Public Address: Notes & Queries

Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out!

David Herkt — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 10:42:00 +1300

Martin Aston’s just-released Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out is one of those books that seems to have been a long time coming. It is a history of the popular music which has been produced by queer musicians over the last hundred years.
With stories ranging from the bisexuality of some early Black American Blues artists to singer, song-writer and rapper, Frank Ocean, via the 1930s Pansy Craze, Disco, Glam Rock, Punk, and lesbian folk, it is a comprehensive and all-embracing story.
Martin Aston is a story-teller. Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache is a history…

Time & Perfume

David Herkt — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:14:00 +1300

Smell is probably our most culturally neglected sense. We prioritise vision and hearing, and our words for them are numberless, with many careful distinctions. Smell, on the other hand, is comparatively a great unknown, without a general language or the ability to enunciate subtle distinctions. An entire history is undervalued and left undescribed.
A perfume or fragrance has intense physiological effects. Each of our bodies already has its own scent. We scent erotic arousal. We can smell genetic similarity and family smells different from strangers. We can smell fear and mood. Odour may very well form the infant’s first bonding…

Little CD in a Prospect of Flowers

David Herkt — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 13:41:00 +1300

She did go out in time for the Sunday headlines. Her body was discovered at 11.15am on Saturday in her Finger Wharf apartment in Wooloomooloo, a respectable time as far as media coverage was concerned. The death of Charlotte Dawson would front the Saturday evening TV news, with that lead-time to gather the all-important file footage and comment. And she’d headline the Sunday tabloids throughout Australasia.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried suicide before. There had been a recent attempt which had ended up in hospitalisation, and there had been others. But this one was different. This one was by…

Kiwi Queer Screen (Part One) - From 'Hudson & Halls' to 'Squeeze'

David Herkt — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 14:33:00 +1300

In an era when the Archive is being opened and formerly inaccessible items are just a search and a click way from viewing, curation becomes the name of the game. NZ on Screen has compiled a selection of GLBT movies, documentaries, shorts and TV programs. It gives us a glimpse of time and change, from the 1980s to the present. It is a remarkable journey and it effectively begins with David Halls and Peter Hudson.
Hudson and Halls was a New Zealand produced cooking show, where two men guided the audience through a variety of aspirational recipes, with flair and…

Nightingales/Bombs/Beethoven

David Herkt — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 14:24:00 +1200

There are lances through time, connections between things, links that run through years and spaces.
In an Internet world, where more and more of the archive is opened up to exploration, this vast mass seems indigestible. Direct questions and direct answers simply lock us into linear worlds; in order to get the answer, you have to figure the right formulation of the question. Now we follow link-streams to their end… which is different.
We are coming to the stage where the connection is everything. But we need new words to describe just what it is that happening when we move…

Confessions Of A Sleepwalker

David Herkt — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 09:42:00 +1200

I have been more than fascinated by the much-publicised recent case of New Zealand’s sleep-driving woman. I’ve followed maps of her route intently. She drove from Hamilton to Otara, and Otara to Mt Maunganui. A total of 302.8 km. I was interested in the fact she managed to text friends. I am disappointed no report contains the content of her texts. I was interested in the fact that, in her case, the event was described as a side-effect of a sleeping pill. The fact that she had no memory of the event was another point to ponder.
It also had…

Waikato Railstop Dawn

David Herkt — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 11:19:00 +1200

Trains shifted through my childhood nights. I’d hear them in the distance approaching across the Whangamarino Swamps, a rumble that gradually increased in volume and strength. They’d roar past in the dark through Te Kauwhata Station, with high-pitched whistle-shriek or the flatter blare of an electric horn, before slowly fading to the south.
They provided a timetable for my dreams. The Night Limited would pass swiftly in the midevening, about the time I was sent to bed. Glowing blinds were drawn down in carriages, concealing the passengers and mysteries of sleeping-compartments . Then later in the night, there would be…

The Rejected Selfie

David Herkt — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:44:00 +1200

I had the recent experience of being requested to provide a self-image for an international art magazine, one of those nicely laid-out publications of leading-edge contemporary art, filled with thoughtful commentary, exhibition reviews, artist profiles, and lots of full-page gallery advertisements.
I loathe requirements to provide self-images. I always have. My first facebook self-image dated from the beginning of facebook, and was only recently replaced, after complaints of misrepresentation, by another more relevant to my current appearance. Even this second facebook image had been taken under obligation, with much wailing on my part, by a New Zealand Herald photographer to…

Paul

David Herkt — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 11:23:00 +1200

If you ask, Paul will tell you that when he was born he didn’t breathe and it took a long time before he did which is why he has a disability. For a time he seemed to want to tell the story with frequency. It was the beginning of everything. It was what made him different. It was a strange and wondrous event. It needed to be told and repeated.
Paul is intellectually disabled. He doesn’t quite know the detail of the bodily responses that were involved, the death of brain cells from oxygen-deprivation during birth and the effect this…

In The Face of Global Terror: 9/11 Cakes, Costumes and Lego

David Herkt — Wed, 15 May 2013 08:15:00 +1200

Like almost everyone in the Western world, I remember 9/11 vividly. I woke in the morning to the rolling TV coverage and the collapse of the Twin Towers on repeat. Terrorism met the Age of Spectacle in a purpose-planned event.
Part of the reaction came from unexpected areas. There were 9/11 jokes circulating within the US by the 12th September 2001 and recorded on a Dutch website by the 13th. There were howls of outrage when an American comedian tried a 9/11 gag a month later at a Friar’s Club celebrity roast for Hugh Hefner. “Too soon,” members of the…