you could whisper to all those unseen molecules and charm them into something new?  ​Looking back , it seems like true creativity was hibernating inside of me. I had complete access to it as a child with the ability to act it out in play. Infusing the world with alien dangers and delights. But when teenagehood lurched into the scene creativity became a facade. But in recent years with the encouragement of my D.H  I have nurtured the brain-garden, tending to the foetal muses and dropped the mask of transgressive pageantry. Creativity is part of my spine now, 

Ashburton. Why?  How? A dreamland nesting between braided rivers or ute-infested moo-cow madness?  Ashburton  (Why) does it feel so pressed and flat yet rich with verdant nutrition. Looking at its expanse in satellite view I imagine running my hand over it, Cool velvety fields for miles, the river running through it like a cold artery under my thumb. The town looks delicate with tough woody roods burrowing deep into the earth. Ashburton (How) does it make me feel, I can only think of the hive mind of the humans living there, A world of Tractors, Moo cows and sensible footwear. But I wish for it to have under the surface a gossamer web of beastly and beautiful strangeness. 

What speaks to you about the zine expression?  Is it the paper?  I miss paper.  The whole Zine idea was born out of complete spontaneity. I awoke at 4 am one morning and my brain vomited up the raw material..... "Make a thing! It can be whatever you want! Something tactile, quaint, and energised!"  And paper is nice, something real to hold in your hands. 

How do you deal with those moments of ‘oh fuck/I suck’ and the general pointlessness of everything?  The Oh Fuck / I Suck exists as a mental roundabout. That requires you to squeeze your eyes shut and yank the steering wheel in the opposite direction to get out of. When I went looking for inspiration and read some posts on your blog, it was so fucking good and interesting. The photography and writing, so professional.   That must mean I am an amateur, that must mean I am a shitty writer/creator/human. And like that you are in the roundabout.  Content wise I was happy with Volume1, But V2 felt like a pale and disappointing middle child . But slowly and with the encouragement of my lovely muse I was able to focus, pay attention to the things that crack the atom, like smiling to myself as i drive past a tiny dog shitting on someone's front lawn, Lying on the floor drinking Sake talking about Wormholes and Dogs in space. And looking at the world around me through a broken 1950's Camera.

Which potential creative direction frightens you with its impossible allure?  Something that frightens/fascinates me is the art of Mischief. For example: collecting Cicada shells with a friend and then walking into a loud and highly flammable women's clothing store and attaching them to polyester sweaters ( we were young, and this was crossing a line) And lightly trespassing to take  photos of some wonderful graffiti. There is a thrill , a spark. And It makes for a colourful memory to cherish. 

Words or pictures?  Which side wins if you could only choose one?  Pictures, without a doubt. There is a pile of books that I keep meaning to read, they are dusty, and I have stopped adding to the cobwebby pile. But Film and visual art are like oxygen for my psyche. 

You’re trapped aboard the cut-price cruise ship Rabies of the Sea, everything is hideous until 3.33am one night in the darkest corner of an obscure upper deck cocktail bar, red tinsel fluttering under the row of brown liquor overhead; a single historical figure of your choosing looks up from their tequila sunrise and puts you on their tab.  Who is this paragon and why specifically did you summon them from nothingness?  What happens next???  Curiously, at first, I approached this as a right or wrong question, One historical figure kept appearing and seemed to stick, except the one time that Nancy Reagan surfaced (umm No) So I am going with the one that wants to stay. 

I am staring at the pitted and sticky surface of the bar and the regrettable brown liquid in the tumbler I am nursing. Then I look up, At the end of the bar I see a woman through the blue smoke,  she has a froth of red hair and a pale moon face and is dressed in a white man's dress shirt with bare legs and feet , the bartender brings me a barely cold tequila sunrise from the woman and she waves me over. I shake her sweaty hand and introduces herself " Mary Magdalene". I have a hundred questions to ask her, but we just talk. She tells me that redheads have a naturally higher pain tolerance and that her heart is a sad and small brown bird. She gives off waves of intense shadow and flashes of light. This is a soul that has lived lifetimes, I feel that some liberation is required.  I order many shots of Poitín (Irish moonshine)  and we chain smoke her hand rolled cigarettes.  She feels at home on this dreadful cruise ship, untethered and anonymous. We dance to good disco music playing loudly through shitty speakers pulling at the chintzy Christmas decorations hanging above us and mussing the hair of the gloomy bar patrons. I stop and ask her one question, shattering the moment " What was he like?" .................. she frowns but then smiles drunkenly....... " His tears are salty like ours."  ​

​The weather moved me yesterday.  It was misty in that patchy, anomalous way that means you can't see shit one moment while it's clear as a bell 10 m down the road.  Always look behind you into the sun during mist.  These are a wee bit noisy but the camera was ancient and tiny, so whatever.  I didn't throw on any FX filters, just black and whited them.  This is pretty much how it looked.

