Maybe you caught this stuff the first time, maybe you didn't. I don't know. Check it out.
Die Antwoord- Werewolf Techno
So, Die Antwoord. Flipping off Lady Ga Ga after she offered a support spot on her last tour (no I can't name it, no I don't care) certainly landed them a few glistening tonnes of global eyeballs but some of us were onto them before that and feel a bit above all the hissy hoo ha. I love the Antwoord unreasonably because they are the lost twin to the paint-huffing retard taking up far too much square footage in my psyche. They feed it and caress it. I love Yo-landi's boobies and Ninja's chatty penis. Zef Side is the way a large chunk of the Southern Hemisphere looks once you've stepped away from your resort; the twitching remains of colonial experimentation, like Frankenstein's monster smeared across the landscape. I love them for celebrating that.
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A Thunderstorm for Xmas, Port Chalmers
Yesterday was a good day to be alive. It's been raining for the best part of a week. Everything is soaked through, the air is one-third water and the birds emerge at the slightest break in the clouds to trill defiantly. There was a break in the clouds but it was still thundering almost continuously and spitting whiplash spokes of lightning at the hills over the horizon. I took the camera onto the road outside our house at about nine pm. I'm really glad I did. Breathing this in was a privilege. I even found some love for powerlines.
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The Fall of Icarus: Bill Hammond
This has long been one of my favourite works by a New Zealand artist. I know virtually nothing about its inspiration and execution and even less about Bill Hammond himself, other than his being a bit of a recluse (whatever that means) or at least not given to airing his figurative underwear in interview. But when it comes to images, I've learned to trust and even prefer this ignorance; the only requirement I have of art is that it speaks for itself. There's not much worse than coming to an unknown work loaded down with other peoples' praise and slag. C L I C K F O R M O R E...
Review: Miel de Bois- La Sorcière
The psychology of disgust and rejection is an interesting subtext in perfumery. It is beauty's shadow, the necessary companion of any allusion to desire or allure, and I'm always perplexed by the unquenchable need of so many to uncouple them. What is one without the other, after all? Having spent five long years on a professional sensory panel, I can tell you a thing or two about pungency, overload, anosmia and characterization; this experience, coupled with wide culinary and environmental exposure, means that my spectrum of tolerance and active inquiry is possibly broader than most. When I became interested in the idea of Miel De Bois and began to peruse the reviews, I was intrigued by the violence of the language and reaction it seemed to inspire, but then I'm always surprised at the space disgust occupies in peoples' personal real estate.
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The Sun & The Moon Rejoice: Central Asian Jewellery
As a child, I was once asked to choose a ring from amongst the massed rows of cheap silver on offer to the beach-going tourist in Bali. I chose a cuff-style piece with a single table-cut carnelian, unsure why I had done so in the midst of my infant personal aesthetic, but certain it was what I wanted. The ring has long passed into the yawning oblivion that trails us all but I have since learned that it was probably Afghani, traded southward from its Tadjik origin during the drug-greased Eighties and ending up on the black sand of that Hindu island. And when, much later, I thought about the kind of portable wealth that would hold the respect of the nomad brothers at the centre of The Blackthorn Orphans, I knew immediately that it would be the fabulous gilt and inlaid silver of the Turkic tribes that had once surrounded them in the remote lands of their birth.
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Brugmansia Sanguinea, the Red Angel's Trumpet
This superb datura is a sensory banquet, possessing all the delectable qualities you could possibly wish for in a companion plant (to call it a 'pet' seems so patronizing) except, ironically, the empyrean perfume for which its compatriots are so renowned. But let us not quibble; it is a beauty and a luxury for any self-respecting floraphile and I am more than pleased to finally have one in my garden.
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