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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Otara Millionaires Club and the Flying Nun Sound

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Simon Grigg How Bizarre James Dignan

How Bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the song that stormed the world by Simon Grigg (Awa Press, 2015), 255 pp., $38; In Love with These Times: My life with Flying Nun Records by Roger Shepherd (Harper Collins, 2016), 295 pp., $36.99

Two fine new books from insiders at the heart of two important chapters in the history of New Zealand popular music that will grace the bookshelves of lovers of home-grown musical talent. It would be only too easy to make facile comparisons between the works, and indeed there are many parallels. Both Simon Grigg and Roger Shepherd had their hands – albeit only nominally at times – on the helm of New Zealand music gold. In both cases, mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and the authors made it out alive, albeit barely, after changing the face of the local music industry and running headlong into the grey bureaucracy of corporate music. Both books tell the story of taking a provincial scene and propelling it to world status. Most importantly, both stories are compelling reads, and both are among the best books on the inside story of the New Zealand music scene ever written. But these parallels only tell a small part of the largely unconnected episodes which lie at the heart of the books, and indeed it shows the strength of New Zealand music that these two tales can co-exist largely without interacting with each other in as small a musical sphere as ours. [Read more…]

Judge Time

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stead_shelf_lifeDenis Harold

Shelf Life: Reviews, replies and reminiscences by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2016), 452 pp., $45

C.K. Stead’s latest collection of ruminations, Shelf Life, is illuminating about what has driven and drives this venerable, multi-award-winning author. He states in an interview that what is important to him is observation: ‘It’s the escape – the relief! – from the ego. The world around you is what matters.’ The back-cover blurb tells the reader that ‘the guiding voice’ is ‘clear, incisive’. One is offered the image of an author polishing his prose and verse to transparency.

This is Stead’s fourth selection of assorted literary criticism and related prose, the last appearing eight years ago. He claims this is a milder, less controversial selection than the previous three. The retired don calls this non-fiction his ‘afternoon work’; ‘morning work’ is writing verse and fiction.  [Read more…]

Kinetic Experience

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Zizz_Len_Lye_HorrocksAndrew Paul Wood

Zizz! The life and art of Len Lye, in His Own Words, by Len Lye with Roger Horrocks (Awa Press, 2015), 208 pp., $30

The Len Lye phenomenon has become almost cult-like in recent years, culminating in July 2015 with the launch of the mirror-finish, fingerprint-prone $11.5 million Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth (and entered through the gift shop). There have been documentaries, even an opera, and from the official mythology you could be forgiven for failing to grasp that with the exception of a handful of  believers – Hamish Keith, Peter Tomory and Bob Ballard, the sometime director of the Govett-Brewster – in the 1960s and 1970s Lye was largely ignored.  [Read more…]

Connecting Places, Ancestors, Gods with the Present

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the-lives-of-colonial-objectsEdmund Bohan

The Lives of Colonial Objects, edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (Otago University Press, 2015), 368 pp., $50

The inspiration for this beautifully produced and sumptuously illustrated essay collection, described by its three editors as one ‘in which objects serve as pathways into New Zealand’s colonial history’, comes originally from Neil MacGregor’s celebrated best-selling book A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), itself based on a groundbreaking collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum. The occasion for this book’s conception, however, was the 2013 conference on ‘Colonial Objects’ at Dunedin’s Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, whose themes were described as the ‘material circumstances’ of colonial life; and while there were 70 papers given, only 50 are included here, and of those, some were not actually presented at the conference. [Read more…]

Hornby, Dinky, Tonka and Torro

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hello-girls-and-boysNicholas Reid

Hello Girls and Boys! A New Zealand Toy Story, by David Veart (Auckland University Press, 2014), 314 pp., $65

When I was a kid I lived next door to a boy who loved trolleys. He did not have just one homemade trolley, but a small fleet of them. Because he lived on a generous-sized property (or at least generous by the standards of suburban Auckland) he was able to play with his fleet down a long tree-lined driveway, on a grass sward next to his big brother’s vegetable patch and on a concrete path in front of his parents’ house. In fact he called his trolleys his bus company. He had drawn up schedules and timetables for the different routes his ‘buses’ took, and had given each trolley a destination board and number. Once or twice I remember being a passenger on one of his ‘buses’ as he pushed me on a bus route, puffing and making engine noises and the occasional anachronistic tram-sounding clang-clang.

Not surprisingly, the boy grew up to spend part of his adult life as a bus-driver. [Read more…]

Ice Cream Dreams

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F4_in_the_intervalMax Oettli

F4: In the Interval by Susan Jowsey, Marcus Williams, Jesse Williams & Mercy Williams (Rim Books, 2014), 96 pp., $25; An Urban Quest for Chlorophyll by Jennifer Gilliam & Dieneke Jansen (Rim Books, 2013), 80 pp., $30

Seldom have I received a parcel with more disparate contents than that containing the two books I am reviewing here. They have one common thing: their imprint from Haru Sameshina’s Rim Press, and I suppose I could go on about this delightful do-it-yourself publishing venture, and Haru’s assured way of putting books together and making them meaningful without getting too stuck in a house style.

Both works smell of art; and a kind of defence/deference mechanism clicks in with this cynical reader, a linguistic and cultural retro-referencing which allows me to scuttle back into my comfort zone and peep out – stick out my feelers to see whether the beast bites. F4: In the Interval affirms the values of Haru’s Rim Press, assuring a consistent typographical approach, careful paper choices, and pictures imbued either with deep sadness or with a kind of weird bathos.

Then, I immediately summon up the personal reference that ‘F4’ has for me. It denotes a French state-subsidised apartment designed for a 4-person family unit: 2 bedrooms, separate kitchen and living room, minimum surface of 90 square metres. It fits, with Marcus Williams, Susan Jowsey and the two kids, now earnest adolescents, thrown together in a number of spaces and configurations – essentially acting or inter-acting out rôles. [Read more…]