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The sun was pushing through the watery suspension and lensing into the void over the bay in the form of a cold white rainbow- the opposite of darkness yet somehow vacant of all the properties you expect of light.
​ I had never seen this before.

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It's 3.38 am and this is the first and only draft.  Enjoy.

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A family group of swallows has taken to nesting around the boat sheds at Back Beach and we have been watching the babies fledge and get their insect-grabbing wings over the last couple of months.  Unfortunately one of them had been downed by unseasonal southerly gales and sat huddled on the road, dazed, possibly with strained wings and definitely  just moments from being run over.  Luckily R saw it and carried it home, from where it was delivered to the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital.  A big shout out to the DOC weekend operator who went the extra mile and picked it up for us.  Fingers crossed that it just needed a couple of days to rehydrate and recover.

Good luck, little bird.

from peeping at the IVH show with the lit feet and stuff

I make a lot of my own clothes, and as I've entered cronedom I've become much more conscious of fabric qualities over fancy construction.  Which leads one back to hand-sewing everything; the tensions generated by hand and needle yield a much better result than machine stitching natural fibre fabrics.  It's strange how the seemingly lax plain stitch holds your silk tunic and sack dresses together like no one's business, resulting in virtually zero seam pulling and holing etc.  There's also some indefinable quality in hand sewn garments; they just sit and hang better.  It's the same with natural colours over synthetic dyes.  There are quite a few shades that just die horribly when attempted with modern chemicals; apricot, red, blue-greens and purples.  Even the black that's been so treasured and ubiquitous for the last 40 or so years is really quite a horrible, revenant thing when compared to those found in vintage rugs and old school textiles.  Blacks derived from indigo are sublime in contrast.  The industrial versions may seem brighter or more stable at first, but after looking at them for more than a few moments, the eye feels tricked and assaulted.

I don't really know where I'm going with this so just watch the fucking doc.

Though I might be white and therefore privileged beyond the average POC hair experience, the degree of policing and assumption I've personally encountered would probably surprise a centre-part Becky.  The suuuper-subtle inquiries about my background (they mean ethnicity) by that strange clade of people who are low-key preoccupied with one's precise degree of Anglo-Saxonicity; big hair and dark eyes get their pursuivant nostrils twitching.  Am I... something else?  The pervasive cultural insistence on curly (they mean mad) hair's link to certain kinds of personalities and conduct.  All those wilful, temperamentally incontinent and usually doomed literary heroines: they don't have flat lobs.​  Then there's the inquisitive strangers who feel entitled to physically touch your fucking hair (old ladies at bus stops: okay.  Jelly queens honking about your wig game: can deal.  Creepers in the seat behind you on the bus: not fucking okay).  And oh yes, the fetishisation from dipshits who think you're going to flip their penis for real with your feral, folicularly-driven sluttiness.  
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And last but not least, the reason why I haven't been to a salon in twenty years- that look they give you.  As though your head was going to explode and infect theirs with your unruly aberrance.  The wistful yanking of your curls out to their real (they mean straight) length; it could be so much flatter and longer!  The clueless, disinterested butchering.  The completely unsolicited attempts to blow it straight.  The last peremptory ho to try this was astounded and dismayed that I preferred my natural texture and actually congratulated me on being able to 'come to terms with it'.  That was the very last time I paid someone with a fucking pixie cut on a homely-arse five-head to touch my shit.

So now I cut and dye my own damn hair, wash it once or twice a week, air dry and don't brush.  Recently I started using Deva Curl Let It Be finishing spray and I like it well enough; Deva products are fairly natural-ingredient based and non-irritant and I'm just grateful they don't make my hair situation more difficult.  I wouldn't boost them to anyone who wasn't interested in cutting down on synthetic nasties in their personal care regime as I don't think their performance is substantially better than anything else I've tried.

Washing your hair with Sabun soap is a bit of a trip, requiring you to let go of a few deep-core assumptions.  The dread of having to de-tangle non-conditioned hair is hard to understand unless you've held a fistful of your own crispy, broken frizz.  I've come to accept that the artificial shine furnished by conventional Eurocentric products just isn't in curly hair's best interest.  The softer natural lustre provided by organically-derived lipids is what curls need for texture stability and preservation.  This might be old news to people of colour, but curly white peeps just get pointed at white-people product and told we're not doing it right when that shit doesn't work. 

