Posts by Bob Munro
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The Wellington artist Michel Tuffery, who has Tahitian ancestry, has been making for some years, artworks in his Cookie series exploring the First Contact between Europeans and the Pacific.
Inspired by his reading of Anne Salmond's The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas Tuffery reinterprets historical events, offering a Pacific experience and voice. Salmond's work delves into the mindset of Cook and his men and in so doing she provides the opportunity for the Pacific to play a role in these explorers’ tales. The important role that both Tupaia and Mai played on Cook's voyages as well as the psychological impact the Pacific had on Cook is just beginning to be investigated. It is only in the last decade that the identity of the 'artist of the first mourner' has been revealed. Tupaia, a priest and navigator from Tahiti, befriended Cook, and was the first Pacific Island artist to use Western materials.
We now assume that it was Tupaia who led Cook to map the Pacific, and it was Cook's relationships with both Tupaia and Mai that enabled him to broker the positive relationships with the Pacific peoples he encountered. In this exhibition we witness Tuffery's interpretations of the interactions between Pacific peoples, of the pacification of Captain Cook, and of the events that make up First Contact.
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Chuck Norris walked into a Burger King and ordered a Big Mac.....and got one.
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In a statement released this afternoon, Veitch thanked his former employers for their "ongoing support".
"I need to take stock of my life and spend time with my family before I make any decisions about my future. At the time I undertook counselling and am still continuing to do so. It has been a great help. I am extremely grateful for the love and support of my family and friends.
He asked that the confidentiality of the agreement he reached with Dunne-Powell be respected.
"At all times I have been honest with my employers and at all times I have tried to do the right thing for everyone."
He said TVNZ had been his life, but recent media coverage had made it "untenable" for him to continue in his on-air roles.
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All very interesting - but how was Kasey Chambers? :)
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I refer you to the habit of some supporters of making ape noises and throwing bananas at black players until at least the the 90s in England and the 21st century in some parts of Europe.
In the mid eighties my wife and I went to a one dayer at Lancaster Park where bananas were thrown at the West Indian born English bowler Gladstone Small. Small has Klippel-Feil syndrome which accounts for his distinctive "no neck" appearance.
My wife has never been back to the venue.
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maybe it's time to start an all black game with some flowers and handshakes.
As the Romanians did when they toured here in 1976 :)
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Here's something interesting.
Howard Knopf, a Canadian lawyer is suggesting the torturers at Guantanamo Bay may have to pay royalties for the music they play to make people go mad.
Babylon, the mild-mannered folk hit by David Gray, is allegedly one of the most popular torture songs at Guantánamo. Speaking to the BBC last week, Gray was incredulous. "That is torture," he said. "It doesn't matter what the music is - it could be Tchaikovsky's finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn't matter, it's going to drive you completely nuts."
Gray's fury aside, Knopf wondered on his influential copyright blog whether the singer-songwriter might be owed royalties by the US military. Performance rights associations demand that licenses be purchased if music is to be played in a public space.
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What, when it is at home, is plastic lumber? And textiles - I think I was right about the polar fleece.
Yes you are right. The first polar fleece made out of recycled plastic was by Dyersburg in 1993.
It takes 26 plastic bottles to make one of Robyn’s vests according to the Christchurch recycling centre.
There’s a wonderful ethical story about Malden Mills the inventors of polar fleece too.
The factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, run by third generation owner and devout Jew Aaron Feuerstein was burnt to the ground in a howling winter gale in 1995. Feuerstein kept his 3000 staff on full pay until the factory was rebuilt - six months later.
And in what goes around comes around – in 2001 his creditors banded together to keep the factory going when it ran into trouble because of cheap imports.
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Help! Can Battlestar Gallactica fans solve the next line of today's xkcd?
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Christchurch and Dunedin are not the wops, wops
You, of all people know thatYes we are. And proud of it. Well we don't eat this.
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