The Sabun lather feels rather unconventional on the head. It's important to get an even, all-over lather going, especially if you're longer, and to rinse thoroughly, working from back to front with warm water, to distribute the oils.  While still wet (don't even towel dry, just enough to stop it dripping), spray in your favourite anti-frizz product and either big-comb through or just work it down the length manually.  Scrunch gently to reinstate your curl shape.  Then leave it alone.  There's sometimes a slightly greasy feel while it's drying and it's hard to believe your hair won't feel heavy or dull, but I promise the finished product does not.  Allow an extra half an hour of air-dry time if you're on the clock.  

For me, the Sabun+spray allows my natural texture to reform peaceably without frizz, and doesn't bring on greasy-root syndrome by denaturing the scalp. It dispels that itchy product buildup that plagues us sensitive types and doesn't aggravate my psoriasis (it doesn't make it any better, but what does?).  It hasn't stripped my colour, which is a semi-permanent black.  And as a final blessing, the Sabun imparts a weirdly obedient cast to your hair; it stays placid and arrangeable.  The result is natural, snaky curl instead of morale-destroying fluff.  I am really pleased with how aggressively archaic it looks.

No one is paying me to say any of this.  I just want to share this rare positive experience with widely available, eco-friendly and inexpensive products.  The Sabun is about $7 per enormous bar in New Zealand; the Deva Curl spray is about $35 which is a lot, but for me it's lasted a long time and it replaces the $15 per bottle I dropped on shampoo and conditioner.  And both are so much better than tipping litres of industrial chemicals down the drain. Taking one damn product into the shower is incredibly liberating.  Give it a try if you have dry, frizz-prone hair and have lost patience with conventional shampoos and conditioners.

I might be the last person to know about this band but I'm on it now, okay?  Fuck.

It's only a little camera so there are some technical challenges but I like how it blows out, just like an eye.

The harbour is an unusually three-dimensional place, strictly contained by rims of hill and either expanded or compressed by cloud.  On a bright cirrus day the blues are infinite, stained yellow by the slanted sunlight and pulled from azure into turquoise.  Then the northeast cloud rolls in from the ocean, pouring through the gates at Taiaroa and over the Hare hill to set a leaden lid on everything, lying so low you feel as though your hands could brush its undercarriage.  One is a palatial ballroom, the other a mist-dripping cellar.  I like both.

This isn't drone footage.  We climbed up to the lookout hill on foot to get these pics and that series of abrupt inclines sucks with lunch on board, let me tell you.  I had to stop once on the last leg to reoxygenate and felt like an aged fatarse, but had my chagrin assuaged by the pall of cigarette smoke from some lazy random who had driven the whole way to the top.  I gave up smoking twenty years ago and have never owned a car.  

​Superiority intensifies.  

A towering complex of feral Tasmanian Blue Gums, Monterey Pines and Cyprus sp. flourish in the uninhabited belts of hillside encircling Port.  Passionfruit and Muehlenbeckia vines entangle their lower storeys and tend to safeguard them from dipshits with chainsaws; birds sing all day from this ribbon of humanless green, fantails and warblers swooshing down over your head as you walk the Back Beach road that runs parallel.  

Unfortunately, this miniature forest also seethes with feral possums, who demolish the regenerating native vegetation.  We trap them for The Halo Project, a predator-reduction initiative linked to the local Orokonui Sanctuary, and they have just begun an intensive push to get their numbers down toward elimination.

There is often a curiously gaudy, oversaturated effect to the autumn light that falls on the paddocks in Sawyers Bay; I think it's the heavy volumes of water carried by the fresh grass that glows and amplifies the yellow tones.  This scene illustrates that effect at about half-strength.  When it's fully lit, the quilted, undulant farmland looks almost candied through the smudgy pines, but it usually passes before you can get a lens on it.  Annoying.

The South Island is not much more than a brief affront to the vast volumes and momentums of the Southern Ocean, a montane blip to winds and oceans that scream virtually unimpeded around the tail end of the planet.  So we get a lot of visible atmospheric stratification, with clouds headed this way and that on their various business.  High horsetails usually mean trouble is a few days out, so you'd better get shit done in the garden before that cold southerly slams into and bows the big front windows and covers the road with pine needles and huge ribbons of gum bark.  Bubbly cumulus lazily mass and disperse just a hundred meters or so over the harbour; the same shape will be born, over and over, in the lee of an island and the space of half an hour.  

Everything worth knowing is annotated in this rhythm, all meaning, all process, all denouement.  

I don't want to keep you or any of these people in suspense any longer so I will just release my grades right now.

Yes/Thematic Success/ Would Wear to Supermarket Personally

There was some merit in Cardi B's paradisiacal genitalia cosy but big trains are so fucking played out and I lose IQ points looking at her just as a general rule, so no.

Here in Port Chalmers, the cruise season is over, by and large, for another year.  Forgive me if I express deep gratitude for that blessed cessation, as an introvert domiciled in an increasingly visited small town.  This has been the busiest year to date.

Boatpeople, for us hapless residents, the season is long.  Have a thought for the flesh units trapped in those destination towns.  Your oceanic hell wagons belch carginogenic smoke, blast us with their fucking PA and mediocre musical stylings whilst decanting far too many people into the surrounding countryside.  Day after day, for months.  It starts tap dancing on the nerves.

We didn't ask to be put on the CS schedule; in fact, we were given no say in the matter.  You may be on an expensive holiday, but no one else is.  While your paying presence might provide benefits to a narrow demographic, you should probably know that much of your sweet, sweet visitor spend is expertly snatched back by your bloodsucking cruise co affiliates, which is why all those pre-booked day trips cost twice as much as they should.  Your dollar isn't equitably distributed and much of your impact amounts to exploitation.  To too many of us, you are just the thudding chug that wakes us in the morning and the smokestack emissions that permeate the contents of our clotheslines.  We twist the names of each boat into childish obscenities just to make ourselves feel better about the whole situation.  I'm not telling you what they are.

​You know how you wander in and sit your arses down en mass in local businesses, purchase-dodging and using their internet while actual customers stand out on the footpath melting your brains with their stares and wishing wing'd death on you?  You fool nobody, and the accrued karma will send you to an ER one day.

It would be great if you could use the literal biblical plague of buses specifically laid on for you to get into the city, instead of the local public transport which is already inadequate for our purposes.  These tourist buses create toxic stank and inconvenience for locals and they will not go the fuck away until you give them your fare, so have a heart.  You're making people late for work and school when you form 30-deep lines trying to save $1.50.  You even fill the bus sometimes so that locals miss their rides altogether.  Come on now.  Also: don't loudly complain when another passenger opens a window on the trip into town.  You wear 500% and 355% too much Red Door and Flower Bomb, respectively.

I know you're on a boat motherfuckers, but remember those basal social skills.  Treat locals with the respect you presumably afford fellow travellers on your amazing prefabricated journey of discovery.  We aren't props or extras.  Those people with dogs outside cafés are probably deliberately avoiding eye contact.  You are never the first person to loudly interrupt their personal convos by declaring how much you miss your dog, seizing and handling the unknown canine, snapping memorial photographs and going on to wanderingly impart your unsolicited attitudes to everything from race relations to phrenology.  Don't expect on-demand deferential engagement.  We're trying to chill for 20 mins with a friend and every successive version of you edges our hand closer to that cake knife.  Just smile at the dog and move on.

Further to this, people going about their business at their private addresses aren't props, either.  I say this as someone who lives on an increasingly popular walking route.  Please don't stare in to our houses; we can see you.  Think twice about coming up driveways to take photos of private property.  Don't pester strangers in their gardens when they're busy or obviously disinclined, and staring fixedly at them over the fence until they acknowledge you is a pretty fucked up thing to do.  If you're determined to go ahead with this behaviour, the least you can do is throw money; it might stop me clipping you in the head with flying dog shit.  I cannot tell you how much the imposition of awkward pleasantries with a day-long stream of randoms takes the shine off enjoying one's own yard.  ​It sucks.

So does trying to patronise a very small local supermarket packed to the tonsils with boat people who have just emerged from a vessel groaning, nay, listing with every fucking foodstuff known to mankind.  They need more, and right now.  They cluster in impenetrable clots in every aisle and in front of the items you need, stripping the stock whilst glancing over their shoulder at you but never, ever conceding access voluntarily.  They don't bother carrying local currency but do want to dispute the exchange policy at the checkout with 20 peeps banked up behind them.  They're always up for an arguement over NZ's alcohol ID requirements, the high cost of cigarettes here and maybe demanding the checkout person's help to sort through the things they actually want from the two stuffed baskets they've emptied on the conveyor while shouting to their sister in law who is jumping the cue with another two baskets.

Visitors, there's a reason why you don't shop like this at home and that reason starts with throat and ends with punch.